how not to be a good parent

Is there some rule in the fucking Parents' Handbook that says: when your child is angry with you to the point of screaming, hyperventilating, and passing out, you should stay right there and tell them not to be angry? Despite the fact that you're the reason for them being angry in the first place? Despite how your child is telling you to get out, go away, because that's the only way your child can calm down? And then, after you've told your child not to be angry (which doesn't work because your child's been telling you that YOU'RE the problem and you just refuse to go away), you get angry at your child for being hysterical.

That's just what happened with my mother. 

Well, she was about to beat me up when my father dragged her off. Which is not necessarily a good thing, because they shut themselves in their room to blame me for everything again. I can fucking hear it. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again and I predict I'll be saying it forfuckingever, it's just not possible to reason with my parents. It just doesn't go anywhere.

A: They agree to your request, but grudgingly. This is only on the surface and there is no ideological change. They agree just to make you go away. Which makes you feel unimportant and like a pest. 

B: They talk about unrelated things. The "talk" goes to hell, you try to bring them back on track, they don't listen, talk over you, laughs at your anger, goes even more off track. You get angry and go away because talking to them is unproductive and makes you so angry and irritated you're going to faint.

Also they have talks between themselves about how to "deal with" me. Which I can completely hear, and makes me feel like my existence is something they don't take seriously. They're never going to listen to me, they're just going to "deal with" me. 

Like, you know, how you deal with a puppy. A problem. Something you can't communicate with. The idea of actually connecting with me probably has never occurred to them. They're not interested in my existence as a whole, they're interested in specific aspects of it. 

For example, my health. My studies. That is it. I ask for money from them sometimes. They complain that I only talk to them when I want money. I try to talk to them about things. They wave me off. And then complain that I only talk to them when I want money.

I love them and all (yes I love them, somewhat, a little, in my way, and this kind of love really doesn't amount to much like I wouldn't do jackshit for them if it's too detrimental to me) but god. They're really shitty parents. 

I've read a lot of psychology and parenting books, and while that doesn't make me an expert at all, it makes me enlightened enough to see when my parents fuck up and do things that parents are not supposed to do. I'd make a comprehensive list but I'm afraid I'd start listing every moment of my life, because that's how often my parents are bad parents. Like, not 'bad' as in jail-ish bad, but bad as in doing things that are detrimental to children that they don't have any good reason to do and could change that behaviour to something conducive to raising a child with minimum effort. 

A: Comparing to other kids. They do this, all the time, casually. Like they just told my brother: "Write up your passage. [my brother interjects "I don't wanna!"] Well your friend A writes pages and pages in one go." They don't see a single problem with it. My father tells me all the time, "You know, there are SIXTEEN YEAR-OLDS interning at the company I work at." With emphasis on sixteen. "Just the other day this FIFTEEN YEAR-OLD BOY came for a job interview." And so on. 

Which is extremely not productive and does nothing but demoralise your children, thank you very much. All children are not the same. Would you rather switch your child with that other one that you just praised? Because that's what your kid is hearing. Like, dad, d'you want me to drop out of school and take up a construction job? Would that make you happier? Huh? I know what I want to do and it has no relation to construction or engineering, and I am perfectly aware that people my age get jobs all the time, so you telling me that in that particular tone does nothing but insinuate that I am not good enough.

B: Insults. Both implied insults and straight-up "you're worthless" insults. I believe I've talked about this a lot. My mother in particular loves insults. "You'll never go anywhere in life." "Do you think with your results you can go to a good university?" "You'll just test badly and end up with a low-paying job sweeping the streets." "Don't hang out with your stupid friends." "You've been loitering around after school with your no-good friends again haven't you?" And she says all this vehemently, viciously, like she's enjoying it. She does it all the time. 

I literally don't go a day without hearing some variant of "you have no future". But you know what's really sad? She's never going to get the concept of "people internalising insults and becoming exactly what you said they'd be". Also the concept "you see what you want to see". Also, this is the stupidest thing a parent can do. Like, the people who raised you and know you really well don't think you can do anything with your existence? "Oh, okay, what a bummer." Listen, it's not going to be "oh, bummer". It's going to be "I've got no future, I'd better go die." This is what suicides are made of.

C: Tell you that you're a burden, or that you're an obligation. I literally cannot stand this. Every time anyone says something like that, I get really angry. First of all, no one asks to be born into this world. You can like it or hate it but your existence wasn't chosen by you. To bring someone into this world and treat the person without love is the worst fucking thing you can do. 

Everyone loves differently, like you can love someone very distantly, like "dude I care about your general existence". As long as there's love, it's okay. A child is not a THING. A child should never ever think that you got pregnant and had a kid and now years later you're regretting it. A child should never ever think that you had a kid and now you're stuck with it. A child should never ever think that you had a kid just to satisfy your parents or whatever. 

Like you know, you could be "I had a kid to make society happy but yeah I love the kid a lot". That's fine and all, but let the fucking kid know?? That you love it??

Sometimes my father sighs and says very tiredly "We give you food and room and money. What else do you want?" Like WHAT. Or: "We put clothes on your back and food in your stomach, we've done everything we're supposed to." Wow that makes me so angry. WHY DID YOU HAVE A KID. Just to waste your money and time on it? What? 

This is very hurtful to a child okay whether the child is five or fifty. Just no. 

I could go on and on about how my parents really suck at being parents, but this post is nearing a thousand words and I have other things to do and my fingers hurt. 

i don't have the energy any more okay just read the thing

I haven't blogged in so long because school has been oddly demanding (I don't really know why, I have three hour breaks every day except for friday) and when I get home all I want is to sit in my home and slowly rot. It's like an on/off switch - when I'm "on" I can smile and jump around and make snide remarks and be engaging, but when I'm "off" all you're going to get from me is "uh". It'a not a good system because I tend to shut off abruptly so if someone stops interacting with me but is still looking at me, they'll see my face go bland and expressionless in about less than a second, and then they'll wonder if I actually don't enjoy their company. I enjoy company, seriously, because it stops me from being melodramatic and sad. In fact I actually want a constant whirlwind of activity around me.

Anyway, i wanted to bitch about my mother some more. Recently she's been going ballistic over not seeing me study or do work (work, apparently, can only be work that's done the "old-fashioned" way, on paper - note my "sarc-marks") because I once told her I was too lazy to study and just barely didn't qualify for four H2 subjects. And that's ridiculous because if she's going to go anal about something relatively minor then it's just going to stop me from wanting to tell her anything at all.

Also she gets offended over me not being polite or calling her "mother", which is even more ridiculous because she only got angry about my politeness after an incident in which I passionately argued about the stupidity of politeness. Anyone can be polite, it's not even hard, and it's actually quite superficial so anyone who's taken by politeness and politeness only is quite stupid. Also I said that I only have to be polite to other people and not at home because other people will judge you for politeness because they're not close enough to you to interact without barriers, and I said ultimately the bottom line is my mother loves me and I love her, even if I really do hate her sometimes, so politeness is a stupid thing to get bothered about between the two of us. 

(I mean really, I don't think I'd be in shambles if she died or anything, and I really don't care much about her, but I do love her somewhat, if only because she gave birth to me and raised me.)

Anyway she's been pissy ever since that day, which was actually my birthday. I had a maths test the day after my birthday so that was a bummer because I couldn't go out with friends and had to study until quite late (which I'll admit is my fault because I didn't study before that) and many of my friends said that they'd get me presents after that whole slew of tests.

It was a pretty lacklustre birthday and I actually forgot it was my birthday, which must surely mean that I'm getting old.

Back to the point, which is my mother. She kept getting pissier and pissier because apparently I wasn't doing any work and wasting my life away on the iPad when really I was super stressed about writing (typing it out, which isn't real work to my mother because it's done on the laptop) my CSE essay (China Studies in English, which is a bloody H2 subject and is currently stressing me the fuck out). Anyway she was pissy and started yelling, being physically aggressive kinda, insulting me (worthless, stupid, never amount to anything, the same things she always says when she's angry at me, so I'm pretty used to it and it's only irritating now). 

So yesterday I came back home and realised after a while that my box of poker cards was missing. Okay so I have this nice black and silver metal box which l store my twelve sets of poker cards in and never touch. Those poker cards are anime/kpop editions and some of them are really nice so I put them in a closed box and put the box in my cupboard, which has a lock. I've mentioned before how crazy I get if peope touch my things without me knowing and I get ten times more irritated if they touch something that I specifically put away and never even touch myself. The box was missing and my cards were stacked up. 

I thought my mother had taken the box because only she and my brother and the maid are ever home, and the maid wouldn't take it (she's Michelle and she's nice this time, I hope my mother won't send her away, I'm sick of always changing domestic helpers) and my brother wouldn't stack the cards up and the cupboard is too high for him to reach without a chair and why would he go into my room and go through my cupboard anyway. If something from my desk was missing I'd suspect my brother but this is the cupboard I'm talking about. Even I have trouble reaching it.

Anyway I demanded that my mother tell me where it is and she refused to say anything of value, which is basically "I didn't take it", "it's not with me", and instead did stupid things like start arguing with me because I didn't add the word "mother" when demanding the location of my missing property from her. Anyway i started looking in her room for the box, like opening drawers and stuff (the drawers and small and shallow so I only had to open and look to know if my box was there).

Afterwards my dad came out to ask about the noise and it turned out my brother had taken it. So I was stern about it and said "I hope you know what you did was wrong" and then my mother started going on about my rudeness and I thought that was insanely stupid. My brother had just stolen my stuff and reluctantly admitted it and showed no sign of guilt and she doesn't even say a word about it! In fact after that she tells him goodnight in a sickeningly sweet voice. And she chooses to pick a fight about superficial manners instead of stealing?????

I do understand that going through her room and maligning her was bad and I would completely have  apologised had she not been so pissy about it. I was actually on the verge of apologising when she started lecturing me about my rudeness instead of saying anything about my brother going into my room and stealing my things. And then I pointed out that she should probably scold my brother instead. And then she pretended I didn't say anything and continued being even angrier at me.

This is utterly stupid. I haven't spoken to her in about three days or something because she insists on being angry all the time. Like frowning and saying everything angrily (the "it's your fault" tone) and choosing angry words to express everything. There's this particular Asian way of being unpleasant, and it's really hard to describe. Like, all prickly and sensitive and bloody fucking self-righteous about her stupid meaningless anger. And saying that you're a stupid worthless person to another person in a volume that is totally loud enough for everyone around to hear.

I am so angry and tired and I cannot muster up enough anything to respond to her. Her presence in the house just stresses me out so much. Is it that hard to tone it down? She has high blood pressure and takes medication for it and moans incessantly about it (just as she likes to moan about her weak heart and pretty much every other injury, real or not). 

And she won't stop saying "I have high blood pressure, you'd better stop making me angry", which first of all is pretty stupid because you can make the decision to be angry or not. For minor things like someone not showering the minute they get home, not being at the dinner table the second dinner starts, etc etc... Getting angry over those things are entirely a choice. I'd understand if she gets angry over someone calling her parents names, but come on. No one in this family does anything to really make her angry, because all she needs to get angry is someone not obeying her. It's that easy. So it's completely stupid to blame her emotions on everyone else.

Also I am pretty sure that's emotional blackmail. "If you don't pander to my whims I'll get high blood pressure and die" or something. So ridiculous. She's not a child any more. And even children don't do that. What's also very stupid is the fact that my father is so tired of her anger that he gets irritated for her sake - so he gets angry if I don't treat her like a delicate glass ornament like she wants. 

This whole situation is mind-bogglingly ridiculous. And it makes me so tired and stressed and I already get enough of that from school.

Once in CSE I asked my teacher about central-local relations. Governors of provinces want to get promoted, and to be promoted their province must perform well economically. So if one province makes money at the expense of another province, and the governor of the richer province gets promoted, he'll be in a higher position. And in that position he'd have to deal with the income inequality that he created anyway, so why not just work together to increase the net profit of the country? And my teacher said "I don't think they think that far", which is depressing and true and applies to life, basically.

A lot of people just don't think. (This includes my parents and some other people I know.) I don't mean to say that Chinese people (those provincial governors) are stupid, because we watched a documentary on China and everyone in it was Chinese and had amazing insights about the situation. I just want to say that everything could be so much easier if everyone just thought about things for a second, rationally, logically, taking account of the circumstances and other people and emotions and everything. Just think. Which is apparently really difficult. 

The GOP in America is a reallt good example of stupidity, because everything that comes out their mouth makes me want to smash my face into a brick wall so that I could stop existing in the same universe as those idiots (who are leading the country!! holy shit that scares me lots and I hope it scares you too). And it's not like I think all of America is stupid, because my CSE teacher is American and he's actually brilliant.

But it seems to be a trend that many people in positions of power are stupid. Like my school (actually the student council mostly), which organised a founder's day and invited the alumni and didn't bother having ushers and so the alumni were all stumbling around because the campus moved like three times at least. And in Uganda where my teacher said high-ranking people use the anti-homosexual thing partly to distract the people from real issues. 

Everything just makes me angry and it's been making me angry for quite a while (about four, five years) and I don't think it'll ever stop making me angry so I'll probably still be writing stupid blog posts about stupid things in fifty years.