This spring my parents moved to the same city as my sister, something to do with getting away from the brutal winters in the Northeast (and, yeah, it was pretty bad this past year). My sister has a bit of a smothering tendency towards my parents, but one that fluctuates with extreme degradation when it fits her agenda. As I've written previously, my sister has worked hard to put our parents in the middle of a situation that concerns only her and me. In her mind, if only my parents would consent to being her flying monkeys.
Alas, my mother -- being a fair-minded woman -- just will not submit. In a noncommittal tone, my mother's response to my sister's list of grievances against me is that people grow apart. In her blog (forgive me that I don't link to my sister's blog, but I don't want to risk her finding mine and using it as a pretext for harassing me), my sister writes about how my mother refuses to understand her and how my sister is reduced to tears by my mother's nonchalant behavior. The most telling bit is when my mother responds by telling my sister: "You're grown-ups. You created this fight by yourselves." My sister then tells the world about, gasp!, my mother's failure! You got it -- this is all my mother's fault, darn it! If only my mother had taken charge. Then, oddly enough, my sister thinks that she can reinforce the view of my mother as a failure by talking about her weaknesses: 1) she can't drive; 2) she doesn't speak English. Let me talk first about my mother's English. It isn't that my mother can't speak English -- she's just not a fluent English speaker. And who can blame the woman? She came to the U.S. when she was already in her thirties and while she took some ESL classes in the first few years of our immigrant life, she didn't have access later on when we moved to the South where there were less resources. Yet, despite such limitations, she picked up enough English to successfully co-own and run two small businesses with my father. Their customers, practically all of whom she had to communicate with in English, adored her. She remembered their names, their children, their celebrations and their sorrows. The customers loved to talk with her because she listened to them on their ground (a trait sorely lacking in my sister). So, is my mother's English less-than-perfect? Perhaps in my sister's eyes, but that has never stopped my mother from communicating. Now, in regards to my mother not driving. Um, big effing deal. In all honesty, I don't drive. I learned to drive when I was in my late twenties and have always been a horrible driver. I had two car accidents and decided that the world was safer without me behind wheels (I notoriously once crashed a go-kart -- I guess that makes three accidents). And to expand on that truth, every single person in my family of origin is a horrible, bad driver. My father drives too slow, my brother drives too fast, my sister drives too fast and frequently stops paying attention while driving. But to get back to the point, my sister refuses to accept what my mother said, namely that my sister is partly to blame for the rift between me and her. As my sister has written to me: "I am sorry. I don't know what I did so wrong that you are treating me wrong but let's forget it." The infamous non-apology of a narcissist. My sister doesn't care what she did wrong. More likely, she thinks she did nothing wrong. My mother and me -- we are to blame. I understand her blaming me but her blaming my mother. Wow. Just wow. My sister also expands a great deal of effort on her blog on her own sorrow. Here are some choice tidbits: I weigh my efforts to convey the depth of my sense of calamity. I have sobbed in front of her. I've talked to her of how I can no longer trust people, how I couldn't rely on anyone else to stay by my side when my own sister abandons me. I've told her how I'm persistently angry, how I cannot shake this feeling of betrayal. (Just baffling, I know, why her younger sister who she harassed with fourteen emails and five phone calls every single day, stalked, threatened with destruction of her possessions, threatened with commitment to a mental institution would choose to "betray" her. I know, my sister was soooo trusting. She trusted that she could act with impunity and that I would always, always be by her side... you know, because my role is to be the sidekick, the Tonto to her Lone Ranger, Nicole Richie to her Paris Hilton, Robin Hood to her Batman.) I now feel like I live my hours on the verge of an impending crisis, of yet another breakdown. How one minor spurn, one signal of rejection, or one careless word is enough to spiral me into a hole of despair. How I feel more like a stranger here on earth, with few friends I feel I can turn to. How what I now see are inevitable doom, inescapable failure, impending betrayal. (Run for the hills! The apocalypse is coming!) And I never thought to question whether they were worth it. That my family was worth whatever effort I put into it. That they were worth however much time I spent with them. That they were worth however much money I spent on them. (Let's just admit it. None of us, no one in her family of origin is worth the greatness that is my sister. I mean, we spent effort on her. We spent time with her. We even spent money on her -- although, in fairness, perhaps not as much as she given that she is married to a millionaire and spends his money on the family.) I would also like to believe that her (our mother's) words came from a place that contains no malice, no ill-will, but from that crevice where we lack easy access to other words, to words of sympathy, words of understanding. I would like to think that I have the fortitude to withstand these words without suffering too many bruises. Yes, that says it all. Because god forbid that your mother would ever expect you, as a grown child, to take responsibility for your own mistakes. What an awful, awful mother.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. The word repeated itself in my head as I ran the blocks of San Francisco's Financial District. The training session for the new software at work had ended late. As soon as the instructor finished talking, I had run out of the classroom, not even bothering to stop by my cubicle to pick up my cell phone, and rushed out of the building (or as much as possible, given the slow elevator). Now, I was practically running through the streets, running uphill towards Golden Star, the Vietnamese pho restaurant where I was supposed to meet my sister for lunch. Panting, I finally made it to the restaurant, ten minutes late, where my sister didn't bother listening to my blurted apology. "Where were you?" she exclaimed loudly, her face knotted in anger. "I tried calling you on your cell and you didn't even bother to pick up. If you are going to be late, you can at least pick up or call. I've been standing here, wasting my time." "I am sorry," I pleaded again. "The training session ran over and I got here as fast as I could." "You are wasting my time. You are so inconsiderate." "Look, let's just eat, okay." She didn't let up, not for a second while we sat down, ordered our respective pho and received it from the waitress. Finally, I said, "You know, you are almost always late. There are times when I've waited for you for an hour and I never gave you guff over it. I figured you had a reason." She finally paused for a minute. Then, she responded: "I make much more money than you do. If I am an hour late, that doesn't compare to you making me wait ten minutes. You make less in ten minutes than I do in an hour. If you have to wait an hour for me, that's okay. As an attorney, I bill more in ten minutes than you earn per hour." "Fine. If that's the way you feel, maybe we shouldn't meet for lunch ever again. Let's just eat and leave." All my life, my sister had groomed me to believe that being late for anything with her was a cardinal sin. One time she told me that if anyone was fifteen minutes late for any occasion, she thought it appropriate to leave. Even as I made every effort to be on time with her, knowing that she'd raise holy hell if I was late, she made zero effort. She was commonly ten to fifteen minutes late for every single meeting with me. When she laid out the worth of our respective times in dollars and cents rather than in human consideration, I realized that I was always going to be worthless to her.
He [the brother, Yngve] has told me often that Dad had totally crushed his self-esteem on a number of occasions, humiliated him as only Dad could, and that had colored periods of his life when he felt he was incapable of doing anything and was worthless. Then there were other periods when everything went well, when there were no hitches, no nagging doubts. From the outside, all you saw was the latter. Dad had also affected my self-image, of course, but perhaps in a different way, at any rate I never had periods of doubt followed by periods of self-confidence, it was all entangled for me, and the doubts that colored such a large part of my thinking never applied to the larger picture but always the smaller, the one associated with my closer surroundings, friends, acquaintances, girls, who, I was convinced, always held a low opinion of me, considered me an idiot, which burned inside me, every day it burned inside me; however, as far as the larger picture was concerned, I never had any doubt that I could attain whatever I wanted, I knew I had it in me, because my years were so strong and they never found any rest. How could they? How else was I going to crush everyone? -- My Struggle, Volume 1, page 358
The above excerpt is from Karl Ove Knausgaard's lightly fictionalized autobiographical six-volume novel, My Struggle. The first volume deals with his relationship with his cold father who descends from being an impeachable middle-class conformist to an alcoholic. When his father dies, Knausgaard and his brother, Yngve, drive to their paternal grandmother's house where their father had spent the last few years, and Knausgaard is horrified by the sight that greets him: the once impeccable rooms filled with vodka and beer bottles; dried feces stuck to the furniture; the smell of urine in every part of the house; stacked up to the ceiling is a pile of old laundry, so old that mold is growing in various layers. What struck me about the words above are Knausgaard's descriptions of how the father's slights lived on within the two brothers. For the older brother, Yngve, his father's insults "colored periods of his life when he felt he was incapable of doing anything and was worthless"; for Knausgaard, "every day it burned inside me." In the book's narrative, the brothers are sharing their respective perspectives on their father at his death, over a decade after they had left their father's house. When Knausgaard started writing the series, he was already in his early forties. That burning, pernicious memory of his father is what propelled Knausgaard to write his epic novel series. I don't know if Knausgaard's father was a narcissist, only that his youngest son feared him, so much so that he would listen for his father's footsteps lest he be taken unawares. That sense of watching someone, like a cornered animal, the wariness, and the possibility of humiliation: it is an apt description for my relationship with my sister as for Knausgaard's with his father. For years after my relationship with my sister ended, I was convinced that people thought lowly about me. She had projected her beliefs, her emotions, her fears about herself onto me. Like a member of a relay team, I in turn projected my sister onto everyone. Everyone saw the worst in me, like she did. Everyone thought they had the right to control my life, like she did. Everyone was out to insult me, like she did. I had lived for years in a relationship where I was always in a flight or fight mode and I couldn't turn it off. This has cost me friends and jobs. There were years where I lived each day automatically, the days turning into weeks, months, seasons...all without me feeling anything. FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt) was the triad of emotions my sister deployed against me. These feelings, which form a complex web of the primal (fear) and societal (obligation and guilt), helped keep me isolated and under her control. Fear: She tried to stalk me. She threatened to destroy my possessions, books I had lent her when we were friendly. She yelled at me multiple times in public. Even though she invited me to live with her, when I didn't do the things she thought I should (not that I disrespected her -- I just refused to let her dictate what I did for a living, whom I dated, and whether I could write in my spare time), she threw me out of her house, knowing that I had nowhere to go. She mocked me in front of her friends. When our parents visited, she hinted around secrets I had told her about my personal life, pretty much letting me know it was in her power to reveal them to our parents. She called me at work to curse me. She would email me at work, sometimes fourteen times in a day. When I asked her to call my cell phone or email to my personal account, she ignored my requests. Obligation: During the worst fighting, my sister got engaged. She held the wedding over my head. She wrote me, emailed me, phoned -- all with the insistent message that I absolutely must reconcile with her because of her wedding. She told me that I would make our family look bad. When I tried to compromise by saying I would attend the ceremony but not the long reception, she raged: "This is my occasion. You are supposed to be happy for me. You are supposed to care. If you don't come to the reception, you can't come at all." Guilt: She said that unless I changed my job as she dictated, I would be a bad daughter to our parents. I asked her for her meaning. She said, "Have you seen how much hospitals cost? You need to have a million dollars to give Mom and Dad if they are ever hospitalized. How are you going to do that with your job?" I asked her, "Do you have a million dollars saved to give Mom and Dad?" She didn't answer. If I was late by even ten minutes (although she was always late), she would start ripping into me, telling me how I was wasting her time. Later, after her son was born, she wrote how she wished he could know me but that she couldn't even tell him about his aunt. When I got married, a few years after I severed contact with her, she yelled at my parents, telling them they had to make me invite her. My parents, to their credit, tried. Yet, in a long angry blog post, she skewered them for not getting that invite, called them weak. Sigh. I don't want to live with her voice in my head. In the mornings, I walk to a park, walk through stretches of man-made wood. A bird perched on a branch above sings the same note twice, pauses, sings those same notes again. His song is beautiful, mine torturous. Many days, I try to remember that her actions are hers alone, that I need not internalize them. One of these days, my notes will be as clear as the bird's.
