Category: Family

Taking a child away from her parents

This is quickly turning into a situation where I don’t want to write at all… where the inertia not to write at all is starting to take over.

I made this screenshot last week, when I was watching the film Philomena and there is a scene where Philomena has her child taken away from her (by the evil nuns), and last weekend when I was in a historical town in northern China called Jimingyi I talked about how I no longer talk to my parents. We were at a lazy susan and someone went around the table to ask about everyone’s relationship to their parents. When it came to me I wanted to be honest, and so I said that I don’t talk to them anymore. I wonder if this is related to them leaving me with my grandparents.

Coincidentally, the lionizing of my grandma, making her a picture of perfection to me over all of these years, hasn’t helped. It made it feel as if she was my only family. That I only had her no one else. And everybody encouraged this fiction. So much so that when my grandfather died I felt like I had lost a parent, at sixteen.

dark daddy

Who is the man who I’m constantly attracted to?

Don Draper has a drinking problem, and his drinking problem is supported by his partners. It’s only because they support this drinking problem that they are even in the relationship in the first place.

I had a friend who when I ate lunch with at a Cantonese restaurant told me that my attraction to the dark types will disappear once I’ve made my peace with the archetype- which probably means, my father.

But why is the darkness so sweet and so tempting? falling into it feels delicious. And what are the times and reasons that we fall into it, willy-nilly?

Updating

Probably time for me to update this on my grandmother.

She is still alive. She’s 99.

Here’s a picture that I took with my iPhone when I was there last time, about two weeks ago.

1921-

It basically summarises her whole life. But the intensity of this image, and her while life, curriculum cv published in this book of revolutionaries from the Yan’an era, is her striking resemblance to me:

Sudden changes

I dug this out today. It seems that I have been working on why I came back from China since 2017, and of course much earlier as well, and sending little messages to myself about them, in an auto-fiction kind-of way.

And I have always written about my granny.

A shift happened on my birthday, on 18 August. My 33rd birthday. The shift happened when I realised that I essentially no longer wanted to be there or liked to be there. The whole ‘good girl’ thing had become a sort-of performance, and I was definitely playing a role.

I don’t know when this role thing started, or how, or why I was doing it, except I had found out slowly. I was doing it for her: If she wasn’t still around, there would be no way that I would pretend that I was happy in a home that was essentially abusive and didn’t contribute to my own image of myself, or my own happiness.

I had gone so far beyond the Chinese family — which engulfed everything EVERYTHING — that I was at some sort of stasis, homeostasis, the way that I have always been. And it made me feel lucky.

Update on my granny

The last few weeks have been tough, as I have taken on a more care-taking role for my grandma. I didn’t know that it would be this way but probably on some intuitive level I knew as well, that during a period of time I might have to stay in Beijing to take care of her.

I thought it would be fun, but the truth is it is not fun. It is a slog.

On boundaries

The thing about boundaries, and the lack thereof in my family, were the worst. It was this place where we weren’t allowed boundaries, we were not allowed to be ourselves. “Porous” is a word that comes up for me.

The word has a special meaning for me. It was permeable. The people who are always coming into and within my boundaries were the ones who I let do it the most. My youngest aunt typifies this example. Just one example of her inability to come into her own in terms of boundaries: her deciding that everyone is just like her, it’s as if she haven’t seen to the end of her nose, and her one question to me after all the years that I have been married: “Do you even cook?”

Her single life means that she orders food a lot. But I am not her. What has she missed in all my years of growing up?

Divine Daughters

I have had a rough week. Between deadlines and the gym, friendships and not having traveled for six months, my dad was in town.

Here is something I have realised about my father. He demanded everything and nothing from me. When he expected nothing, you felt all the freedom in the world, but he also expected everything, which meant that he would walk away from me as a child, on the sidewalk in London next to our underground basement flat-cum-caretakers-quarters (side-note: My aunt, when I had first started school, told me to tell everyone that my dad’s job was a ‘maintenance manager’ not a dormitory caretaker, which is what he was; she asked me to lie, maybe that was the first time, before I had hit puberty), if I didn’t obey him. I remember being on a small bicycle, we were perhaps riding to the park. He wanted to leave me there, because I had made one extra request– it was oh, maybe, that I didn’t want to bike 15 minutes, or something even more minor. That fear was incredible, and has lasted to today. I am always so scared of being abandoned, because of this extremely early period of abandonment, this experience of abandonment. Why would he do this to a child? It almost didn’t make sense, to leave a child on the side of the road.

His threat was abandonment.

I was listening to the RobCast yesterday (highly recommended!) and he had a line in there about being “Divine sons and daughters.” The idea, an idea that I had also read on the Bodysex website this morning, was that we are completely whole as we are. I hadn’t encountered this idea until a fingerful of years ago, and certainly I had no idea of this idea in childhood. I was always on the bicycle, with a father walking away from her because she had made a request. Always.

Givers and takers

I was with a friend yesterday and we discussed givers and takers. The context of the conversation was with men and it sparked so much within me. My father was a taker. He took everything– my time, my energy, my love. And when he gave it was with the expectation that I had to return big things to him, like my unconditional loyalties or all the things which I could give to him.

But that was it- his love was conditional, and my love was unconditional, because it was a child’s love for a father.

The first time that I experienced unconditional love was with the man pictured, J. This photo was taken during our first Spring Festival together, so 2010, almost ten years ago, ten years next Spring.

It was such a strange (and sudden, to be fair) thing in my life that I didn’t know what it was– I couldn’t recognise it. What was this thing, shiny and sparkling which looked dull and strange when it first got there?

Because I guess when you’ve been brought up under the glare of only conditional love, you have no idea what it is you have on your hands when it arrives on your doorstep, unannounced, closing the door and hanging its coat on the hooks on the wall in your hallway.

That’s a giver.

Anxiety / secrets

Wrong to say I wish she would die already?

Does anyone know what it’s like to switch their phone on and off, on and off all the time in case it beeps?

Realistically and also psychologically, for 32 years?

I only learned how to love 3 or 4 years ago from Joel. At the pub, at Beiping Machine.

When I was 16 my grandfather died and nobody told me. For weeks I rang back to Beijing every week, because my dad and his wife had taken a trip to Beijing, packed their suitcases and said LIED that it was because my father had a bad tooth. Now, 16 years later, the lies that they told are still reverberating through my life.

When my aunt (the elder one) sat on the bed of my then-boyfriend (who had graduated from Beijing’s No. 4 Middle School and was a Beijinger), it was actually the lower of a bunk-bed, she laid out things from the funeral: I don’t remember a lot of them because my head had gone in a spinning wheel, a pitch dark of blackness, and I had blacked out.

I blacked out for about ten minutes, or more.

I’m not kidding. I blacked out.

This is all I can write about this for now…

To be continued

Self-compassion exercise

A letter of self-compassion, to myself

You grew up with the shapes and boxes clearly defined for you, and you never ever shape-shifted out of it.

You were told always what to be, what to do, who to like, who to please.

And you scared me into believing that the small world you created was the real world, and I felt all of this as if it was real when I was still a child.

I never realised that some of you — my family — would be my adversary, and I didn’t realise this until a couple of years ago.

And now I’ve realised how much darkness is in the past, and I can only say this: You will not defeat me.

Oh, and if you find this blog too dark, you don’t have to stay.