Favorite Book Of The Year (Continued)

This is the 2nd half of the post. The 1st half is here.

Yesterday, I started to leaf through the pages again. I had reread many books before, some more than two or three times, some once every year. However I had never reread a book as soon as I finished it. This book was the first. I reread the first twenty pages and tried to savor what I had missed the first time around. Then I reread the last twenty to thirty pages, during which I felt that I had to write about this last section since it really reminded me the days when I was growing up.

At the end of the book, there is a little section–just several pages–about Teoria’s family and her years of growing up. It really reverberates with my childhood and my confused teenager years. I can relate to it in so many different ways.

Teoria’s father is a tyrant who often tells his kids, Teoria and her brother Wendell, “say your time tables in your head”, or “think of all the starving children in the world”, or “prepare your thoughts for the coming week–obedience and brightness are your goals.” He felt ownership of his children and treated them as “subjects, instruments that he could move around, order around, send for and send away.”

If Teoria’s father can be easily categorized as a tyrant and a narcissist, her mother is more complex and more difficult to understand. Teoria says, “my mother was a ghost who lived in the house. She did as my father ordered. She did this out of utter fidelity to him; she loved him. She loved him to her own extinction….Her affinities for my brother and me were predicated on my father’s approval.”

Teoria continues with her observation: “There are people like my mother trapped in imaginaries. I do not mean her own imaginations since I don’t think she made it up herself. When I was a child, I used to watch my mother apply makeup to her face and neck. She mistook my fascination for pleasure and camaraderie….She instructed me on the right amount of eyeliners…I saw her appear–another person. Her eyes encouraged me to imitate her practice. But even when I was a child, these appearances of my mother disturbed me….My mother tried to usher me into the cave with her enactments of femininity; I was unable to see anything but weakness in that invitation. When she had control of me, she forced me into display. I was her possession to be dressed up…as if I was a pet on display. At ten, she recommended band-aid for my nipples. At twelve, she laid out her jewelry on the bed offering me a bangle if I behaved…”

These words can almost describe my alienated relationship with my mother, word for word, scene for scene, sentiment for sentiment. The only differences between Teoria’s mother and my mother are that my mother was more aggressive in her words and in her manner, and my mother hated my father with a passion.

I remember my mother’s enthusiastic attempt at making me presentable through offering new clothes or hats or shawls, scolding my postures, shaming my body for being too skinny, too tall, or two or three shades darker than her. Wait, the worst body shaming she ever said was that one of my gestures was very much like my father’s. I was a little shocked to hear this, not knowing which gesture she was referring to, but she said it with such disgust that I was afraid to ask her to elaborate.

Unfortunately her project of making me “a beautiful pet” on display became an utter failure, just like all the other projects she had ever dreamed of to satisfy her own narcissistic fantasy. I guess my perpetual sulkiness and the disconnectedness between us made it impossible for her to enjoy the process of beautification or to take pride in the final exhibition.

I remember when I was 10 or 11, something happened in the rural college campus where my mother worked and where our family lived. It happened to somebody we didn’t know but with whom we had mutual friends. One man was murdered. It was rumored that the man and his wife were estranged for years, and the wife had a lover on the side. Soon the killer was found and jailed. However everybody said the killer was framed, or if the killer was not framed, he might as well be the contract killer who took orders from the estranged wife.

I was so scared that my parents were going to kill each other too that I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork or even talk with my friends as usual. Before that point, I only read stories like this in history books or watched movies with plots like this etc. It was not real, at least to my mind. They seemed to be abstract and distant and morbidly entertaining. It was an abstract concept or an unrealistic theory or a fictitious imagination that this could be the solution, a bloody solution no doubt, for a couple who disliked each other. However when it happened so close to home, its realness was undeniable. It shocked me. I wonder what would become of me if the same story happened to my parents. Having two narcissistic parents was bad, but not having parents seemed so much worse.

Sorry I digressed. I was trying to write about the book “Theory”, but I ended up talking about my own family. Anyway, my mother had a male colleague she really liked to organize events with, and my father was often absent. My parents probably both had lovers I didn’t know about. And probably they were both plotting with their respective lovers on the potential demise of their inconvenient love rivals.

“Theory” is such a good book and it can bring back memories…