I’m continuing to muse about Taiji and me for the sixth post. In the last post, I talked about how I learned to trust my Taiji teacher over time beacuse she was consistent, transparent, and steady in her response to my barrage of questions. It’s one of her best qualities in my eyes. I could expect honesty from her no matter what question I asked her, so now, a decade-and-a-half later, I don’t even queestion it when she tells me something about Taiji. She has earned that trust.
Then, six months ago or so, I wanted to learn the Swimming Dragon Form with the deerhorn knives in Bagua, a different martial art. I love the deerhorn knives. They are probably my favorite weapons overall (double sabers are myi favorite taiji weapons) beacuse they are so vicious. Did I say that out loud?
Many many moons ago, I was having difficulty with meditation. I kept having flashbacks, which was highly unpleasant. My teacher brought in a pair of her pratice deerhorn knives and handed them to me. She taught me how to walk the circle with them, and that wsa what I did in the corner while the rest of the class was doing meditation.
It was during this time and while I was walknig the circle that I had a life-changing realization. I used to proclaim that I was a pacifist and that if someone tried to kill me, I would let them. This was married with my belief that my life didn’t matter in and of itself. That wasn’t something I just thought up myself, by the way. My mother drummed it into my head ever since I could remember, and when I was eleven, she started pouring out all her problems (especially with her marriage) to me.
I got to hear about how unhappy she was and how depressed. She comlained about my father incessantly and how he had done her wrong. Which, she wasn’t lying, but it wasn’t something you should be telling your eleven-year-old child. She did not do this to my brother, by the way, in case you were wondering. There are a few reasons for this. One, I was AFAB, and my mother has very rigid ideas about gender. Women were for nurturing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, and birthing babies–not necessarily in that order. Funnily, though, even though she liked to say that being a parent was the most important thing to her (and she said it all the time), she focused all her attention on my father.
It makes sense now because he has dementia that is getting worse and worse. It started when he was in his sixties, and he’s mid-eighties now.
When my mother complained about my father, I just shut down. There was nothing I could do about it, and she would have not handled it well if I walked away. I was a hostage to her complaints, though there were no physical chains restraining me.
One day, I had enough. After she complained to me for the umpteenth time, I told her bluntly that she should divorce him. She stopped short and said that was not acceptable in Taiwanese culture. And it didn’t stop her from complaining.
Sometimes, I wondered how different her life could have been if she had listened to me. Probably, she would have married someone else with the same qualities as my father because that was so ingrained in her. I used to think if she had divorced my father when I was young, she could have had such a different life. It’s only been since my medical crisis that I’ve realized she would have replicated the situation with someone else.
When my brother went to Taiwan last summer, my mother told him that she would find something else to obsess over when my father died. She didn’t put it quite like that, but that was what she meant. My brother told me that, and I was not surprised. I thought it would be her church, but it seems she’s fallen off that a bit.
Anyway. My point is that she drummed it in my head when I was a young child that my first duty in life was to be the container for her emotions. I did not know the word parentification at the time (not sure when it came to be), but that’s what she did.
I brought it up to her when I was in my thirties and she apologized, but kept doing it. When they were here during my medical crisis, she would unload on me, apologize, asay she shouldn’t do it, then continue doing it. I finally told her to stop saying she shouldn’t do it because she was going to do it, anyway. It made me angrier for her to do it immediately after she had just said she should not do it.
When I hit twenty-six, she commented that she had had my brother at that age. Which, fine. That was just stating the truth. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a fifteen-year war to get me pregnant. And, yes, I felt like it was a war. My mother had moved back to Taiwan by that point, and she brought it up almost every time we talked. When she visited here for weeks at a time, she brought it up constantly.
Back to walking the circle with the deerhorn knives. One time as I was walking and focusing on ‘the enemy’, I had a flash of, “If it’s him or me, it’s going to be me” (to live). That was the first time I realized that my life was worth something, and it was when I stopped being a pacifist.
It wasn’t that I wanted to go around and beat up people or anything like that. It was that I finally acknowledged that I had worth, that my life had worth. I did not have to earn the right to be alive (yes, that was something I believed prior to Taiji), which was a relief.
I have been depressed all my life. Or at least since I was seven. It was chronic and severe, and I did not know what a weight it was until 90% disappeared after my medical crisis. It’s back up to about 50% now (with a good reason for it), and my anxiety is about 60% of what it used to be (it had only gone down to 40% after my medical crisis).
Doing my Taiji/Bagua routine every morning is one thing that keeps me grounded. I don’t know what I would do without it.