Sarasvati - Of Art and Knowledge

There's a meme going around Facebook right now that makes me feel rather uncomfortable.

And no, I don't mean that ridiculous one where People With Boobs are supposed to change their status to say where they like to put their handbag. I found that one annoying partly because of the assumption that if you have boobs, you're automatically going to have a handbag and be feminine about it, and because I kept being sent reminders about that meme by people who really should know better in regard to my gender identity.

I know that one was supposed to be a follow-up meme to last year's "Post what colour your bra is" meme, designed to confuse guys and raise awareness for breast cancer. This one was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer too, but as I posted out at one point, unless women have started detaching their boobs and carrying them around in handbags, there's no correlation. At least the one related to bras had a clear connection to breasts!

But no, the meme that's making me uncomfortable right now is the following: My parents were MEAN to me when I was a kid. They made me do chores, and go to school. They gave me a curfew, made me get a job and work for the things that I wanted. They insisted that I do my best at school, at my job & to take pride in my work. I grew up with morals, a good work ethic & respect for the law, and my elders. I'm thankful everyday for my MEAN parents. Copy and paste if you agree! LOVE & THANK YOU

I see what this is. This is supposed to be an adult mockery of all the kids who rant about how mean and stupid their parents are for not letting them do everything they want, for trying to give kids some responsibility in life. My problem is that my parents actually did most of the things suggested in that meme... and yet were crappy parents and I am not thankful for what they did to me.

My parents were the kind of people who weren't terrible enough to warrant the intervention of the police or social workers (though my mother and I did try when my father started throwing things violently to vent his anger), but were bad enough to make my life very difficult, and some of what they did had very lasting consequences that I'm still trying to sort out amost 10 years after I got out from under their thumbs.

They didn't make me do chores, not exactly. I tried to do some when I was young, as an incentive to both of us to establish a whole, "I do work, you pay me small amounts of money," thing. It worked... for about 3 days. I came up with a chore list and we all agreed on the amount I should be paid for doing them. Then my parents just got to owing too much for what I'd done when they couldn't be bothered to pay me for it, and backed out of the agreement.

I didn't learn to cook anything until I was on my own. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen to cook or bake anything, even in my teens, unless one of them was there supervising me. (Because making a batch of sugar cookies is oh-so-difficult...) That sounds fine in theory, except they always just told me they didn't want to supervise me. In retrospect, that was, purely and simply, because they were being lazy, and it would have cut into their TV-watching time. The fact that I was willing and eager to learn a skill I was almost sure to use at some point in my adult life meant nothing to them. If it interrupted their sitcoms, then it was a no-go.

They made me go to school, and I'd say this is a good thing, except it was illegal for them not to school me and neither of them was interested in homeschooling, so what choice did they have? When I wanted to transfer high schools to avoid the serious bullying problem I had, though, they made sure to express their dissatisfaction at how inconvenient it was for them to call a few people to get me registered at the new school and to make sure my records were sent over.

Note that I made the decision to transfer between school years, so it's not like there even had to be some rush to get me switched in the middle of a semester or anything. But it was inconvenient for them to have me try to get away from people who were physically and verbally abusing me.

Curfew? Sure. I had a curfew. Through most of high school, I was grounded, so my curfew was pretty much as soon as I could get home from school. Why was I grounded a lot? Some legitimate reasons, like skipping classes. Others not so legitimate, like being grounded for a month for accidentally forgetting that I left a banana peel on my bedroom floor for a day when I was at school.

Rei told me once that he was sure I was lying about being grounded so much in high school, that he thought I was just using it as an excuse to not hang out with anyone. To his eyes, and to the eyes of just about everyone else, there was no reason for me to be grounded so much.

Grounding wasn't much of a punishment, I admit. Most of the time, it meant that I just came home after school and didn't hang out with anyone, which just reinforced the idea that social lives are too difficult to maintain. I could still watch TV, I could still read books, all that stuff. And usually they'd let me off the grounding early, for "good behaviour."

Even when I told them not to. I went to my dad, on the last time I was grounded, and told him flat-out not to end the grounding early this time, because I was losing respect for him. "Good behaviour," you see, didn't actually involve me doing anything different than what I would have done anyway, if I wasn't with friends. I came home, watched TV in my room, did my homework, read some, and went to bed. Rinse and repeat. And because I'd been so good, they figured I'd learned my lesson and give me a reprieve.

I told them not to do that. They agreed. And did it anyway. That was the last time they ever grounded me.

No, the punishments to be afraid of weren't the groundings. They were the isolations. Twice in my life, I did something that my parents deemed needed a very harsh punishment. I don't remember what the first once was, but the second was me hiding food in my room so I didn't like, so that I could throw it out later, but I'd forget and so it went moldy. I agree, that deserved punishment. But not what they did.

They removed everything from my room except for my bed and the dresser that held my clothes. My toys, my games, my books, all of it was gone. I wasn't to go out of my room except to go to the bathroom and to eat meals. The rest of the time I was to be quiet in my room.

It was like this for a month. I was 9 at the time. I can't count the amount of times I read my social studies textbook from cover to cover, because I had nothing else to do. Sometimes when my father was out, my mother would sneak out a book or a toy for me, or let me watch half an hour of TV, before he came back. But the rest of the time I was in isolation. I wasn't shunned, exactly, but nobody really went out of their way to talk to me or to try to draw me into some family situation.

I suspect that my father had no real idea what I was doing by myself all that time. On the first day, he called me out of my room in a loud angry voice to demand what I was doing. I remember holding up a textbook as an answer. He didn't check again after that. Maybe he expected me to be crying or something, I don't know. Maybe if I had cried, he'd have relented on the punishment a bit. But facing him down by holding up the only thing he had allowed me to have as entertainment, the school books he couldn't keep away from me, was the only answer I thought to give him. I was meek, I was quiet, and I was messed up.

Let's see, what's next on that meme. Ah, right, working for the things I want, and getting a job. Yes, my parents made me get a job. They, in fact, got me my first job. When I was 15, young enough to still need express parental permission to work. Without even asking me if I wanted a job. I called home one day after school to tell them I'd be at the library for a little while, and was told that I had a job the next day. I asked if they meant an interview, and was told no, a job. My mother had badgered her boss into hiring me at a fast food place.

The thought never crossed my mind to say no. The thought never crossed my mind that I might be allowed to say no. I wasn't even asked if I wanted a job. Just told that I now had one.

This worked out well for my father. He'd told me for years that once I got a job, he'd no longer pay me allowance, and I'd agreed, since it made sense to me that if I was earning my own money, why would I need him to give me more? But once the place that didn't want to hire me in the first place stopped giving me hours and eventually just let me go, he didn't reinstate the allowance, and so if I wanted money at all, even to buy Christmas presents for friends, I didn't have a choice but to get another job.

At least the next job was one I got to look for and choose myself, rather than having it suddenly forced upon me.

Insisting I do my best and take pride in my work? Sort of, in a backwards sense. If insisting that I do my best can be conveyed through punishments if I did less than what they wanted my best to be, then sure, they did that. They didn't encourage, except when I was in elementary school and in the top of my class. Then they encouraged, and gave praise. But when it got into junior high, started doing French Immersion, and started suffering apathy and depression, encouragement gave way to vocal disappointment.

Once, my father said he was so disappointed in me that he didn't even want to hear me speak. I don't even remember what I'd done to warrant that. All I know is specifically, at the time he said it, I was trying to engage him in a talk about what I'd learned and done that day in gym class. He cut me off and told me, in essence, that I wasn't good enough to talk to him.

I grew up with eating disorders, a fear of authority figures, and abandonment issues. I can't love them for that. I can't even thank them for that. They did some good things for me, sure, but sometimes it seems like they were done by accident. I toed the line and learnt morals and ethics, but only from fear of making the wrong decision and getting punished for it, and punished out of proportion to the crime.

When my parents bought me my first computer, they said it was my computer, but that I had to allow them to use it if they needed. I agreed. I didn't know at the moment of that agreement that my mother would be coming into my bedroom every hour to check the status of my father's eBay auctions, not giving me any real time to myself. I didn't know that my father would be obsessed with installing random programs and messing with settings until the whole system crashed and had to have an OS reinstall, meaning that all of my files got deleted about once a month. And I couldn't complain about this, either, without a loud lecture about how selfish I was. I couldn't password-protect anything, even my ICQ account, without demands to know what I wanted to hide from them.

They finally got a new computer for me and I gave them my old one, as was part of that agreement. Great, I thought. Now I can stop worrying that all my stuff's going to disappear, and they can give me some privacy. Then I came home one day and found out that my system had crashed and needed an OS reinstall. Why? My father had downloaded a program on his computer, and then did the same thing to mine to see how it ran differently. A screwy conflict happened, and there went Windows. And I couldn't even put a password on what was purely my system then without accusations and suspicion.

This is not good parenting. It wasn't good parenting then, and it isn't now. I may not have been the easiest child to raise, what with my mental health being shaky at best, but I also could have been a lot worse. I can't be thankful for that.

I can't be thankful for my father greeting me by saying, "Hi, sexy," and then asking why I don't pluck my eyebrows, because they look like two hairy caterpillars on my face.

I can't be thankful for my mother leaving me alone until midnight when I was 12 years old, saying she'd only be gone for a few minutes, so that she could cover a friend's car with branches as a prank. I had no idea where she was, got more worried each minute she was gone, had no way of contacting her, and needed to sleep but was too afraid to. I can't be thankful for the anger she expressed at me when I didn't share in the laughter of her prank.

And that's why the meme makes me uncomfortable. I agree with what it's attempting to do, poking a bit of fun at the kids who insist that they have lousy parents because they're not allowed to stay out until midnight and go drinking and have to keep their bedrooms clean. But I can't, in good conscience, repost that message. I wouldn't mean a word of it. My mother would see it and thank me for being so sweet and kind and go on believing that she's done the right thing all along and that none of my problems were due to her negligence. My father would see it and ask why, if I felt that way, I acted so often as if they did so many things wrong.

This gives me the same feeling that shopping for their birthday cards does. I can't get them the sappy ones that gush about what good parents they were, how much I love them, how thankful I am for everything they did for me, because it's a load of sugar-coated lies. And I don't want to give them lies, no matter how nice they taste, no matter how much better it makes them feel about themselves, because it isn't real.

And then I feel selfish and mean and keep asking myself why I can't just do something nice for a change, make them feel good about themselves even if it's not entirely true, because everyone likes to feel good about themselves sometimes. I feel like a jackass for feeling like they made some monumental fuck-ups and for not just putting it all behind me.

If I had to describe that feeling, I'd sound all emo. It really is like a hollowness in my chest, like somebody stuck this bubble of negativity where my heart should be, and I can't tell if I want to cry or hurt myself for being such a bad person or shout a lot or just ignore it, because all of those options suck.

Family is a complicated issue.

It came as no real surprise to, for the first time, consciously understand why I spent so much of my life believing that even those whom I called my best friends were only merely tolerating my presence rather than actually wanting to be around me. At best, I considered myself to be just another tag-along in their social circle. At worst I believed wholeheartedly that they were only putting up with my presence so that they could learn humiliating things to laugh about later.

The reason for this is how my parents treated me.

This Friday, my father got back into the city and asked if I wanted to get together. I sent him a reply (this was through Facebook messaging) that I was free all Saturday and he could just let me know when we could meet up. He'd suggested a local BBQ festival might be fun, and I agreed.

No reply until evening, after I had spent the entire day thinking to myself, "I'll wait another hour and see if he calls. Just one more hour. Maybe he's sent an email." I didn't eat, because I thought that at any moment we'd be going out to eat tasty BBQ food. But that email in the evening said that ooops, he'd been busy all day, and maybe we could get together Sunday instead?

I suppose taking 30 second to call me would have been too much to ask.

My mother called today to express surprise that he and I hadn't met up. I told her I'd sent him a message on Friday and he didn't reply until Saturday, and that I had plans today anyway. "Oh," she said, "well he gave me something to give to you."

Yes, he spent yesterday with my mother. Taking her shopping. Buying all her groceries. Evidently planning to not see me today, really, if he went so far as to give something to my mother to give to me.

"Luck you," I said when she told me that he paid for her groceries. The bitterness in my voice was lost on her. She makes about $500 a month more than she needs. I make $500 too little.

Not the first such incident. The Pride parade was another great example. My mother said she'd come, and even march with me. Then she forgot all about it and made plans to meet up with my father instead. She later sent me an email saying that she must have underestimated how much it meant to me.

That all reminded me of the time last year that I was doing my first stage performance since high school, and she had told me she'd come. She didn't. She apparently spent too long on the phone talking to my father, then lay down for a nap and didn't bother to set the alarm.

But hey, she's willing to pay for a gym membership for me, right? That shows she cares!

Except that the only reason she did it is so she wouldn't have to go by herself, because she felt too intimidated to do so. If someone else was there with her, someone larger than her and therefore not as threatening as all the skinny people she wants to be like, then it's okay.

I'm a convenience item. They take it for granted that I'm going to be there when they want me to be and that I'm just going to happily go away when they've got anything else to do. And by "anything else," I mean such inconsequential things as spending half an hour at Starbucks drinking overpriced coffee beverages, which usually means that any and all plans with me are automatically cancelled, even if both things could be done in a day.

No, it's no wonder that I spent my life thinking that people only tolerated me and didn't actually like me. Even my own parents treated me that way. I'm a pretty little thing to show off. "Look at all she's accomplished, you must be so proud of her, you must be wonderful parents!" "I'm not going to be seen in public with you if you don't dress more nicely." I'm a display piece. Something seen and not heard, and only seen when it's for the benefit of other people. Other than that, I may as well not be here.

And they still can't comprehend why I spent over half of my life suffering from depression, alternating between apathy, half-hearted rebellion, and outright self-harm and suicide attempts. They think themselves good parents, and can't understand why I have so many problems with them and with what they do. They've given me so much, after all, that surely all the other piddly little things mustn't matter anymore.

Of course they don't. To them. I, on the other hand, get a slap in the face when I reach out for parental connections. I must just go on smiling and pretending nothing's wrong, that their slights and oversights don't bother me at all.

Rei's sitting across from me playing Dragon Age. We're not even looking at each other, and we haven't said much, but so far today, he's actually paid more attention to me than my parents have. And cares more about what I have to say and what I feel.

It's odd, though. Sometimes when this sort of thing happens, parts of me shut down and cease to feel. Protection, I suppose, because otherwise I'd probably burst into frustrated tears. But when this happens, Rei can rant for an hour about how lousy my parents are and how badly they treat me and how inconsiderate they are, and it always surprises me because it feels like he's more angry about it than I am. I'd be angrier, but it would just hurt me more.

But maybe if I let myself be angrier, I'd stop hoping that they'd eventually learn and remember that I have a schedule and feelings and ought to be considered as much as themselves. If I stopped hoping for that, then there'd be no real let-down when they didn't do as they said.

But I'm tired of crying. It's selfish, and probably backwards, but I don't want to have to work through this in order to not feel pain because they can't learn. I'd actually rather suppress it, squash it down and let Rei be angry on my behalf, than let myself sob one more time.

Sometimes the strangest thought-trains occur to me. I was sitting comfortably, reading Mori Kyoko's memoirs, Yarn: Remembering the Way Home, and I came to a passage about her grandfather walking through the rice paddies in Japan.

And then, unbidden came them memory of trying to converse with my father about something I was interested in: at the time, this was the Pokemon video games. I mentioned how the game was set up so that most often, random encounters only took place in tall grass.

He asked if I was sure that it was just tall grass. Confused, I told him that was what the game said, that was how it had been presented, and I didn't see any reason to think otherwise. He clarified his question, saying that he knew the game was made in Japan, so he thought that they were probably rice paddies instead of patches of grass.

I couldn't begin to wrap my brain around why this would have occured to him as a serious consideration. Did he think Japan didn't have grass? Did he think that all there was to Japan were the things that Westerners think of as "typically Japanese?" Rice, slanted eyes, chopsticks, kimonos, sayonara. Did he think that was all it took to understand the essence of Japan, of every Japanese person?

He denies that he is racist, of course, even when he calls the Chinese students "chinks." He doesn't mean the term in a derogatory fashion, so how could it be taken as such, he reasons. He will glare daggers at me if I say the word "nigger" in an academic or historical sense, but still talks about "damn chinkies" and eating "chinky food" for supper. It's okay for him to be this way, because he means no offense and so nobody should have any reason to take offense.

I can't expect much of this man. He is, after all, the same man who had a legitimate discussion with me about why he thinks the Bible should be a central book for every religion, because it teaches good ethics and has much to teach people. I argued that the same could be said for just about any religious book, which he dismissed as a valid argument because he hadn't read them and so couldn't judge.

He hasn't read the Bible, either, I should say. He's not religious, let alone a Christian. He's one who demands indeniable proof before he'll let himself believe.

He's the same man who insists that "soduko" is just another pronunciation as "sudoku", and one that's just as correct, because according to him, a 'U' and an 'O' are pronounced the same way in Japanese. He bases this on the band "Shounen Knife", and since he pronounces shounen with a short 'o' (as in 'hot' rather than 'oh'), then the same must stand for all words.

All these memories, triggered from a single line in a single book, a line that has nothing to do with racism or stupid parents or stupid people in general. All of it, from "rice paddies."