Maybe I am even a child of three Adult Children, if stepfather is counted.
Can you imagine living day-in day-out with two people who never speak to you, never make eye contact, never say hello, never say goodnight, never have a casual chat with you? And if these people talk and swear to you, and about you in the third person when you are there? And these two people scream and yell and fight with each other, and when the other is out of the house, the remaining one talks incessantly to himself about what a “stupid fat cow” the other one is and lists a list of imagined “ugly” physical traits of the other persos? And if you are a child and these people are your parents?
Apart from two isolated,. specific very short exchanges (namely, “Leave the crispy chips at the bottom for me, I like crispy chips” when eating a packet of British chips, and “Make sure you wrap up [Schrondiger’s Brit’s] colouring pencils“, which when actually taken into context are not even that normal or functional), I literally have no memories of my parents, Two Adult Children, ever having a functional, normal, adult exchange between them.
Even when I rack my brains really hard, nothing comes to mind. I have plenty of memories of totally dysfunctional exchanges between them (from toddler age through to my grandmother’s funeral, through my wedding, through my thirties) which they didn’t care to hide, and them childishly using their schoolage and adult children as go-betweens (although they deny). Screaming, shouting, yelling, name calling behind their backs, mocking each other, calling the other parent names to their young children, swearing, cussing, cheating, lying. The mother had reams of Asian “male friends” and the father had the occasional Asian “female friend”, and they were both very nice to their friends (again no matter what the cost to their children), but they just couldn’t be even remotely civil to each other, nor their children. They are both two deeply dysfunctional individuals tied together in a codependent relationship.
I don’t know is this better or worse, but my parents continued to act as if nothing ever happened, and everything was all hunky dory and they couldn’t imagine why there would be any resentment held towards them. When I confronted them in my twenties they continued to deny, get angry, gaslight, diffuse, and blame me for being a “difficult child”. Around other family members they both put on this “I don’t know what happened”, frail, innocent act which is even worse. At least some bullies are equally nasty to everyone: on a slight career-related tangent: the ones who kick down and kiss up are the worst. Again, the same pattern is there, incapable of having an authentic relating conversation. They continue to pester me with banal chat about weather and my cousins and random people I once met when I was 10 while dodging the elephant in the room. You know what, fuck you. I appreciate that we have to take control of our lives and live for the future, but at the same time, as other individuals who are aware that they come from severely dysfunctional families of origin will be able to relate, it isn’t so simple. Ongoing trauma needs to be processed and dealt with, not least of all when you want your own family, among other reasons.
Details aren’t really important, but in a way they are for painting a fuller picture. But my father used to bang on the wall, scream to the TV and himself, not talk to us but talk to himself ABOUT us while we were in the room. He would throw things on the floor and brush things to the side with his feet. He would never clean, and the one time he hung some laundry out to dry he made a big song and dance about it and pouted that we didn’t help him. My younger brother wet the bed when he was a toddler, you know, normal toddler behaviour. My father took this as a spiteful action aimed to bother him and screamed and screeched at my sleeping brother that “I hope you are happy now” and after cleaning him up quickly, jeered, “Yeah now you can piss yourself to your heart’s content“. My mother would lock my brother (as a toddler) in the bathroom and he screamed and cried to be let out, he would come through the door, and she called him a “Stupid bastard” and wacked him with the wooden part of a wardrobe clothes hanger, slamming the door in his snot and tear-streaked face as he wailed to be let out. He (allegedly) doesn’t remember. I remember catching her eye at night time and her narrowing her eyes into a spiteful glare, sheer hatred and annoyance burning through me. Shrieking and snapping: “Don’t look at me with your big eyes!!” before turning away with her back to me. At the same time, he was also the favourite child of my mother. As my mother constantly shreiks “[Schrodinger’s Brit’]s brother doesn’t mind/care“. If I mention it, more victim blaming and gaslighting “He treats me so nicely…”. She also knowingly left us in childcare with an abusive woman and man who explicitly preferred my brother to me and their own Asian daughters, years later dimissing it factually with “they prefer boys“. It annoys me to say this. but this is such a fucking cultural stereotype which I see repeated again and again, that is the whiter-looking male child being the favoured member of the Asian-white biracial family by Asians.
Emotional neglect and abuse aside, just to add the scenery: The walls and surfaces of places we lived in were constantly covered in grime, dust, cooking oil, dead flies (squashed flat with a newspaper and left there by my father who didn’t seem to think cleaning up was a task for him), beetles and crumbs. It was living in squalor.
*
They divorced, but of course never mentioned this little fact to anybody. Never sat us down to have a chat. Typical ignoring, denial and fake frontin’. Just carried on screaming and yelling and shouting in the same manner, ignoring each other and passively-aggressively and aggressively insulting each other, and us, until years later the house was reposessed because my father decided it was easier to declare personal bankruptcy than to pay back a few thousand GBP. Characteristically, mother claimed later with her typical lying, that “it was to protect your brother” (of course no mention of me whatsoever), but there is nothing protective about living in such a toxic environment.
We got evicted and moved to social housing where immediately upon moving in the family across the road called us a bunch of racist names. This would be a regular occurance with most of the kids on the estate joining in. (Mother’s reaction when I came home angry and crying: start screaming angrily “You have NO CLASS at all“. Her reaction when an adult friend apparently spoke “sternly” to my adult brother 20 years later: cut off all contact and end a 40 year friendship). She would scream, yell, gaslight, the usual. Nowadays I’ve met plenty of mothers in biracial families who support and defend their kids or move them to another school when the inevitable racist bullying arrives. It stings to see how much their children are loved.
Similarly, at some point, stepfather just arrived. No introduction or talk. He just arrived. I just gathered by inference. My stepfather and mother would at least talk to each other normally, in a language which my mother didn’t teach us and which she refused to teach us if I asked. Once I came home with books and CDs for the language and she grunted about how it was such a chore and after reading a short 3 line dialogue told me to get lost. They would talk to each other, ignoring us as if we weren’t there. Talk to each other, turn the television on and act as if we weren’t there. Sitting around the small round dinner table, they would talk to each other and act as if we weren’t there, stuffing fried goodies on a bed of rice into their mouths. My mother took some weird pleasure in trying to be some go-between, wailing histrionically that she was “caught in the middle”, and playing her usual emotional manipulation by saying we “made” Stepfather “feel left out” and how he was “sensitive” and how it was basically our fault he was so sensitive and felt left out. (Given that they were always conversing in a language they refused to teach us despite us asking, or get help to teach us with, I’m not sure how he felt “left out” or why he was so “sensitive” about some random people he had some to live with who they had never bother introducing themselves to or explaining).
I couldn’t wait to escape. Under the myth of meritocracy and the way in which my mother puts “educated” people on an unearned pedestal (having had to leave school herself at 13 because of lack of money), excellent grades were my ticket out (and to be fair, in some ways there were).
Lots of stuff happened before and in between, but no room to put them here. I travelled the world and experienced all kinds of new places and faces, but ultimately, we have to find home in ourselves and our family of choice.
*
My mother recently recovered from an illness, and while this sounds harsh, it just made me realise how we have no bond closer than that of two people who happen know each other. She’s recently become a little bit more authentic, and we’ve become a little bit more closer as a result; however that was the long and laboured result of much effort and tears and forcing on my part. It isn’t my job. You both couldn’t, didn’t come to me in open love, and I don’t owe a thing. This is the same woman who told me upon visiting me in hospital when I was 13, that she “doesn’t care” if I died because she had my brother; my father’s response was to mention a month later in passing to me (it being the only thing he would have said as we never had actual conversation) that “I heard you were in the hospital”. Who upon visiting me in hospital when I was in my twenties, immediately nagged me about how I owed her 3 GBP for her hospital parking (but she has no issue picking up the bill for those long-lost Malaysian relatives who we’ve never heard a peep from our entire childhood and adulthood so far, who so conveniently get in touch when they need a place to stay in the UK, for paying for and looking after friends of relatives from Malaysia while telling me because they are staying there is “no room” for me to come home). She constantly over the years screamed at me for sighing (copying her), gaslighted me, denied, called me “ugly” and said “nobody likes you because your room is messy”, yet seems it’s acceptable to regale me with the personal problems of cousins, her friends and her friends of friends of friends. Complete hypocrisy.
She loved to play the martyr constantly, making out she made so many sacrifices for us, how she took us to school and twisting her bad deeds into versions of “i only did it for your own good“, and getting her sister to join in with their mind-numbing chorus of “you should be grateful she carried you for nine months in her stomach, and she didn’t abort you“. While constantly lying, manipulating and basically precluding any possibility of truth or authenticity with her children, getting angry and screaming whenever I have any weakness, she has absolutely zero boundaries when it comes to complete strangers, no matter what the price to her children and family (all those people hanging around in our house late at night keeping us up with their loud chat without any attempt to be quiet, all those people who used our home as loan collateral before racking up debts and disappearing overseas).
Then decades later I see my parents in law freaking out because the door makes a little noise and it “might” wake up their little grandchild sleeping in some little village in the middle of nowhere. “How do you think poor kids living in inner cities with the constant noise of traffic, sirens and people sleep?” I fumed. The depth of this fury is frightening because nobody has actually done anything, but it has its own logic.
Then she has the cheek and hypocrisy to lecture me on how women “should” have children to “feel like women” (great coming from someone who made it very clear that being a mother was a burdensome chore), on the importance of “family” and “coming home”. This deliberate and willful self-deception and delusion is unbearable.
At the same time, I hurt when I see how certain people speak to her, look at her (the reason is racism, including intra-group POC-on-POC racism no doubt about it). I can sympathise with victims of a system without condoning or forgiving their own behaviour which has crossed the line so many times I’ve lost count..
My father sends me an email once every 6-12 months, talking about himself and our paternal family. He has never once asked me how I am, telephoned me, sent a letter, hugged me, told me he loved me or had a deep conversation with me. He spent most of the time we were at home with him literally ignoring us, only interacting with us to fight with us like another child (taking our things then running away laughing spitefully when we got annoyed and locking himself in his room), talking to himself all day and night (to the extent that a neighbour even complained about him), constantly swearing, calling us swear words and names, calling our mother swear words and names (“Stupid cow” was used frequently). I asked him years later why he connected through social media when he made it pretty clear he couldnt’ stand us for almost our entire childhood. His response was “I’m sorry you feel that way...” before proceeding to his gaslighting and victim blaming. His sister, who seems relatively normal, is another weirdo who felt entitled just before our wedding to email us a list of last minute dietary demands based not on allergies, but on what they “like” and “don’t like”.
I acknowledge both were victims of systemic forces, but do not condone their behaviour.
*
A friend who is a mother informed me that having a child is therapeutic. I’ve also heard this reiterated by several parents, mothers and fathers, and in particular those from severely dysfunctional families. At the same time, patterns are intergenerational. I’m aware of the “ghosts in the nursery”, but I still have my moments of autopilot, of flashback, of procedural and emotional memory overriding any logical anchor and any footing in the fleeting moment that is now.
When I see how other parents interact with their toddler, schoolage and adult children, it’s like peeking into a goldfish bowl from the outside. I watch, the voyeur into what seems like a dream family-of-origin (I do know no family is perfect and that appearances can be deceiving, but my parents weren’t even capable of pretending to be mildly functional).
Even writing this is making me feel tense. What good does it do? The voices of my gaslighting aunt dragged in to meddle in internal affairs, who took advantage of family drama to have a vacation to Europe where my codependent mother paid for everything (wrong fucking timing, perfect opportunist). Gaslighting denying, telling me that people have been racist to me because it’s “how I act” and “how I look”. (I’ve also heard this repeated, generally, without being aimed at me, by a British woman of Indian descent living in Switzerland when I was recounting -to somebody else- a Swiss friend’s story of racism as to why she decided to move her POC Swiss child to a different school. Worst thing is that this woman is a schoolteacher. Again, maybe this irks me in particular because it’s essentially what my own mother has said to me repatedly). I don’t know what good it does, but the act of reclaiming one’s truth and narrative after decades of gaslighting, hiding and denial and others telling you what your truth is, seems personally important, seems liberating.
I don’t plan to actively involve my parents or extended family (who collaborated in the dysfunction) in my own family. It’s too much of a strain on both me and my husband. They’re just too dysfunctional, childish and unaware, as well as probably just being incompatible on personal and cultural level. I won’t actively exclude them, and if they come knocking I won’t turn them away, but I sure won’t be chasing some idealised grandparental relationship.
It’s just better for me and my husband, for us, for our family, if we don’t have active contact. Their recent about-face and acting as if we have some kind of deep relationship when there was never anything there to start with causes enough strain.
That’s my truth. There’s more, maybe I will add. Clearly there is a time and a place, but I’m sick of sugarcoating and fudging just because some people have issues with other people’s truths. When I started to talk about things years back, my mother would repeatedly intervene and try and censor me saying I “shouldn’t” talk about things or “some people might get upset”. Typical passive-aggressive projection that I’ve finally had enough of. I feel guilt and disloyalty as soon as the words commit themselves on this page, but it’s my truth.
I’ve done as much work on this all as I can to date. But it’s an ongoing thing. There’s no roadmap or healthy model, but the comfort of maps from functional people makes all the difference to me. There’s only so long one can put off having children for, if one wants children.
Schrodinger's Brit 