My mom was clearly angry when I called yesterday evening. She is really mad that I am going to my cousin’s baby’s second birthday party, which is happening this Saturday in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which is about an hour and a half commute from my apartment. She had a really nasty tone with every sentence that came out of her mouth, and she said, “I told you I didn’t want you to go, but you don’t listen. You never listen to anything I ever say. But I just want you to know that I do not want you talking to his wife — she is a devil. There, I said it. She’s a devil! DEVIL!” I told her to stop saying that, and she just kept repeating the phrase, “She’s a devil!” that I finally said, Okay, this conversation is over. Goodbye. And then, I hung up.

There are two reasons she hates my cousin’s wife (she isn’t a big fan of this cousin, either, but she wants to focus on her hatred of women most of the time). The first reason is that when my cousin and his wife came to visit San Francisco in 2009, my mom treated them to lunch. My mom is the kind of person who counts every time she treats you and will hate you forever if you never treat her the same number of times. My cousin’s wife profusely thanked her and said that when she and my dad were to come to New York next, she’d tour them around the city and make sure to take them to a good restaurant. Well, in spring 2010, my parents did come, and not only did my cousin and his wife not take my parents anywhere, but my cousin’s wife didn’t even show up to the dinner that we all had together because she had to stay late at work that night. I didn’t mind because I understand how hectic work can be, but my mother was furious and was yelling about it the whole night, taking it personally, as she always does. Stupid me, I defended my cousin’s wife, saying that you can’t control work when it comes in.

The second reason she hates my cousin’s wife is that she found out that she told my cousin to “just get over it” when my brother died last year, knowing that my cousin and my brother were very close growing up. My cousin loves to complain about his wife, and apparently, he told my mother this. What a bad idea. Granted, that does sound like an extremely heartless thing to say, but knowing that my cousin is a complete chauvinistic jerk to her, I can understand that she just wanted to hit him where it hurt. For very clear reasons, my mother was very upset, and typical her, she’s held both grudges ever since. She’s told me she wants me to have nothing to do with either of them and their child, and at most, to just send a gift but not spend any time with them. I’m going to the birthday party because of the baby, not because of my cousin or his wife or their dysfunctional marriage. She just doesn’t understand because she’s so blinded by her own hatred and the grudges she refuses to let go of.

Sometimes, I think about all the things I can’t stand about my mother, and I wonder if I have some form of those qualities. And then I get freaked out by it because I think, I don’t want to become what I hate. Isn’t that what every child seems to fear — that he/she will become the worst qualities of his/her parents?

Last night, I dreamt that my parents were arguing over something minuscule (initially, it didn’t really seem like a dream because isn’t that what happens every day in real life?), and suddenly, my dad starts verbally attacking my mother quite viciously and unfairly. I immediately feel enraged, and I start defending her and telling him to knock it off. Instead of my mother being excited that someone, her daughter, is standing up for her, she ends up yelling at me nonstop, telling me how disrespectful I am being for getting involved and that I have no right to speak that way to my father. I grow even more angry at the fact that she doesn’t realize that what I’m doing is good, so I walk out. She’s still yelling as I slam the door shut.

In real life, I’m sure this same thing would happen. That’s why I never get involved in their arguments.

While ticking off another thing on my to-do list tonight, I had the TV going in the background, and a Mastercard commercial came on, advertising that Mastercard has a site you can visit that will help plan your next vacation. The whole theme behind the commercial was around kids demanding that their parents actually take a vacation, asking questions like, did you know that the average American does not use up all of his/her vacation days in one year? That’s paid time off that is not even taken off! It’s wasted. What is wrong with all of you? You’re supposed to be my role models in life!  

The United States is known as a country of infinite possibilities, the land of opportunity, the place where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed and achieve as much as he/she possibly can. But there’s a tradeoff to being here: you’re considered lazy or unambitious in general if you are the kind of person who actually makes it evident that you enjoy taking time off, or the kind of person who thinks that taking “just” five consecutive days off of work at one time is too short. We’re brainwashed into thinking that we should be working our lives away, that our lives should be work. Because what is life outside of work, anyway — nothing, right? If you aren’t doing paid work at an office or a grocery store or unpaid work by taking care of your children, you must be doing nothing with your life. It’s why you always hear inane stories of people finally reaching retirement and then getting depressed or bored because they have no idea what to do outside of “work.” How about — enjoy life and do things you actually want to do, not just things you need to do to survive and put food on your dinner table?

Today, my cousin told me that my uncle, my dad’s younger brother, has to go in for an angiogram next Monday because a stress test he took this past week showed that his heart was flexing abnormally. I had just seen him last month when I was home, and he had told me that his blood pressure was much higher in the last few months than usual, and that he was taking medication for acid reflux. I didn’t realize it was anything more than that, though. I immediately called my uncle to learn more about what this meant and what the doctor had said before telling him he needed to come in for this heart procedure.

Sadly, we have a family history of heart problems — heart disease, heart attack, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, stroke. My great grandfather and grandpa died from heart attacks in their sleep; my grandpa didn’t even live to see his 65th birthday. My uncle, my dad’s older brother, died in 2000 suddenly from a heart attack, as well, and he didn’t make it to 65. Sixty-five is the scary number in my family for men. Knowing this, I was obviously concerned when I heard this news of my uncle’s health. He seemed not to be too worried about it, but I couldn’t help but think the worst.

My cousin e-mailed his two brothers, and I called my parents to let them know. I got angry at the thought of any of them knowing, though. What would they do as a result of finding this all out? Would they actually call or do anything to show that they cared at all? I’m sure my second oldest cousin would do nothing, and my third oldest cousin would probably send a pathetic text. My dad is completely estranged from his younger brother except when I come back home to visit. Would he even bother calling his own brother?

I couldn’t help but think the worst of all my family members: none of them would probably do anything other than my oldest cousin until they found out that God forbid, my uncle were dead. Isn’t that what happened with Ed — everyone just ignored him until they found out he had killed himself. It’s always when it’s too late that people in my family feign feelings of sadness or concern.

I think this week in my row, I’ve seen the most people out sick or working from home because they all were ill. Then, my boss got sick, and he’s been home for two days now. Some people are walking around my office coughing and blowing their noses, visibly disheveled, noses reddened from all the rubbing and blowing, and eyes watery. It’s finally elicited a reaction from HR, who sent out an e-mail today notifying everyone that if they are sick, they either need to take the day off or work from home. It’s really not that hard and is actually quite easy to arrange. While we may miss seeing your face, our HR director wrote, we do not want to catch whatever illness you may have, as you would be doing a great disservice to all your beloved colleagues. She also sent out an attachment for all the locations where we can get a flu shot that would be 100% covered by our health insurance.

It’s slightly comical to me that an e-mail like that has to be written, yet, I can’t really blame HR for writing it.

It’s sad that as adults, we need to be reminded that we’re not actually proving anything or really working harder by showing up to the office with a massive cough or a fever or the flu, and that in fact, we’re being selfish by thinking about ourselves first before thinking that we have the potential to get our peers sick.

I called home today to get a pretty cold, harsh reception from my mom. Apparently, a fellow JW acquaintance, who my mom doesn’t like, met up with her for their usual “field work” over the weekend (that basically means that they went around some neighborhood together trying to pass out their JW pamphlets to “spread the good news”). My mother has never liked this person or her family for what has always seemed to be irrational reasons, and she never liked it when I associated with this woman. Either way, this woman asked about how I was doing, and my mother decided to tell her that I got engaged. She immediately asked, “Is it Chris?” And my mother being my mother immediately got really aggravated. She told my mom that I’d told her that I had visited Chris’s family in Australia. That made my mom even more angry. “I condemn that,” she said to me on the phone today. “But it’s all over with, and I just want peace, so I’m not going to say any more to you about this.”

The irony about that statement is that as long as she keeps talking this way, I will never have any peace in my own life.

There’s no way I could live a life that 100% pleased my mother; I don’t think any of us are capable of doing that with any of our mothers. But in my world, if I 100% pleased my mother, I would not only have to live at home with her and my dad, I’d also have to clean their house, do their laundry, do all their dishes (and God, there are a LOT, even after just breakfast!), be my mother’s chauffeur when I wasn’t working, spend all my free time outside of work with her when she wasn’t doing JW work, never travel anywhere, especially internationally, have no friends (“no one really cares about you, so why do you spend so much effort on them?”), tell no one about anything other than work and current events, not cook, not spend money on “unnecessary things” (that really means… everything that is not groceries), never see any of my relatives or communicate with them, and never tell Chris “personal and confidential” things about my family (that’s pretty much everything about them). The fact that I tell people that I travel with Chris makes my mother very upset because she finds it inappropriate and apparently a disgrace to our family… because we don’t have enough disgrace as there is.

My aunt, my dad’s older (deceased) brother’s wife, has been based out of New York temporarily since the end of May until now. Despite her having been here for over three months, I’ve only seen her once. Part of this is because of my own travel, part of it is because she’s been traveling around the East Coast to visit family and friends, and part of it is just because our schedules don’t mesh, and I don’t want to see her with five of her friends every single time we meet. She’s very much of the mentality that “the more, the merrier,” so whenever she sees me, she always wants to bring at least one or two of her Jehovah’s Witness friends along. When it’s just us, I have to insist that it just be us; I can never just assume that when she makes plans to see me that it will ever just be her. With these people — we always have absolutely nothing in common, and we just have to make polite small talk, and then after we part, I immediately forget anything I may have learned about them. I’m sure they feel the same way about me. Oh, and her son, my cousin who lives in Brooklyn, never comes because he is angry that his mother spends all her time with JW friends and no time helping him raise his son. Well, I don’t feel sorry for him.

After spending two weeks in Honduras with her JW friends, she is back for less than a week in New York, and then going back to San Francisco on Monday night. I asked if I could see her before she left; the only time she had “free” was on Saturday for lunch. Yet she said that when Chris and I got to the restaurant that we ask for a table for five or six. There’s only three of us, so obviously she’s invited two to three other friends. When I ask her if we can just have lunch with the three of us, she insists that she already invited them and has to see them, and this is her only time she is free this entire weekend because she is seeing other friends the rest of the weekend. The only other time that will work before she leaves is Monday for lunch, but I have meetings throughout lunch time (yes, because some of us actually need to work), so I can’t do that.

So we had to give in to having lunch with her and her JW friends. We won’t have any meaningful conversation, and she will go about her happy-go-lucky life paying for all these random people’s lunches and enjoying her life, even though she doesn’t know how to spend any quality time with her real family. Maybe she just enjoys not having any really deep relationships with anyone, even those “closest” to her.

Maybe she’s realized what I have realized and knows that her real family isn’t so great after all.

Ed came back from the dead last night in my dream. I was standing in front of a house that my parents supposedly lived on atop a hill in San Francisco. It was a white house with black window trims and a black roof. He walked up the steps and approached me, and I threw my arms around him and started crying and asking, “Is it really you?” You’re alive? You came back?!” My mom is standing there, shocked and confused in the background, and she is speechless.

The dreams with Ed were supposed to start getting more positive. The last vivid ones I had of him included him smiling and reciprocating my affection, and even telling me he loved me. Now, they have reverted back to shock and sobbing.

Every day this week seems to be slightly agonizing. The pile of things to do seems to get taller and taller, and every work day has to end with a dreaded phone chat with my mother, who has been extremely miserable and dramatic pretty much every day this week.

I was telling my friend what the situation has been like with my parents this week, and she said to me, “Are you sure you have to call them every single day?” She then suggested, like pretty much everyone else I’ve ever spoken to about them, that maybe I should just deliberately cut back on the calls for my own health.

I’ve been calling home every single day since I moved away for college in 2004. The only exceptions to this have been when I have been traveling abroad and didn’t have the easiest international dialing access. I’ve thought about calling less every now and then, but whenever I have suggested it, my mother gets wildly angry or starts crying. It hasn’t ever elicited any positive emotion. Particularly now, when my mother’s sensitivity has been even more heightened, I’m even more scared of breaking out of what is “normal” for her. There’s really no way to win.

It’s like every day just gets worse. Today, my mother sounds just as miserable as yesterday, and she says that when she dies, she doesn’t want a funeral, no meal, no nothing. She wants to be cremated immediately after being viewed by just my father and me. That’s it. Don’t tell anyone that I died, she said. Don’t tell anyone unless they ask where I am. No one cares anyway, she said. Everyone just pretends. No one really cares. Do you think anyone really cared when Ed died? No one cared at all. Do you think anyone cared just because they took a half day off from work to go to his funeral? It’s just pretending, she said. You can’t trust anyone other than your own parents and siblings. Do what I say; these are my wishes. 

She told me this a month after Ed passed away last year. She loves repeating herself, especially when it’s pertaining to negative thoughts. It makes her feel better, she says. Isn’t that ironic, that it makes her feel better to say negative things?

How does one not tell others when a significant family member has died in her life? Or more importantly, why would one not want to share that information?

It’s like my life is one big drama movie and I’m just waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

This sounds pretty bad, but when I was growing up, I always knew that my wedding would not be “perfect.” You know how other girls day dream about their Big Day and envision how perfect it will be? Well, I rarely daydreamed about the Big Day, and I always knew in my gut that something would be wrong that day – whether someone important in my life would not make it because he/she died prematurely, or someone picked a massive fight with someone else, or the ballroom we selected got set on fire accidentally mid-reception. I knew something would be off.

I guess I have predicted correctly so far. As of now, it looks like the most “wrong” thing is that my brother can’t be there because he’s dead from his own suicide. To make matters even better, my mom is already a drama queen and we haven’t even set a date yet, and I’m positive she will be that way on the day of the wedding because how could she resist herself?

I’m so exhausted that even saying that is exhausting.