There is a plant…well, there are plants, most of them from the Ficus family, that grow around trees and slowly suffocate the host tree and kill it.
I think of my family in this way, sometimes.
I love them, I do, but I feel at times that the very existence of my family, this tree, is a tangle of roots and branches and a thick mulch of dead leaves beneath us.
I went for my fathers 71st birthday over the weekend.
It was a bittersweet opportunity to see an aging patriarch, without all three kids there like they did last year. This year my sister wasn’t there. Not sure if she knew about it, I certainly didn’t say a word, my brother didn’t either…I think if anyone would have told her to join us, it would have been my Dad, but maybe he knows there is some bad blood brewed up between her and I.
I want to make it right, but every time I try I feel like I am forcing a feeling, forcing a thing that shouldn’t be, breaking an animal that has long since been dead.
She says I remind her of Mum…but the truth be told…she reminds me of Mum. She reminds me of Mum and she reminds me of Dad, but its not the good bits she reminds me of.
There is a thick fog of loss and sadness that that surrounds both these women and a feeling of being left behind, scared of being forgotten, and so they fight almost hourly, for relevance.
They do so without observing the way they put others down, they don’t notice how in their cries for relevance they are relegating others problems, others feelings, others own sense of relevance to nothing but dust.
It pains me.
I came away from that weekend feeling downright depressed.
Crawling inwards in my own skin.
Like someone who has looked into a mirror and been scared of who she is because who she is happens to be a long sordid tale of who she doesn’t want to be.
I feel so full to the brim with tears. Anxiety. Sorrow. Fear.
Seeing my father as old as he is…
Seeing him…surrounded by us but still alone.
Seeing my mum grasping for the love and recognition she already has but doesn’t appreciate.
And all the while…slowly but surely, suffocating this tired old man.
Slowly but surely…pushing us all away because we see it and we are ashamed that we do nothing to stop it.
I know…I know I shouldn’t feel this way about these two people. I know I shouldn’t feel as invested as I do…
In so many ways, they are meant for each other, but only in such a way that they were not.
The time for them to have made wiser choices, different paths in the woods, that road less traveled by, that time has slipped through their fingers like sand through an hourglass.
For all the times I have been mocked about my failed marriages…for all that it entailed, I still fucking got out of a boat that was sinking.
I still had faith that it would all work out.
I still plodded on, one foot in front of the other, hardly a sure footed mountain goat, more of an ox. Stubborn and unwilling to accept that this, what I had, was it.
My parents are separated.
I don’t get why they don’t see this.
They live separate lives, they fight, they bicker, they lose their tempers, they retreat to lick wounds, and then they spend the rest of the time just getting on with their lives.
He works, still.
She works, still.
And the more she gets upset with him for not including her in a life she repeatedly says she doesn’t want to be a part of, the angrier he gets when she intrudes and expects to be included.
Its like watching a carriage drawn by two horses, stubbornly pulling in the opposite direction to each other.
They have been married over 45 years.
45 fucking years.
What is the sense in getting divorced now???
“Work then! Work till you drop dead! See if I care!” she says, sulking.
Its as if saying “See if I care” or, really, “I don’t care” is one way of her exerting control over a man she knows she no longer has control over.
I think it would be great if she just let him do what he wants without reminding him she has control over how he will feel about doing what he wants.
If you don’t give a fuck what he does, stop trying to make him feel bad about it.
Let him work, let him rent that apartment, let him visit his kids, let him visit his grandkids. Just let him be.
Nothing my father does is ever enough.
Ever.
I see this and it just breaks my heart.
Sure, he was rarely there when we were kids, but we were in boarding school anyway.
And when he was there…he was there. He was loving, he was full of hugs, he was angry, he was violent, he was full of laughter and warmth and salty tears…
He was everything to us.
To the three of us.
And it defies belief for her that we, the three of us, could value this man as much as we do.
Because…truth be told…sticks and stones may break your bones…but words…they fucking hurt way more than those.
My father may have been a man quick to hit us, beat us black and blue, but he was always kind with his words.
This isn’t some crazy psych evaluation gone wrong here…we always looked on him as a kind man with a very short fuse.
My mother was not always that kind with her words. We competed with each other for affection, approval, and we were constantly compared to each other.
Its why we are where we are. All three of us.
The mistakes we made of seeing approval as love, allowing someone to talk down to us over and over, its the love we remember, its the love we knew mattered.
Somewhere in there, somehow, if we only did more, said more, performed better, cooked better, just somewhere, we would be recognized for the awesome people we were.
We are.
I get this now.
I totally get it.
Its exhausting trying to tell her to lay off him. To just let him enjoy his day. One fucking day in the year. Just for one day, lay off him.
Its hard to explain to people that I do love my mother.
I love her, and in as much as I love her…its like I feel my whole being is tangled up in this family, tangled up, roots and all, suffocating for the same branches of love that suffocate me.
How do I disentangle, disenchant myself from my dream vs the reality I know it to be…
For all her failures as a guiding light, she still guided us.
But I see now, as an adult…how I am quick to cut away from someone who will harm me. I protect myself, I protect my emotions, from people who are jealous, hurtful, unkind. I do everything I can now to no longer give a mean willed person the benefit of the doubt.
I used to.
There was a time I would give every mean spirited person the benefit of the doubt, mostly because I wanted so badly to understand and love my mother, but more importantly, I wanted for her to love me.
And somehow, I guess through me showing mean spirited people love, I would feel this sense of love that I so desperately craved.
And nope, just like a scorpion carried across a river in an Aesop fable…I repeatedly got stung.
So now, its in my nature to avoid people like this. To see a scorpion or a snake for what it is, to not wish for it a better future, a better life, a better nature.
No longer am I an optimist in the art of teaching an old dog new tricks.
My mother taught me this.
My sister too.
There is no change in some people.
Some people…just don’t know how to change. They don’t want to change. Because changing a set of core beliefs would change who they are, completely, and to them, the thought of it is truly terrifying.
I have changed.
But I have changed to a person that is less naive, less forgiving, less insecure and less unsure.
Where I have been able to cut back and keep to myself, I have been able to give to the people and things most deserving.
My mother will visit me when I am recovering from knee surgery.
She is coming to help.
She is good in this role.
I will be crippled and she will be my savior.
Those kind of dynamics work.
I will need the help, J goes back to work the day after my surgery, so she will be a good person to have around.
She will be able to help train my new helper (the one we are hiring from the Philippines, since Anna, our batshit crazy Sri Lankan helper is finally moving on after I fired her) learn how to cook Japanese food, Indian food, and how to clean the house, etc. Things I can watch from a safe vantage point on the couch.
My mother is good at these things. Telling people how to do something in order to do it right. Being the one someone depends on, unfailingly. And if there is any way she shows her love, its through her food.
The woman is a phenomenal cook.
She beams, she practically puffs her chest out like a rooster on a roof, when you compliment her culinary skills.
I see much of her in me in this regard.
I got my love for food, my love for cooking, my love for feeding others…from my mother.
All three of us did.
My brother also loves to cook and loves to eat. So does my sister. Its the love we remember, its the love thats familiar.
I read an article recently about how we marry the wrong people in life. And although I will say it makes a world of sense for the first two shitheads I married (yes, I have been married thrice), I think there is a point in the article where its explained that we don’t think we deserve that normal, decent, moral, responsible person…and I have to say, when I met J, the struggle within me went something like this:
“But he’s so normal, so decent, so quiet and unassuming…so responsible, so funny, so clean cut…he would never go for someone like me…”
and then
“fuck that shit, why can’t I get someone that normal, decent and responsible for a change? why is it that I am not deserving of someone decent??? Well, I fucking AM!”
and that was all it took! Lol. But here’s a quote from the article –
“But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.”
If you want to read the whole article, go here:
I think, in my mothers defense, her father was a gambler and a drinker, her mother was always complaining about how she ought to leave this loser and how he had gambled away her inheritance, etc. My mother told my grandmother, “If you are so unhappy, why don’t you just leave him!” and then, of course, my grandmother, when my grandmother did the whole, “I love you, forgive me, etc” said, “See, our daughter wanted me to leave!” and its been a sore point in my Mums life. She has never recommended any of us leave our spouses because she felt she spoke out of turn and was not appreciated for it then. I think, and this is true to the observations in the article, that my mother stayed with my father, through and through, because she sees love as this insecure place of constantly fighting for relevance in a relationship thats not great to begin with.
My father is immature, he’s self-serving, even when he is loving and generous and kind…he’s kinda clueless about what everyone else wants because his wants are pretty simple. He’s not a complex man. He is not stupid, far from it, but he has come to believe he is stupid because she has made him believe it.
I have seen this pattern play out in my own past failed marriages, where I ended up with people who would do this to me, put me down, make me feel stupid, and I know for a fact, I left because I did not like the person I had become, angry, disgruntled, unsure of myself, and belittled.
I don’t know what it is that makes us seek out these people other than this quest for familiarity.
My brother ended up with someone like that…and I am not sure what the deal is with my sisters life…either she is with someone like that or she is that to someone…whichever way that is going, with her and her husband, its like they are this creeper plant to each other, suffocating each other and yet still unable to disentangle, like my mother and father.
My father was recounting a story just a day ago about how he was left to “babysit” my eldest sister when she was 6 months old. That somehow she wouldn’t drink her milk from the feeding bottle he was trying to give her and so he hit her…and she drank it.
I don’t know why I am telling you this, because it just pains me to even think it.
He was recounting this story while saying he never had a problem with hitting us.
And I said, “Yep, Dad, we know”
And he was like, well, it worked…if you weren’t doing something you were supposed to, I would hit you and you’d just do it!
Then he said, “I remember when we lived in Madras, and I was taking you and Sian to the movies and Sian didn’t want to come in, so I gave him one big whack and he moved on in to the cinema!” he said this as if it were a very funny joke.
My mum then piped in and said, “That was when we were in Madras, I remember, but Sian was only a baby, so you are not remembering it right”
And then I said…”Well, if Sian was only a baby, then this must have been me you hit!”
“Must have, either way, you went into the cinema once you got a whack!”
No words…no feelings…I honestly felt nothing hearing this story, coz its not even one I remember, but its funny my father vaguely remembers this one story.
I would have been four.
You see now what I mean about this idea of root misunderstandings?
Of feeling tangled up in branches and suffocated a bit.
I want so much to have this normal, kind, forgiving and evolving family…but the reality is its not what I got.
My lot, it was simply different from what I wanted it to be.
But its not like I am mourning…I don’t know any other way. I don’t have any other option.
So I just am.
But it doesn’t mean this is something I am immune to.
Every time I catch up with my family, much as I crave the opportunity, its like someone rips off the scab of an old wound, throws alcohol on it and I am back to being raw and injured again.
All the past hurts, all the past buried emotions I had thought I had forgotten, they float up to the surface like a bubble that escapes a pit of thick black tar.
And as this bubble breaks the surface, the emotions that explode out of it are sometimes very hard for me to handle. I end up in tears, angry, frightened, sad and broken.
This is what therapy is like…this feeling of being at ease, at one with the world around you, and then the therapist opens their book and they ask you how you are feeling…and you say you are fine…and then they bring up something that struck them as important, something you said last week…and then you are fucking ball of nerves all over again. You are raw, unhinged and crying while reaching for the tissue box they keep just within your reach.
I am always so hung up on optimism and being positive and upbeat…
But I am also this messy heap of raw emotions.
A broken individual who came from a home of broken individuals…all of us broken but somehow together…when together…and like creeper vines, entangled, one within the other, supporting but also suffocating.
In a spiral of making and avoiding all the same mistakes.
How to break free of the vicious cycle?
Know you are worth it.
Know you are enough, but if you aren’t, know you can be more.
Know that everything you are, every thing you will be, is more than what you were.
And if its not, try fucking hard to be more, never stop, never give up, never accept that the tie that binds will be the tie that restricts.
From the root up, expect more from others and expect more from yourself.
That is all I can do.
That is all I do.
Breathe…
Me, Myself & I 