Holiday Reminiscences (Continued)

My Mother During Holidays

Although my mother was usually happier than usual during holidays, she never shied away from telling me and my father that she was overworked and overstretched during holidays. She cooked too much and didn’t even have a minute to enjoy herself.

Once I saw a dirt mark on the back of her hand as we were having one holiday lunch together. I pointed this out to her, which considering what happened next I should not do. I was forced into a silent grey rock and I should have stayed in silence. However I always managed to perk up in the most inopportune time after a long period of obedient silence. She snapped angrily and said that she got it from working very hard by the stove. If she didn’t work, we wouldn’t be able to have a lunch.

I couldn’t love my mother due to her serious narcissism and her open dislike of me. She never hid her bitterness against me (and my father). Even if I couldn’t love her, I could still see the reason and wisdom of her words when she said she worked too hard by the stove. I knew she was a very bad mother and even a bad person in general, like being vain, selfish, narcissistic, undiplomatic, and verbally aggressive at home. I mean even if I knew she was bad, I still felt at the time that it was unfair that she couldn’t enjoy the holiday as I did. Actually I didn’t really care about the food she cooked–she cooked very badly anyway. I’d rather that I ate the worst food or the simplest food so that she could feel that she was treated fairly or reasonably.

In addition, I should be grateful that she was honest about her bitterness and was quite open about her unhappiness. Later on in boarding high school and in college, I would be very surprised to find that most of my female friends’ moms were not so vocal about their disappointment and my friends ended up knowing less of their real family dynamics.

Anyway, the above is the reason that every year during the holiday season, I feel for those women who have to work so hard to cook food and take care their family. In the Asian immigrant community here, the burden of cooking is even more serious and cumbersome. I wish that engineers can spend more time on producing an affordable artificial home cook than driverless cars or drones.

My Father During Holidays

I just finished reading a book by Marilyn French. I have to say I am inspired, but at the same time I don’t completely agree with her. I feel that my father was not the kind of man who fits Marilyn’s profile of a man. My father didn’t even want a woman who didn’t love him or a family he didn’t love. He tried very hard to find opportunities to go on business trips or to give lectures at distant coal mines so that he didn’t have to be at home. He was still a Mongolian at heart and loved to be a nomad.

He was the only person who’s narcissistic in his own family. His three brothers and two sisters were all very normal people. Even his parents were very normal people. My theory is that his mother tried to starve him to death during a period of scarce food and social turmoil. His mother–my grandma–had no other choice since my father had two elder brothers who needed food. My grandma loved her two big boys and decided to sacrifice my father, the youngest, still not out of his babyhood at the time. However since they were living in an extended family, my father got some attention from some very kindhearted women in his vicinity. He survived, but the childhood trauma turned him into a narcissist, which would accompany him for the rest of his life. I came up with this story through hearing the little bit of stories I heard here and there, and also my father was about 6 inches shorter than his three brothers.

I often felt that my father really didn’t want a family. He could live much happier by himself. He didn’t want my mother who was perpetually hostile, or me who was practically a financial burden. I often thought he didn’t even want to have a relationship with me or my mother if he had the choice. He was very much forced by the social appropriateness to have a family. If he had the choice, he would have chosen some other life style.