“The work of motherhood starts far before you give birth.”

Someone posted this one liner on Instagram, and somehow, that really resonated with me. Even if you put aside how grueling fertility diagnostics, treatment, and IVF are and are fortunate enough to never have to go through all that, the work of motherhood really does start far, far before you give birth. It’s on women to track their ovulation cycles, whether that’s through tracking cervical fluid, basal body temperature (BBT) every morning, and the opening of their cervix. It’s on us as women to understand when we’re about to ovulate to then alert our partners to the fact that, yes, it’s time to have sex in order to procreate! And then once you get pregnant, it’s your job to make sure you’re getting yourself good prenatal care, going to all your appointments, taking your prenatal vitamins, watching out and caring for pregnancy symptoms, watching what you eat and drink. You have to decide on your birth plan. Will you go medicated or unmedicated? You’re probably more likely than your partner to figure out who the hell is going to be your future child’s pediatrician, as well, as that needs to be decided in advance of the day you give birth. It’s never ending. And then, once you give birth, which is like a mini Olympics on its own, you will inevitably as the mother have the lion’s share of all the child-rearing responsibilities! It really is never ending labor!

I thought about all this and realized that it’s no wonder women have so much resentment against their male partners, even the ones who don’t really want to admit it. There’s always the inevitable “mom guilt” that most dads for whatever reason cannot seem to relate to. I thought about this a lot particularly because one of my friends, who recently gave birth to her second child and is now on maternity leave, was texting me nonstop yesterday, telling me how pissed off she is that her husband, who recently started a new job, still hadn’t taken off a single day of family leave since the birth of their newborn about two months ago, and was insisting that she “sleep when the baby sleeps” and has no understanding of the guilt she feels spending more time nursing her newborn versus spending time with their 3-year-old daughter.

“Why are men so stupid?!” she messaged me. “He just does not get it AT ALL. He’s sitting there, working all day at his computer and on meetings while I have to constantly feed and change diapers and basically be a human feeding machine! And then he tells me to sleep when the baby sleeps, but I can’t sleep because there’s all this shit that has to be done around the house that he can’t seem to do himself because he’s WORKING! How does he not see what is wrong?! My work is work, too — raising this new baby!!”

It was infuriating for me to read these messages from her; I just felt so bad. And then I fear that my situation could easily become that. We all know that couples tend to fight more once a huge change like a baby comes into their life, and it takes a long time to adjust and find your groove. And even if you try to delineate responsibilities ahead of the baby arriving and say who will do what, in the moment, you rarely follow your “plan.”

It’s a lot of hard work not to fall into the traditional gender roles. But that work is necessary, otherwise our kids will learn it and no progress will ever happen in future generations.

Since Ed passed away, more and more, I’ve withdrawn information from my mom. I’ve realized that the more I share with her, the more she will get angry about or use against me, or accuse me of “not having wisdom” to make the right choices in life, and so there’s really no point in sharing too much information with her. While I’m not as closed off as Chris is in sharing “on a need to know basis,” I try to limit details with her as much as possible. And of course, she knows this and gets frustrated with this, always ending our short conversations with, “That’s it?” or “You have nothing else to tell me?” but honestly, it’s better for my sanity and for keeping safe boundaries from her.

The most annoying part is that even totally benign, unrelated-to-me topics end up angering her, and then lo and behold, she takes them out on none other than…. me! My paranoid personality disorder, borderline narcissistic mother takes every tiny thing personally and as though it’s an attack on her. She frequently asks how my friend’s baby is doing. I told her that she’s just turned six months and is about to begin eating solid food. In addition to that, she’s already started swim lessons, and she’s not scared of the water at all. My mom had a very strong, negative reaction against this.

“What kind of a stupid thing is that?” she raised her voice. “The baby was just born a few months ago and you want her to go into water? What are they trying to do — KILL HER? In my culture, we never do such stupid things as White people! Your generation just doesn’t have any sense at all!”

Well, that escalated really quickly. And when did this become a showdown regarding Asian vs. White culture????

My mom really has no sense of reality. She’s never been exposed to the fact that the earlier you teach kids something, the better. I mean, that’s probably why she tried to stunt my growth and my brother’s in so many ways in a futile attempt to “protect” us from the outside world. She has no idea that many babies and toddlers learn to swim in controlled, supervised settings, and this actually happens every single day all around the world.

Stupidly as per usual, I tried to explain to my mom that babies live in a water sac for nine months; therefore, water is natural to them, and the earlier they learn, the better. And this is when she REALLY started raising her voice, telling me I had no idea what I was talking about and “just believe what stupid people in this generation believe. But you can do what you want — it’s your life and your future.”

Well, actually, it’s my friend’s kid’s life and my friend’s kid’s future, and if anything, she will be set up to swim well at a young age and never have to endure the insufferably embarrassing experience that I went through, going to public swim lessons at age 15 with a bunch of 3-5-year-olds as my “peers.”

All the “basic” skills that kids are usually taught quite young, and usually by their parents or via lessons, I never had. My parents never taught me how to ride a bike or swim. My dad said I could “teach myself” how to ride a bike (very encouraging, as you can tell), and swimming, well, who needs to learn that? It was all so strange when I started meeting all these other kids who shared that their parents taught them these things or put them in lessons because not only did their parents actually take the time to teach them, but they asked me why my parents never taught me and why I didn’t know how to do all these basic things. It felt very alienating, frustrating, and embarrassing.

To this day, I’m still not fully steady on a bike, and thus there’s no way in hell I’d ever ride a bike on any city street. I’m still scared of deep water and have never properly learned how to breathe during free-style. I hope my future children will have these skills, though, and never be subject to embarrassment because of not knowing soon enough.

“Why do you always say ‘no’ when someone asks you if you want something?” Ed used to ask me, always exasperated and annoyed. “They’ve brainwashed you into never wanting anything. But that’s not normal; everyone wants something from time to time, and it’s okay to want things!”

Occasionally, Ed and I would go shopping together. He very generously took me shopping to purchase my very first prom dress for my junior prom in high school. Ed was always very generous, especially in the years when he was working, and so he’d always offer to buy me things just for the sake of it. There didn’t need to be a birthday or Christmas coming up; he just thought it was good to indulge every now and then. “I don’t pay rent, so might as well use the money to buy you something,” he’d say.

It pains me to remember these moments. All Ed really wanted was love, attention, and our time. Unfortunately, he never got any of the above from our father. Our mother gave him the wrong kind of attention (critical, scrutinizing, eager to compare to “the kids upstairs” aka our cousins).

For whatever reason, I remembered these moments when Chris and I were strolling through the Santa Fe Farmers Market yesterday morning. The farmers market here is famous for being very strict about how all its products are sourced: all of the items or foods either need to be grown and/or made right here in New Mexico. In addition, if it’s a food product, it needs to be certified organic. I stopped by a lavender vendor and perused her lavender based soaps and skin products. Did I really need to buy more soap or lip balm? Not really. But in the moment, I thought, well, I haven’t traveled for so long, and we can always use more soap and lip balm, so why not? Plus, I like supporting small, local businesses. So I purchased a couple items from this vendor and went on my way.

Ed used to hound me all the time for being cheap for myself. And well, it’s not too far from the truth; if I purchase something that isn’t food-related for myself, even to this day, I obsess over whether I really actually need it, even if it’s just a $20 shirt. I will spend at least 4-5 days wondering if I will really wear it enough, get value out of it, etc. I’m just not comfortable splurging on things for myself and I never have been. He’s right, though; it’s likely because our parents 90 percent of the time always said “no” to everything when we were growing up. I even started saying “no” to events with friends before even asking for her permission because I’d be so sure that she’d say no.

The two times I knew she’d never approve of that Ed knew about, which he got really mad at me for: the first time was in middle school, and a good friend of mine was going to get tickets to a concert in San Jose that my all-time favorite singer Mariah Carey was going to be doing. The tickets were around $100, and she asked if I wanted to go; her dad would be taking her. When I heard how expensive the tickets were, I knew my mom would never agree to pay it, so I told her that my mom said no. Ed overheard this phone conversation and lashed out at me after.

“You didn’t even ask!” Ed said, raising his voice. “Who cares if it’s a hundred dollars? She (Mariah Carey) never comes to the Bay Area! You should just go!”

I just shrugged. I told him that there was no way our mom would agree to let me go. In fact, she and our dad would likely get angry and accuse me of being spoiled just for THINKING that they’d even consider letting me to go to an event that cost that much, an event they’d likely deem as “unnecessary.” Everything to them was seemingly unnecessary.

The second time was during my senior year of high school. I had already accepted college admission at Wellesley, and I really had nothing to do the summer after. Two of my friends were planning a Hong Kong and Japan trip that their parents were gifting them as a graduation present that one of my friend’s moms would be going along on, and they asked me if I wanted to go. I knew my mom would say no, so I told them I couldn’t go with them.

I later told Ed this, and he had a similar reaction. “You always do this to yourself!” he said, shaking his head. “You prevent yourself from having fun and enjoying yourself. Just because they don’t want to enjoy life doesn’t mean you can’t.”

I already felt guilt for how much my college education was going to cost; going to Wellesley was going to cost my parents over double what going to UC Berkeley would have cost. My parents never gave me a high school graduation gift; to them, my college tuition was gift enough. My mom was already laying the guilt on heavily on me for deciding to attend a private college on the East Coast, three thousand miles away. My parents were not shy or quiet in the slightest about reminding me every step of they way how much my education was costing them, from the moment they wrote the first check for the deposit to hold my spot there. During one of our many arguments, my mom shrieked at the top of her lungs, “WE HAVE TO EAT LEFTOVERS EVERY NIGHT BECAUSE OF YOU!”

That’s very likely an exaggeration, as my parents were hardly scraping by to send me to college, but it did not feel good to have her say crap like that all the time to me; that was not an isolated incident. I don’t even want to know what my life would have been like every day if our parents decided to send both of us to K-12 private school. I’d likely never hear the end of it.

So I guess every time I buy something that may be perceived as “unnecessary” now, I feel like it’s a small form of rebellion against my parents. They perceive most of my life choices since college as “unnecessary”: all the trips to Australia to see Chris’s family (she actually did say it was unnecessary, if you can believe that), all the travel we’ve done outside of work and San Francisco (going to SF to see them, however, is always necessary), both domestically and internationally; all the apartment living in Manhattan, even my hair highlights.

Small acts of rebellion. I hardly appear like the rebellious type, but it’s easy to “rebel” against rules when the rules are so stupid and insipid.

We left Albuquerque yesterday to drive up to Santa Fe, where we’ll be staying until Sunday and traveling in the surrounds. When we checked into our hotel, which is basically like a lot of little apartments surrounding a pool and common seating area, I thought about all the hotels and motels I’ve stayed at over the course of my life, and how in the last 10 years, I’ve been really lucky to stay at some very beautiful, well-appointed hotel rooms and suites. Somehow, this triggered the thought of all the crappy motels I stayed at during short travels around California with my parents. For my parents, they didn’t understand why anyone would want to pay more than $30-50/night for a hotel room; “it’s just there for you to sleep,” my mom would insist. So each stay, they’d search for the cheapest possible motel, most with peeling plaster or paint, stains on the carpet and walls, and one even had a massive hole in the wall (that hotel was $30/night; my mom apparently drew the line there, and after seeing this, she demanded a refund and we left). Ed refused to go on “family trips” once he was a teenager; for him, being away from our parents was vacation enough. The first trip I vividly remember taking when he refused to go, I was 8 years old, which meant he was about 15, and early that morning when we were packing up the car to leave, Ed started crying, insisting he didn’t want to go. I was too young and unaware to understand his strong feelings of hate and rejection. My grandma sided with him, telling my parents that they shouldn’t force him. So we let him stay behind.

This evening, when I was showering, I also washed my hair, and well, when you wash your hair, you shed hair that needs to get cleaned up. So after my shower, I cleaned up all the hair from the drain and disposed of it in the trash. And yet again, this was yet another triggering moment, making me remember the time when I was in college back home at some point, and I accidentally left hair in the bathtub drain. I had always been pretty thorough with cleaning; I was basically trained to be that way because anything less than perfect (splashed water on the kitchen counter, stains on the stove, dust on the shelves, sponges left unsqueezed of excess water) would be constantly nitpicked by our mother.

I was always good about cleaning my hair out of the drain, except for this one, single time. And I distinctly remember my dad getting so angry and worked up about it (because all the little things are made into big deals in that house). He barged into my bedroom by violently opening up the door (you’d know a violent door opening when you heard it), and yelled, “You know, you need to remember to clean the drain when you wash your hair! You don’t need to be told! USE YOUR BRAIN!” And then without wanting or expecting a response, he left and slammed the door.

Leaving hair in the drain once is really not a big deal, but as he and my mom always did, he made it into one. Everything was explosive and angry in that house, and unnecessarily so. His reaction was such an over-reaction, but sadly, it was not unexpected from them. A reasonable father or human being would have just walked over to me and said, “Hey, can you remember to clean the drain after washing your hair next time?” and maybe even acknowledged that I NORMALLY ALWAYS DID THAT ANYWAY, AND THIS ONE TIME THAT I FORGOT WAS NOT A FUCKING BIG DEAL AND WAS AN ANOMALY.

And if you thought that was it, well, that unfortunately was not the end. Later that day, I may have accidentally slammed a kitchen cabinet. And my mom came out of nowhere and said angrily with her face all scrunched up, “I know why you’re making all this noise. You don’t like it when your father disciplines you. Well, all children need to be disciplined and told when they are wrong. Kids need to listen to their parents, and those who go against their parents will be punished BY GOD!” With each word, her volume rose. And with each word, I counted down the days until I could be free of their financial support, graduated from college, and far away from their constant unfair treatment and tyranny of me.

According to the Bible, children must honor their parents. But what the Bible (and I’m sure every other religious text out there) never outlines is that parents are NOT always right, and when they choose to be physically, verbally, or psychologically abusive towards their children, that is not okay with whatever higher power you believe in. Parents are not gods, whether they want to believe that or not. I frequently have yelled back at my mom and told her that she believes she is God, but not because she thinks she is always right. Her response is the usual, “God hears everything you say, and you will be punished for being disobedient.” Rather, I say that to her because she literally criticizes and judges every single person as though she has zero flaws herself. She most recently criticized someone who is supposed to be her “best friend” because her daughter is recently going through a divorce (my mom thinks divorce is unacceptable) and her son just had a baby out of wedlock. I wanted to remind her that maybe, just maybe she shouldn’t criticize her friend, because at least both of her friend’s children she gave birth to… ARE STILL ALIVE. Some of her criticisms or judgments are based on “facts” that she has actually made up, which only makes her seem even more delusional and mentally demented.

This past week, for whatever reason, has been extremely triggering for me. Everything seems to remind me of something stupid my parents have done. Oh, and I just looked in the mirror and realized that what I thought was just a “bloated” look is actually my stomach starting to “show.” I hope all these triggers can go away so I can just move forward and stop remembering the stupidity of my family’s past.

Today marks 11 weeks of pregnancy. I honestly cannot believe I’ve made it this far; I feel like I’ve been saying that with each passing day and week. It’s been an emotional, bumpy, and anxiety-filled road to get here, but somehow, I made it. I can only hope and pray that things will continue to progress.

It’s been known that as gestational age increases (so as your pregnancy progresses), the chances of miscarriage slowly but surely decrease to minuscule numbers. While that is comforting to know, the frustrating thing is that the worry of miscarriage is just replaced by worries of other matters: what kind of mom am I going to be? How can I be supportive without being stifling? How do I create a safe space for my child to share with me? How am I going to juggle work and parenthood? How are my partner and I going to be as parents and partners together, as we’re inevitably going to have different perspectives and opinions on how to approach situations that arise? Am I going to repeat all the same stupid things that I hated that my own parents did with me?

I was talking with my therapist about this during our session this morning, how I feared being exactly what I hated about my parents, and specifically my mother. I think it’s pretty impossible for me to be like my father; he’s emotionally removed, childish, and never really took an active parenting role with my brother and me other than to yell at and criticize us; there’s really no way I could be that way because I’m inherently not built that way. My default is to be loving and affectionate, so my deeper fear is that I’m going to suffocate and stifle the growth and independence of my child the way my mother tried to…. likely without even being aware of it. I’m an adult now and thus have had a lot of time to contemplate my parents’ style of parenting, and while I’m very aware that they probably did the best they knew how and certainly gave my brother and me more than they ever dreamed of having…. it just was not enough.

“Do you feel like you grew up in a safe, supportive environment?” my therapist asked me today.

“That depends on how you define a ‘safe, supportive environment,'” I responded slowly, looking back hard at her.

“Well, that’s an interesting response and says a lot; tell me how you define that,” she suggested.

From the outside, I’m sure it looks like my brother and I had enough. We never worried about having a roof over our heads; we always lived in the same house growing up, in a house our family owned. We always had enough food to eat and beds to sleep in. Our parents always bought us clothes and school supplies when we needed them. Both our parents were married to each other and were there every night; we never worried if our parents were going to come home or not. But that’s really it: we had, what I consider to be, basic necessities of being children growing up in a developed world. If we had to grade that, I’d give that a C: passing. That’s just the basics that are expected for decent parenting. And unfortunately, many parents are not able to provide the basics outlined above to their kids, which puts their kids in danger of many things as they grow up in this cruel, unfair world. So.. a C grade is really where it begins.

But we grew up being brainwashed into thinking we were poor; my parents always said “no” to pretty much everything; we never had any piano or dance lessons, no sports activities, not even Chinese classes. The response was always “we can’t afford that.” Ed never got to go to a single birthday party growing up; we certainly never got real birthday parties where we could invite friends. Ed, as a result, never really made friends throughout school and was extremely lonely. I was never allowed to go to anyone’s home or sleep over anywhere; if I went out with a friend, my mom had to have a 1:1 conversation with the parent to suss out whether they were “good people” that wouldn’t rape and kill their daughter. In other words, our parents tried to instill a deep distrust of the outside world to us and make us feel like we had to be grateful to even have the most basic necessities. “Even dogs know to show appreciation and gratitude,” my mom used to retort to Ed and me when she felt we were acting “spoiled,” which according to my dad, was really often.

When we did things that didn’t please our mother, she would often sit us down for long, useless talks about how we have to be grateful to have what we have and have parents who work as hard as they do because her mother didn’t do “a damn thing for me.” “You should be grateful I am sitting down to have this talk with you; my mother never would sit down to talk to me about anything,” she’d say, bitterly. She was supposed to be the disciplinarian while all my dad did was provide financial support and constant criticism in the background.

Ed’s relationship with our dad was pretty terrible; there’s no sugar coating that. From a young age, Ed felt rejected by our dad. He would always want and seek his attention to constantly be rejected by my dad, too eager to spend time doing repairs at the apartments or talking to himself senselessly as though he had some mental issue. During fights, my mom used to accuse my dad of wanting to spend time at the rental properties more than with his own family; that was likely very true. Occasionally, he’d even shoo us away and say, “can’t you see I’m talking to myself?” We had no idea what was going on. Ed eventually gave up trying to get our father’s attention and started outright ignoring him at a pretty young age; I think he was only 13 or 14. A supportive dad would have recognized his son was retreating and addressed it, but my dad was too immature and instead responded by doing the exact same thing and ignoring HIS SON, not even referring to him by name and instead pointing at him or saying “that guy.” He never acknowledged his birthday from that point onward until after Ed died. When he did interact with Ed, it was to criticize him or yell at him about something.

In addition, home was never a safe space for sharing pretty much anything. In fact, it felt like a constant surveillance zone where any of my belongings could be searched without warning; I literally had no personal space at home, and neither did Ed. Even my computer files were searched! No matter what, Ed and I were always wrong, and they were always right. When Ed was getting hit by his elementary school teacher (clearly a violation…), he didn’t feel safe enough to tell my parents because my mom would yell at him and say “Teacher is always right! you listen to your teacher!” After Ed died, my mom found an essay my brother wrote during college detailing this. “If I knew this had happened, I never would have let him stay in that class,” my mom mumbled. Well, maybe if she had actually created a an emotionally safe space for him to share, maybe, just maybe her son would have told her this.

My dad, who never did well in school at all, used to criticize anything that wasn’t an A, and would be especially harsh about standardized tests, which I always did just-okay at. In elementary school, I was particularly terrible at them; I still remember in fifth grade, I scored in the 59th percentile for math (I was slow; what can I say? It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to do it; I didn’t do well with limited time, which is clearly a learned skill). When my dad saw the test results, he called me an idiot and asked how I could I be so stupid. I got so upset that I actually cried; remember: I was TEN YEARS OLD when he said this. That wasn’t even the first time he had insulted or name-called me; my first memories of my dad name calling me were as early as 5 years old. Usually, my mom didn’t care if my dad criticized us, but this time, she actually pulled him aside to tell him he screwed up. I was actually shocked. He never quite apologized, but he did say to me later, “I didn’t mean to call you stupid.” And then to make it worse, he suggested I not be so sensitive. Sure, you didn’t mean it. Who sounds like the idiot now?

My mom, instead of talking with me about how classes were going, would not talk to me about school at all. Instead, she would go through my binder, which included homework and test results, and then yell at me whenever she saw anything that was less than an A or a B (B- is basically a C, according to my dad). She also used to go through letters and notes friends would send and give me and question every little thing that people wrote me, exploding if there was ever a mention of her or my dad in there. Once, she even had me call a friend to grill her to ask what she meant by something my friend made a broad-stroked comment on my parents about. I used to tell her that those were private and weren’t meant for her to see; she’d yell and say that she raised me and supports me, and therefore she has a right to do whatever she wants as long as I was under her roof.

When I did have hobbies, like middle and high school journalism or choir, my parents took no interest. My mom would always say she’d be too tired from work to come to the choir concerts. My dad went to one choir concert and fell asleep. When my aunt took an interest in my writing for the newspapers, she followed up with me after the first publication and read my work. She raved to my parents about how gifted I was. This was when I was 13 and in eighth grade. That resulted in an all-out screaming session: my mom was so insulted and said she had “no face” that I didn’t tell her and my dad but told my aunt. I insisted I did tell them both, but they didn’t listen and never asked to read my work. She yelled back and said they were “very busy” and “didn’t have time” to ask me; it was MY responsibility to share the newspapers with them, and by not sharing it when them but sharing with my aunt, I was being a bad daughter and making THEM look like bad parents. She demanded I write an apology letter to the two of them; I refused and never did it. I was young then, but I knew I was absolutely in the right no matter how demented their thinking was. It’s a parent’s job to show interest in their child; it’s not my job as a child to constantly remind my parents to take an interest in ME and MY interests. I was relatively young when I started realizing how wrong my parents were, but this is one of those moments that always sticks out to me.

Given the above, if Ed and I had ever been involved in sports or any regular activity, we all know our parents would have not only NOT supported it, but they would have made zero effort to ever come to games/shows/etc. If it wasn’t directly school related, they wouldn’t support it. They didn’t understand that getting into Stanford wasn’t just about good grades and test scores… but then again, how could they since neither of them had ever really had the opportunity for school (mom), or cared about school (dad)? Whenever I had friends’ events, I always had to ask to catch a ride from another parent because “Your dad works so hard. He works harder than every other father (!!!). How can you expect him to drive you here and there for all these unnecessary things?” Everything, pretty much, was deemed “unnecessary.”

So, it should come as no surprise that I looked forward to getting the hell out of that house as quickly as I could, and not only that, once I left, I had zero intention of ever moving back. It wasn’t that I had no intention of ever coming back to San Francisco; I had zero desire to ever move back into that house, which my subconscious perceived as a mortuary or cemetery (my dreams reflected this): nothing thrives or grows there. The garden my grandma once nurtured that once upon a time, was actually something you’d call a “garden,” sadly evolved into a sea of weeds. The kitchen is peeling with fixtures that are still there from when my grandpa was still around in the 70s. The floors are creaky and there’s a mysterious draft that flows through the second floor of the building. It’s just bad vibes and negative energy all around.

Things only got worse as I got older and started having boyfriends.. and exercising my freedom. The more I showed that I could do what I wanted and she had no control over any of it, the more my mother acted out and screamed, futilely attempting to exert her nonexistent control over me. I repeatedly got told I was a prostitute, a slut, had “no face,” that no one in the family respected me for having a boyfriend. I was repeatedly screamed at in public because of my supposedly promiscuous ways. In retrospect, my parents really had no fucking clue how good they had it with Ed and me; we barely did anything was really “bad” from a teen perspective. My mom also loved to repeatedly make up stories about all my boyfriends and their families… because apparently she knew more about them all than I ever did. She still makes up stories about Chris and his family to this day, likely out of jealousy and just pure hatred for anyone else that’s not “in our immediate family.”

I thought about all this as I watched parts of our wedding video over again last night. Not only does it amaze me that Chris just smiles and nods in my parents’ presence to this day, but it also amazes me that I said such nice, loving things about both my parents at our welcome dinner and our wedding reception. I apparently wanted, very much, to paint a picture of love and mutual respect between my parents and me that didn’t really exist. While I did mean that my life’s privileges are very much due to my parents giving me a better life than they had, I turned into the person I am today very much in spite of them and their constant hate-filled, baseless criticisms and threats.

As a hopeful mom, I hope to never recreate these senseless, stupid moments with my child. I want to create a safe, supportive, emotionally open space with my child. But I also don’t want to let my child run around rule-less. For whatever reason, all these memories have been flooding back into my mind over the last week, and they’ve been pretty anger inducing.

“Just the fact that you are thinking about this and are conscious of it means that you won’t do the same things,” my therapist said to me. “Awareness is key here.”

I hope so.

There are people in my family who think that race no longer matters, that they “don’t see color” (unless it’s to attack Black and Brown people, that is), that Asian people are essentially of the same “social status” as White people.

My family is truly filled with a bunch of idiots.

Someone in my family sent a group text to a bunch of us today with a YouTube video randomly uploaded by someone with barely any subscribers (the video had about 50 views) that slanders Joe Biden and said, “after you watch this, you can be the judge of whether our mainstream media is pushing a communist country along and whether they are suppressing the REAL news that needs to be covered.”

I did not watch the video. I do not care to watch a bunch of random trash uploaded to YouTube. While I do maintain a YouTube channel and upload videos, I am very, VERY cognizant of the fact that anyone can upload pretty much any video to YouTube proclaiming something to be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean IT IS TRUE. I’m sad that my own family members are not smart enough to separate reality from falsehoods. I’m even sadder that said family members are condescending to those of us who actually DO read The New York Times or the Washington Post and think WE are the stupid ones for believing this “fake news,” that they actually believe they are BETTER than us because they follow these conservative networks full of lies.

It’s nothing unique to my family that we cannot discuss politics in a civil, level-headed manner. Everyone seems to have their opinions set (self included), and no one really wants to budge. Most of my family members’ politics is heavily colored by racism, sexism, hatred of “freeloaders,” and in general, xenophobia for people immigrating into this country who do not look like them. Or, actually, for one of my family members, he just hates all immigrants, even those coming from China, in general and views them as being a leech on our welfare system, mostly “bad people” who want to rape and kill Americans and steal jobs from Americans… Yes, because our safety net is truly worth bragging about amongst all the western, industrialized nations of the world (can you sense the facetiousness in that statement?).

It was my uncle’s 70th birthday yesterday, so I sent him a gift last week and also a message to wish him a happy birthday. He replied to thank me, and also to let me know that while the entire world has been struggling with the pandemic and its restrictions, he was not one of those people struggling. In fact, he was embracing it. He’s been painting the facade of his house, and in his own words, “I’m enjoying camping out. This is fun for me.”

It was frustrating for me to read this. While I am happy that he does not feel like his life has had to changed in a drastic or negative way, it’s disturbing that anyone, during a global pandemic, could possibly say that their life has not changed for the worse, or that they’re actually embracing this. During this pandemic, people have lost jobs, lives, homes. People have lost loved ones. We cannot socialize the way we used to, weddings and even funerals have not been able to happen. International travel is off limits for anyone who is choosing to not be selfish. Going to live performances or even movie theaters has been made unacceptable. Unless you are a total anti-social, anti-people, anti-entertainment hermit, how could your life NOT be affected in a negative way due to this pandemic??

It was even worse when a group text with my uncle and cousins started regarding my cousin noting something about the Trump administration. My uncle immediately called it “fake news,” because apparently when you hear something you don’t like, it’s now totally fine to just write it off as “fake news.” He proceeded to talk about how tech companies like Facebook and Twitter need to be regulated by the government because they are restricting conservative views or “media they do not agree with.” Now, this sentiment is coming from someone who believes overall that the government should regulate LESS, and someone who has never, not even once, logged into Facebook and Twitter. Anyone who has logged into Facebook even once knows that once you show an inclination for a certain political view, you will continue to get served similar articles and points of view; that’s the way the algorithm works. You don’t need to work in the tech industry to know this. If anything, the data show that Facebook and Twitter do not censor conservative content; in fact, conservative media is favored because of all the organic conservative groups on the Facebook platform. It’s unfortunate when people continue to refuse to look at the actual data and facts and instead choose to get their “alternative facts” from their tunnel-visioned sources.

I guess this is why we have Trump as our president — he’s the president for every American who doesn’t want to believe in data, science, and anything that is actually rooted in real history. This country is only getting stupider and more pathetic to observe.

Last night when I was chatting with my friend, she was talking about how random things you see during the day or things you may do can suddenly trigger a long-lost memory of something that you had seen, witnessed, or been a part of that you had just forgotten after all these years. That’s not to say that it never happened and that your mind was making it up, but rather that so many things have since happened that this memory just got de-prioritized by your brain.

She was talking about her schoolteacher mom and the lessons she was working on for her students, and out of nowhere, it made me remember the times when I was in high school, and my mom used to go through my school binder when I wasn’t there. I had all my subjects separated by dividers, and within each of those dividers, I had separated assignments being worked on, assignments completed and grade, notes, and tests. Every now and when I’d emerge from doing household chores, showering, or dressing, I’d catch her at my desk, going through my binder, page by page. The first time it happened, I obviously got really irritated.

“What are you doing?” I asked, in a slightly accusing tone.

“I’m looking at your schoolwork,” she would reply back smugly. “I’m your mother. I have a right to go through your things and see what you are doing in school. I support you and provide a roof over your head.”

It was so rude and disrespectful, but in my mother’s view, it’s impossible for a parent to be rude or disrespectful to one’s child; that can only go one way, meaning only the child can be disrespectful or rude to her parent. When she’d see any test or graded material that was less than a B, she’d interrogate me with empty questions, accuse me of talking too much on the phone and spending too much time with friends instead of studying and preparing for tests. When she’d see As or anything positive, she’d say absolutely nothing — no compliments, no words of congratulations, no “I’m proud of you.” I let it go because I was clearly powerless: what was I going to do — refuse to let her go through my things? She already had spies watching me at school, reporting back exaggerated falsehoods and would call my friends behind my back to confirm that I was, in fact, actually with them and not running off with deadbeat losers and boys. She didn’t realize that I knew all of this and that my friends actually told me.

In retrospect when I look back on this, I realize even more what a massive failure in parenting this was. Instead of going through the contents of my backpack or binder, she could easily have just asked me how school was going and ask specific questions about my subjects the way the average good parent actually would, the way I hear parents of today and 20 years ago having done. We could have had what many parents try to facilitate with their children, which is trust and open communication. She clearly didn’t want this. She wanted to feel powerful, to feel like she could do whatever she wanted and could control me. She said she “had no time” because she was busy working and putting a roof over my head. Oh really? But somehow, she made the time to go through all my things and ask people to snoop on me?

The best decision I ever made was to leave home, and stay away from home. She knew no one on the East Coast who could spy on me as a student, and she sure as hell would not know anyone who could follow me all over New York City as a working adult. It’s been refreshing, particularly in the last seven years, to force my mother to realize that she has absolutely no control over me, my life, or anything that happens to me. She cannot take credit for everything I’ve accomplished, because if she does, she should also take “credit” for my brother’s untimely death.

My friend is in town visiting for the weekend, and we were reminiscing on our college days when we took three different trips to New York City and all the funny things that had happened. One thing I completely forgot that happened our second trip: it was so cold and windy that my friend’s pores on her legs started bleeding during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. We had come for our second trip together just the two of us during Thanksgiving week 2005, and it was probably the coldest visit we’d had to New York. We had to get her to a bathroom to wash off the blood and some bandages from a local Duane Reade.

During our combined three trips, we visited probably every major museum together while quizzing each other about each others’ art history knowledge. We both took Advanced Placement Art History in high school, and in college, I took another semester of it. She is one of the few people I know who has actually taken a real art history class (even though she didn’t do so well in it, nor did she really retain the knowledge or love of it, but well…).

Our physical selves haven’t changed very much since our 2004 trip. We looked back on old photos that Chris put up on our Chromecast, and we more or less look exactly the same. I can still wear the same clothes that I had back then, too, if I really wanted to. Our minds have certainly gotten older, though.

I haven’t called home since the day after I came back from San Francisco. I sent my mom flowers to acknowledge her “birthday” a couple days after her birthday two weeks ago, though. She expects a gift around the time of her birthday, but not on the day of her birthday because that would be going against Jehovah’s Witnesses beliefs about no celebration of birthdays or holidays (it seems like a total crock because she wants what she is not supposed to have according to her chosen religion, but hey, that’s what she wants). Part of the reason I haven’t called home was due to work stress and drama. The other part was because I just needed to decompress from all the pointless arguments that happened where my mom, as per usual, insists people (including me, of course) have wronged her endlessly and that she’s 100 percent innocent and has never done a single thing wrong.

I called today after work, which was probably a mistake. I regretted it as soon as I heard her cold, testy voice. She immediately started saying that because of something someone else caused (me) where she did nothing wrong, she’s now being “persecuted.” I had no idea what she was dramatizing, but whatever it was, it was clear she had her finger pointed at me as the one to blame.

Apparently shortly after I left, my aunt, who lives upstairs, hosted a large gathering of JW friends, and while hosting all these guests, she never bothered inviting my parents. My mom was livid and ran through all the reasons that my aunt wouldn’t invite her. “But I put two and two together, and I know what happened,” she said. “You told your cousin bad things about me, and he told your aunt, and that’s why your aunt is mad at me and doesn’t want to invite me!”

A previous version of myself would be angry to the point of yelling. I’d raise my voice, tell her that it was all a paranoid, made up story she decided to fabricate in her head and run with. I’d get soft feet, feel my throat drop into my stomach, and feel small. I’d stand there, scared of her response. The current version of myself merely stated that I never spoke with my aunt; I did no such thing. She can believe whatever made up stories she wanted to believe, but (and I love doing this) “God knows I did nothing wrong, so you can believe what you want to believe and make up whatever you want.”

The paranoia was obvious. She started raising her voice, saying she never “directly” accused me. I’m not stupid, I said plainly, and I wasn’t born yesterday. She’s blaming me, and it’s not true. She then moaned on and on about what a good child my aunt’s eldest son is, how “he tells his mother everything and obeys her from her head to her toe. He would even tell her when he has sex with his wife (yep, this is a real quote) — that’s how much he cares about his mother!” This is her way of comparing, saying I do not obey, I am not enough of a daughter, that I am a terrible child who is “against her parents.”

If I wanted to get a really nasty reaction out of her, I could have responded, “Yeah, I really love that you keep comparing me to my aunt’s oldest son. Constantly comparing — it’s so nice of you! I mean, that’s what you used to do to Ed — constantly compare him to ‘the kids’ upstairs.’ You and dad used to repeatedly call him ‘useless,’ ‘brainless,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘idiot,’ ‘moron,’ ‘dumb.’ And where is Ed now? Hmmmm….”

But I refrained and I held it in. Because I recognize that will get me nowhere. It will get us nowhere. Ed and I had an emotionally and verbally abusive upbringing, and it ended up being a huge contributor of his ultimate downfall. That “upbringing” isn’t over for me because I still have to endure all the nastiness of my parents to this day. But there’s line you have to draw to be an independent, healthy adult, where you acknowledge that you cannot “blame” your parents for everything bad in your life, that you have take ownership of your own life.

And that’s what I am trying to do. I’m drawing an invisible line to separate myself from my parents, to prevent their constant criticisms and fabricated stories from getting the best of me and my psyche. I refuse to endure the constant abuse, to try to continue rationalizing the made-up stories she keeps creating in her head. The world is not “out to get her” the way she thinks. The world… just is what it is. It’s not the warmest, friendliest place, but it’s also not full of evil at every corner, either.