Category: Grief

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.

something negative about grandma

We grew up idolising this woman, this maternal head of the family household.

One of the things that I want to do to keep track of, is the awful things that she tends to say to me, and the rest of the family, so I don’t see her as an ultimate martyr and or some sort of saviour person. Of course I think the savior figure that she plays in my life is due to her being my primary caregiver as I was growing up– actually that’s putting it lightly. The most important years of my life, she was the only one who was there for me.

But there are a few things that she doesn’t do well at all. For example she definitely sees us as wandered. And I don’t mean wanderers in the good sense. I mean more like 流浪汉 līulānghān– and this might be because she was one herself. She had traveled from Malaysia to China, and in some ways got abandoned there, or I should say, here. So in some ways she now sees people in the same way, so she’ll make little stabbing remarks to that effect. Because it’s Chinese New Year (which is actually just New year), there is a surplus of dumplings because the aunts made them. So I went to get them on 初二 chū’er or 初三 chūsan, and she was looking so amazing and healthy.

But the next thing that came out of her mouth was, “After you’ve finished the dumplings, you’ll be back to eating crumbs again.”

It was actually pretty shocking to hear. What did she think of me? Did she think I was some kind of vagabond?

In a funny, weird way this also intersects with one of my therapy sessions. One of the hardest things that my therapist had told me was that I saw myself as a vagabond- a līulānghān. That that was the way I saw myself.

Was my grandma the same? Did she see herself this way because she had left her entire family behind in Malaya?

I guess when I wanted to write about the things that my grandma did to upset me, it turned into something much wider-reaching, and wide-ranging.

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

Today

When I entered therapy it was for Fear. This is a note from January 30, 2018, from more than a year ago:

30.1.2018

Today was therapy. I have seen this therapist for two years. She’s Chinese and looks like my mum. Today she didn’t let me get away with any of my usual shit. She said I looked at her with “naïve” eyes, and that I wasn’t addressing anything she was saying. I knew myself also that I was avoiding everything that she was saying—that my mind was leaping about, unable to absorb anything, every five seconds. Just staying there, physically in the room, was difficult. Concentrating was difficult—I was planning dates, thinking back to dates, thinking about other things. Even now, when writing about it, I wanted to stop, and think about other things. The writing will not flow, it’s so slow. My therapist said something to me about the fact that I was stuck—that on this topic I was unable to go anywhere. If it was mapped out, it would look like this:                 stuck                    leaving                  sadness                        abandonment          grief      

Anticipatory grief?

This is short, and brief, as I am on my way to the gym.

Yesterday during Lantern Festival there were talks of putting my granny into an old person’s home in Yanjiao, on the border between Beijing and Hebei province. It would close to her elder son’s place, and everyone is getting so tired looking after her.

This is a difficult act for everyone, not least because of the idea of failure when it comes to filial piety and love. I’m still processing it myself, but at the same time I feel like I’ve been ready for it all along. She’s a vibrant, social, extraverted person, and I know what that feels like, because I am one, too.

There are other cadres at this place, and she’s always had that wonderful ability to make friends, enlist others, and be herself. This might be some sort of fantasy speaking, a mind’s rationalization, but if we could all see this as the next challenge and obstacle to overcome– the obstacle is the path– it could have so many benefits. A lot of her friends are already in homes and she talks to my aunt about checking them out.

Where will her extraordinary life go? Now I’m really rambling (signs of a lack of acceptance, probably. But I’m getting there)