I had been dreading my cousin and his family coming over. They live fairly close, just right across the park on the Upper East Side, but his entire marriage and the way he and his wife have raised their son just screams dysfunctional. She blames him for everything, and he blames her for everything. Each sees themselves as a victim and the other as the reason for their misery. It’s truly a match made in hell, and you wonder how these two people even got married and had a kid together. There is very little joy in meeting up with them. The last time I had seen them, I went to help them move from their old apartment on the Upper West Side to the new place on the east side. Every time my cousin asked his wife a question, she would ignore him. When I would ask her something or tell her something, she’d immediately respond. Well, nothing had changed, as this same situation repeated itself when they showed up today. It was made even more awkward by the fact that their son was with them, and he is not totally all there. The baby was clearly with me, and he asked where the baby was. He had no interest in seeing or really interacting with my child at all even though he claimed he did when he walked in. And his mother was constantly grabbing and holding him even though he’s almost 10 years old. All of them kept their masks on the entire time, and seemingly were too scared to touch anything in our apartment in fear that we would likely give them COVID. They wouldn’t even take a glass of water from us to drink. My cousin barely even looked at my child and was on his phone almost the entire time.

So yeah, that was a fun and riveting visit. At least they dropped off two brand new play mats for my baby.

My one cousin who lives in New York has suggested that he, his wife, and son come to our apartment to visit our baby for the first time. While in regular circumstances, this would be a happy visit, in my circumstance, or at least, with my cousin’s life, this is not a happy visit. He has a miserable work life and and arguably worse family life, and he complains like no one else I’ve ever known in my entire life. Woe is always him, and he’s always a victim. Chris can’t stand him for obvious reasons and does not want him coming over. So the easy way to push this visit out is to blame the rising rates of positive Omicron cases and to say we are holding off on visitors due to this, which my cousin would easily understand. I can’t use that excuse forever, but at least for now, I can keep his negativity at bay from my family.

In general, whenever I have been invited to a wedding or baby shower, if the couple has a registry, I will always buy a gift from the registry or give cash. This makes the lives of all of us much easier: we know that the couple will like and appreciate the gift because, well, they themselves chose it. And there’s no guesswork needed, nor is there pressure in terms of how creative you can get with the gift. I recently finished reading Adam Grant’s book Give and Take, and in it, he succinctly says that if you are a giver (in other words, a good human :D), you will buy a gift off a registry or give cash. What you will not do is try to go off registry and buy something else… because in that case, you are thinking about yourself and your own orientation and what you think would be best for them. And in sum, a gift is supposed to be about the recipient, NOT the giver.

So it was weird when I received a long-winded email from my uncle when he wanted to explain that he didn’t get us something off our baby registry and decided to go with something else. While I am always appreciative of gifts and do not expect gifts (I mean, I’m not forcing anyone to get us a gift), this was just odd. He said that given the ongoing pandemic, he wanted to get us something fitting, which ended up being… an automated soap dispenser with soap refill. “This way, both parents and baby will keep safe,” he explained.

A soap dispenser isn’t baby or mama related directly, and his rationale for going with this just seemed so strange and out there. In addition, we already have an automated soap dispenser, so why does he think this is such a superior gift compared to any of the items I had added to our registry? The most absurd part is that he purposely didn’t even check off the “this is a gift” box on Amazon and just had it sent without a tracking or order number (he admitted this when I told him the item came already open/seemingly used), and without the ability to return or exchange it. My uncle has sent me many gifts from Amazon previously over the years, and he had always checked this box off before. So in my head, I wondered if he did this purposely and/or even facetiously.

Regardless, we were able to return it and get Amazon credit for it, but in the back of my mind, I wonder what real rationale he had when he did this and if he was trying to send some weird message to us in doing so.

When I originally set up the baby gift registry, I knew my mom was going to pry and try to find out who gave me what and basically calculate the “value” of each gift. Granted, she’s not that computer savvy, so it’s not like she’s going to make me send her specific links for who bought what off the registry, but that’s just the kind of person she is. When it’s come to pretty much every event, whether it’s a birthday, graduation, wedding, when she finds out what someone has given me, she has either opened up the envelope (amazing and classic her) or gift, or done a mental calculation in her head of the value of the gift. For her, gift giving is purely quid pro quo — if she’s given the person a gift of say, $100 in the past, she expects a gift of that value in the future for herself or for me. It’s pretty exhausting and infuriating.

So when the baby registry gifts have been coming in, she tries to ask who has given what, but I give very broad-stroked responses, “Oh, she bought the baby swaddles and bibs,” or “He got the baby a bunch of toys.” I don’t tell the quantity or the exact item name because I know she will try to get my dad to open the registry and actually do a calculation.

When I give a gift, I just want to give a gift. I don’t want to obsess over what that person will give me for a future event or expect a “payback” in the future. I used to think similarly to my mom since that’s what I was taught and what I knew, but my thinking on gift giving has evolved. I will give a gift if I want to do it. I should feel good doing it. I should feel good about the item I’ve chosen to give. I don’t really expect something of the exact same value in return. At the end of the day, not everyone is of the same means as me, and others have more or less, so gift giving is what it is, and I’m grateful for anyone to give me or my child anything because at the end of the day, no one “owes” me anything. Also, not all “gifts” are physical or can have an exact dollar amount assigned to them. That’s not a concept that my mom can quite wrap her head around.

My therapist and I were discussing my family situation, and I told her that pretty much no fail at every conversation that talked about the baby’s birth and coming home, everyone has asked about whether my mom will be there to help support us. And my general response is, no, I think that would cause more problems than it would actually help or comfort me. And while all of that is true, in an ideal world, my parents would be there to support me bringing new life into the world. My mom had the support of my grandma, her mother-in-law, when she brought Ed and me home from the hospital. Even though my grandma was a bit of a psycho witch to her in her initial years after coming from Vietnam, she did take care of my mom and us. She cooked my mom food and helped out with the baby as much as she could. In Chinese culture, as with many other non-Western cultures throughout the world, there’s this concept of postpartum confinement or nourishment, when after a woman gives birth, she is cared for and nurtured by her mother, aunts, sisters, other members of her family to recover as quickly as possible from child birth, which is very obviously physically and mentally taxing on the birthing person. In Chinese, it’s known as “zuo yuezi,” or “sitting the month” (after child birth). The birthing mother’s sole job for about 30-40 days postpartum is to a) recover, heal, and be replenished from childbirth through eating nourishing foods and resting, so no going outside and lying down / sitting as much as possible; and absolutely no housework, and b) breastfeeding her baby. All other tasks are for the baby’s father and the rest of the family to take care of. We have endless photos of my grandma holding and carrying us when we were babies, so we know for a fact she played an active role in our upbringing. My mom recounts often the times postpartum when my grandma fed her nourishing, delicious postpartum Chinese dishes and helped with diaper changes and baby needs, and to this day, she is grateful for her help and support (especially since my dad was pretty useless, but that’s another story for another day). My mom hasn’t offered to come to support us, and well, even if she did, I probably wouldn’t want her to come because I know she’d cause a lot more angst and stress than needed. That doesn’t even include the fact that she’s not really physically or mentally all there; she’s constantly unstable and cannot even hold a coffee mug, resulting in endless coffee stains all over the carpet at home. She causes more problems in her head than actually exist in real life with everyone, whether it’s my aunt or my cousins or who she claims to be her “best friend.” I need to deal with reality, not the reality that she has chosen to make up in her head and run with.

So my therapist suggested this to me: it’s okay to feel sad or frustrated that the experience you wanted isn’t going to happen. It’s okay to mourn what you wished could happen but cannot for the given circumstances. I’m not sure if I would call it “mourning,” or wistful thinking about what could have been. But I just know it won’t happen the way it would in an ideal world with the ideal family that I do not have.

When you are not texting someone one on one, and instead are texting to a number of people within a group, there can be a tendency for some to message and “participate” a lot more than others. And what also can easily happen is that people simply will text about what they care about, which no one else cares about, and send messages into a dark hole that no one will really read and will actually just ignore. That’s basically what’s happened with a group text among two of my cousins, my uncle, and me.

Here are the general themes among how each person here participates:

Cousin 1: This cousin has never really fully matured, though he is 48 years old now. He has no idea how to properly communicate, and as a psychotherapist I follow on Instagram recently wrote, communication is not a skill we are born with; instead, it requires us being taught and actively learning how to do it well to best express ourselves and be heard. Those who have not matured in this area tend to become very poor at self expression and end up “expressing” themselves by complaining all the time. This is this cousin, who is not only a poor communicator, but also openly racist and basically thinks everyone of every race is bad except Chinese Americans (he frequently criticizes Chinese immigrants). All his texts are about complaining about how White people steal opportunity from Asians (specifically males), Black and White people don’t believe in wearing masks during the pandemic, and Indian people love to throw people under the bus at work. Everyone else is always at fault and he’s always innocent. He’s also awful at confrontation and basically invites poor treatment.

Cousin 2: This cousin is pretty benign. He may respond to a benign message, and he will also share photos of food he has either cooked or eaten at a nice restaurant.

Uncle: My uncle is also openly racist against pretty much all race groups, but particularly any immigrants and Chinese from China. He’s a Trump supporter who frequently shares Fox News articles that criticize and unfairly blame Biden or Harris or Obama for whatever incident is being reported, and talks about how bad “illegals” are in this country, as they are the number 1 reason for the increasing crime rates supposedly everywhere here. He goes on rants that are paragraphs long over text about how incompetent “liberals” and Democrats are, particularly Biden, Harris, Obama, and California governor Gavin Newsom. However, he categorizes himself as a “libertarian” and believes both in vaccines and in masks.

Me: I basically don’t respond or contribute to any conversation and am just a bystander who occasionally scrolls through their messages, but I recognize none of them care about each others’ messages.

At the rate we are going, we should just cancel the group text and tell each person to talk to themselves.

“Maybe you can get your mom to stop antagonizing you and being negative by just telling her that it’s bad for the baby,” my friend suggested. “No one wants to stress out a pregnant woman, right, because that could stress out the baby!”

If only things were that simple. If only my mom just stopped talking about a topic simply because I asked her to stop. She really has no idea when to stop, and the worst part is that she is manipulative and tries to make it seem like I am actually the problem when she is choosing to be negative and bring up bad stories from the past of “wrongs” that people have committed against her 5, 10, 15, 20+ years ago.

My uncle recently asked me to share my new address with him, and so I thought I’d just be efficient and share our new address via email with all my family members. In the email, I also let everyone know that I’m pregnant. I BCCed everyone (minus a psychotic aunt) since I know my dad has a tendency to report back to my mom (who is also basically HIS mom) every single detail of every message or action he’s aware about that I’ve done online. And he certainly did not forget to do that this time around.

So my mom called yesterday, and I knew it wasn’t going to be good because she started the conversation in her surly voice with one of her favorite starter phrases. “You know, you aren’t going to like this, but I need to share something with you” (when does a conversation ever go to a good place with a preface like that?).

So then she starts raising her voice and saying that I better not have emailed a specific cousin and a specific aunt because they are trash and they don’t care about me or my baby or my new address. She then starts reminding me (for the 10th or 20th time) of grievances she holds against them for things they’ve supposed done to “hurt” her. When I repeatedly try to tell her that I don’t want to hear this and that she’s shared this pretty much every year for the last ten years, she interrupts me and says, “Why can’t I share a story with you? We’re close, so I should be able to share a story with you. Why do you have to be so mean? I told you that you need to be NICE to me!” With each time that I interrupt her, she continues talking as though I’ve said nothing and allows her story to just keep droning on and on and on.

When I finally say that I don’t want to hear this anymore, she gets angry and says, “You know, it’s clear you are in a very bad mood today. So if that’s the case, then maybe we will talk another time.”

At that point, I was really done. “Okay, if you don’t think I’m in a good mood, then maybe I’m not in a good mood and we don’t need to talk. Have a good day. Bye!” I waited a few seconds for her to respond, and she mumbled “okay,” and I hung up.

In her mind, everyone else is always the problem. She is never the problem. It doesn’t matter what age my parents get to, or what age anyone ever gets to. Holding grudges is toxic and unhealthy and says more about the person holding the grudge than the person who the grudge is against. The person who the grudge is against has likely forgotten or potentially even had zero awareness that there was ever the problem. The person with the grudge is the person held hostage in her own negativity, in the past, and always incapable of being in the present or even thinking productively about the future. Wouldn’t it be so amazing if instead of brooding over the past, which both of my parents constantly do, that they were actually firmly set in the present and appreciative of all their life’s blessings and good fortunes? Well, that’s impossible because they will never be happy regardless of what they have. Something is always wrong with other people, and they themselves are untouchable.

Today, I had an early morning flight to go back to New York. My mom has been in an especially edgy and nervous mood, which can be attributed to a combination of the ongoing pandemic, hate crimes against elderly Asians, and the fact that I’m pregnant, on top of her usual unstable mental state. I was originally planning to get an Uber to go to the airport since I needed to be at the airport by 5:30am, but my mom insisted that my dad drive me. I relented, but only knowing that my dad had two cups of coffee. Given that he’s now 73, I generally don’t trust him driving when it’s too dark outside or if he could potentially be too drowsy. That would just be an accident waiting to happen.

I hadn’t been home in over a year and a half this visit, but for the most part, things are pretty much the same at home: cluttered, dusty, dirty, frustrating, and angst-inducing. Nothing has really changed. On my flight back, I was lucky enough to get upgraded to First Class, so I got to enjoy a nice breakfast, more privacy, and a fully reclining seat. While resting on the flight back, I thought about the way I define happiness, and maybe while I may fear that my parents may not be happy, maybe I actually have it all wrong. To be frank, I don’t think it’s possible for my mom to be happy. But my dad, on the other hand, maybe he actually IS happy. Maybe he’s content with the way his life his and what his day to day routine is. And maybe I’m the one who is trying to impose my definition of “happiness” on him. Maybe he’s content living in a cluttered, dusty, and dirty space. Maybe he thinks that renovating the kitchen or having a fresh coat of paint on the walls won’t really do anything to increase his incremental happiness level, even though I hope that it would. Maybe he’s happy going on YouTube most days to see the “outside world” instead of actually going out into the world. He’s always been content without any friends and only associating with my mom’s friends.

We spend all our lives having assumptions about everything and everyone. We assume that if x person had y and z inspiration or thing or job or person that they might be better off. But who is really to say if that’s the case or not? Every time I go back home and leave, I realize that while my parents may want to impose their views on my life and do it in an annoying way, perhaps I am also guilty of trying to impose my definition of “happiness” and “contentment” on them, and either way, neither of us is getting anywhere with that approach.