Board Games
My siblings and I can’t play board games together. We are all totally incapable of sitting down and engaging in the myth that is “friendly competition”. The problem with this is, because we’re all siblings, everything is a competition and nothing about competition to us is friendly. Like one time a game of monopoly ended up in a full blown fist fight, complete with the board being whipped at someone, someone tackling another person over the couch, and some asshole robbing the bank when the shenanigans were in full force. And don’t get me started on what happens if we play a two-player game where we need to work together.
Part of me thinks this is normal, but another part of me thinks that all my brothers and sisters and I have inherited a flaw from both my parents. We are all incredibly and indelibly insecure. Now at first, one might think that since we’re all siblings I might be mistaking normal sibling rivalry for insecurity. After all siblings are, to some extent, supposed to tease you about those fluorescent pink pants that you thought were super cool but your older sister insisted they made you look like some fucked up version of a highlighter. That’s normal sibling stuff right? And had this been the only kind of teasing going on, things would have been much more tranquil in our house. But it wasn’t. Looking back, we all started teasing each other when we were very little but even then it was always motivated by a deep seated need to prove not only that the other person was unquestionably wrong, but that they were a huge idiot for disagreeing with you. Conversation with us was always a full contact sport and there was no such thing as understanding or accepting the other person’s point of view or just agreeing to disagree. I remember the first time I heard the phrase, “Lets agree to disagree” I was like, what kind of weird fuckery is this where I just passively submit to your views which are obviously stupid if you’re disagreeing with me, and I don’t verbally grind you into submission?? I had seriously never had an instance where someone else’s views were accepted, or even considered, especially if they were different than mine. And there is a reason for that.
My mother and my father were both abusive. And oddly enough I’ve noticed there is a misconception when it comes to saying that. Most people think that when I say, my parents were abusive, that my home life was spent in constant misery huddled in the fetal position crying somewhere. And it wasn’t. Granted there was a lot of crying, but as kids we all went to Disneyland like any other family, we laughed and had fun times, we rode bikes, and dug up crawfish in the creek in the back of our house like any other “normal” family did. That is, in my opinion, one of the truly mentally exhausting and insidious aspects of the type of abuse that went on. That there was no way to tell when something would blow up in your face. It was like a game of abuse hot potato. So we would have spans of time where nothing happened and we just went about our lives. Yet, each and every aspect of our life was enforced by a threat of violence. And I do not mean spankings. I was punched, kicked, picked off my feet and strangled, thrown against walls, and into objects. I was hit with things ranging from a belt buckle to a freezer door. Don’t get me wrong, the actual abuse is incredibly shitty, but another terrible byproduct of abuse is the constant feeling of being powerless. It’s the perpetual and unspoken tip toeing around my father and my mother because you never knew if and when something would set them off. And if the abuse was ever done from one parent to another, the parent on the receiving side often tries to alleviate their own powerless feeling by exerting control over anything they can. Money, friends, kids. Anyone or anything is fair game. This was true with my mother. To be clear my father did not hit my mother after the birth of my older sister. However, I’m not sure if it was the birth of his first child that stopped him from doing that, or an instance of abuse that ended in my mother pulling a knife on my father and warning him that if he ever laid a hand on her again, she would kill him. She ended up leaving him for a few months I think, I’m not sure about the timeline. But my father was still very emotionally abusive towards her. Most of the time my parents were ok with each other, but looking back on my young childhood I see very distinct areas where my father still exerted a lot of control over my mother. Or times where she was made to feel less than.
My mother was a stay at home Mom and she had five kids so that was no small feat, and my father often worked overseas so she spent a lot of time doing this by herself. Yet instead of seeing that as the very important and difficult job that it was, my father often admired other women who were professionally accomplished in front of my mother. Things like, “You remember Henry? I met his wife, really nice lady, they’ve got 2 kids and she went to nursing school while Henry and her were dating…she’s a nurse now and makes a lot of money, really nice lady.” When I was little my mother was not allowed to be on the checking accounts so anytime she needed to pay something with a check, like a bill or anything, she had to forge my father’s signature. Even though my father constantly and almost compulsively spent all the money in pursuit of building his own business which always failed, and often borrowed money from my mother’s parents or his brothers. And heaven forbid if she have any money in her own name. I remember there was an instance where my mother tried to get a credit card when I was in the eighth grade. My father found out about it and flew home from the middle east, where he was working at the time, just to cut it up in front of her. My mother was not allowed to have any friends and if by chance there was another lady she met at church that came around to hang out with my mother my father would get sulky and upset. He would accuse my mom of neglecting the kids, or tell her how dirty the house was because she was neglecting the housework to go “hang out with her friends”. Which was never true. My mother kept a very clean house. Was it perfect? No. But I’d challenge anyone to find someone who is raising five kids and has an immaculately clean house. Yet my mother was often compared to her various sister in laws and the fact that whenever we went to visit one of them, their house always seemed sooo clean. Never mind the fact that most of them did not have five kids or a husband that would selfishly spend all the money on his “business endeavors”, or at times was a single parent.
As is very common with abusers my father was almost obsessively concerned with optics. How he was perceived or how his family made him look was always a huge deal and he had strict rules for controlling that. Rules that were routinely and rigidly enforced at home and especially in public. Like when were at home and ate at the table my father would scrutinize all of us while we ate, and he was not shy about doing it. If he noticed something that he didn’t like, he would stop eating and very openly and very noticeably stare at you. The conversation or laughter that was happening would quickly and uncomfortably die out as the whole table waited for my father to do whatever it was he was going to do. If the offense was slouching in my chair or over my food it could mean that I would simply be told to not eat like an animal. He then would very loudly tell my mother how l was eating was so low class and that now we obviously couldn’t go out to a restaurant or eat anywhere in public because I looked so terrible. Then he’d remind everyone at the table that this is why we practiced at home. Or it could mean I was yanked out of my chair, yanked around by my shirt while being yelled at, then thrown back on my chair which he roughly shoved it back in front of the food. Or it could be a simple punch to the leg. It was always different. To this day, even though I’ve traveled quite a bit and eaten in places ranging from diners to Michelin Star restaurants, it is an incredibly uncomfortable experience to eat with my father. At home or at a restaurant. In a weird kind of irony a lot of people tell me that they are anxious or subconscious about eating alone in public or that it makes them feel like a loser, and I have to laugh at myself because I find it an oddly relaxing experience.
But no matter how different the punishment was, we were never allowed to cry or even be sad because we got punished. Doing so would often result in more verbal ridicule or more screaming about how we were only sulking. And my father hated sulking. Or any emotion that wasn’t his for that matter. I’ve often called my father an emotional tyrant because his emotion had to be the biggest or the most felt in the room. If you were upset at something, I do not recall many instances where he would ask what you were upset about and try to calm you down. He would just suddenly and irrationally begin pacing around the room creasing his lips which was a sign that he was pissed. And no one was ever allowed to be upset at him. For anything. All through my childhood I cannot remember a single instance where one of us was upset at something he did and yelled at him then stormed off to our room and slammed the door. That never happened. My parents never apologized for anything they did, even if it was painfully apparent they had been in the wrong. It didn’t matter. Or like if my father was upset, which was pretty often, no one could talk and certainly not laugh. I remember if my father was angry and we were in our car, we would try to talk in low voices but if there was any laughter my father would tilt the rear view mirror to look back at us and yell for us to stop giggling and be quiet. It’s like he thought we were laughing at him or something. Keep in mind that most of the experiences I will tell you about started from when I was in kindergarten and continued till I was in the ninth grade. So for me that would mean from four to about fifteen. Some things stopped a bit earlier, some a bit later.
Power Struggles
I could go on and on about all the little rules and opportunities for transgression there were, but that would make for the longest blog in the universe. I’ll just sum up by saying there were a lot of them. Even the smallest acts were subject to these standards. Like an occasion where it was me, my older sister, and my father at home. My older sister said to me, “I’m hungry. I’m going to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich really quick, you want one?” My father dissolved into a tirade of how, because she didn’t offer to make him the peanut butter and jelly sandwich first, that she was not giving him the honor that was rightfully due as her father. And it says in the bible that children are supposed to honor their fathers and how that in turn meant she was a horrible daughter. I was completely unaware a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would mean THAT much to God, but my father thought so. Which brings in another means of judgment and control that permeated our life. Our religion.
In addition to the very controlling parents we had, our religion had very strict and regimented aspects of control. Like if we wanted to go to a school dance, well that wasn’t allowed so my mother would just immediately dismiss the concern without discussion. Or if we wanted to play sports. Different request, same result. Even very personal things like masturbation or sexual thoughts, well all those things are unclean so you should pray to God to help you rid yourself of those thoughts or desires. And if you were not clean or did anything the church considered inappropriate they could kick you out. Which would have been a good thing had that not involved the fact that no one at church or your family would be able to talk or interact with you. And as a kid that’s not a particularly pleasant thought. There was absolutely nothing in our life that was ours or that was private. My parents, particularly my mother, would conduct routine searches of our rooms while we were at school for anything that was deemed offensive. I remember one time I had a note from one of my classmates in my desk drawer and they had said, “Ugh my Mom is acting like a bitch…” and my mother found it. That was enough to convince my mother that I shouldn’t be allowed the freedom of riding my bike to school because I was choosing bad association there, since this person was obviously a bad person because she had such a terrible view of her mother. So for several weeks after she found that note, she had to drop me off and pick me up at school. Yenno, just to make sure I’m not hanging around the baddies. To be completely honest I’m not sure how driving me to school limited my association, but whatever. It was their circus.
In any case, what I’m trying to get at is since all of us were subjected to constant scrutiny and there was an ever present threat that at any time anything could set off my father, that we are all incredibly self conscious people. We’d never admit it to you in person, but we are. None of us take criticism very well, even though I do try it never works, and we cannot have a verbal debate without their being a celebrated winner and verbally bloodied loser. We are all very sensitive and what I believe to be the most impactful to my life personally, is that absolutely everything is an attempt to manipulate or a power struggle. Because for so long, none of us had any power. To me it’s like the TV show Hoarders. When I’ve watched that show I noticed that most of the people who hoard things do so because they have been made to go a span of time without something that made them feel empowered or in control of their surroundings. Like if they hoard food most of the time it’s because there was a point where they weren’t able to get any food so they might have been starving or homeless. Same thing goes with the feeling of empowerment. It’s like a scarcity thinking regarding control. If you go through almost all of your childhood seeing your mother being treated the way she was; with no friends, and no money of her own, often times frustrated and underappreciated that translates much the same way as not having any food does. At least for me it did. If you live with someone or some religion constantly trying to find fault with you and controlling you in every single aspect of your life from the emotions you felt, to what you wore out in public, to how you ate, to how you made sandwiches that behavior repeatedly reinforces that you have no power in the world you live in. Add in that by controlling someone like that, you take away their ability to see that there is an alternative to the views expressed. I was gay, but I didn’t realize I was or even that I could be gay until much later in my life. So it’s not that the people being controlled just don’t express their voice, they don’t even realize they have one.
Ugh. I feel like I’ve given myself a personality disorder just writing about this stuff. Imagine living that. Every. Single. Day. That’s why all my siblings and I are all so incredibly sensitive and insecure. Because everything is viewed as an attempt to control us. Or as an attack or slight on our carefully constructed opinions. And all our opinions were so carefully guarded because they were the sliver of our identity that was completely ours. So you disagreeing with them meant you didn’t just view things differently, it was you trying to attack us personally. This is especially true for me in social interactions. I wasn’t even the one to notice this. It was actually my therapist who had read the last post called, “Strong Enough Not To Chase” about how hard it is for me to reach out to people. Well one of the first things she said was, “Why does it have to be chasing people?” I had to think about this and write about it for a few days, and in processing this question it seems to be because I have this system of credits and debits in my head for every social situation. Like if I text you good morning, that’s a plus. But if you don’t text me back that day and definitely the next, that’s a minus. So then I’ll view that as you trying to manipulate me into being the first one to text you good morning again and of course that’s not ok. So I won’t do it again. At least not until you text me good morning. Because that one small interaction that put you in a deficit equates to you trying to control me. And I can’t take that. Because I already had an entire childhood of that. Never mind the fact that you might have been busy with your own shit that day, or that maybe you saw the message and simply forgot to respond. It doesn’t matter, my brain will process this as an intentional attempt to gain power over me. Because for so long every interaction in my life was. So I don’t know how to view things through the lens of someone who is comfortable enough with themselves to be like, “Damn, she didn’t call me back…I hope she’s good. I’ll give her a msg again tomorrow to make sure.” What my crazy looks like is, I’ll send a text then wait…and if you don’t text me back…it’s obviously that you just didn’t want to talk to me and that you intentionally ignored me. And both of these are minuses. And if I try to interact with you while you’re in the negative, that’s me “chasing” you. Chasing you to be my friend, chasing you for attention, whatever, it all means that you’re the one in control. And I am not. And that…that is just too incredibly painful.
This is why board games are out. Can you imagine two or more people who are this sensitive and insecure trying to engage in a game of monopoly where the point of everything is to pretty much bankrupt the other person the fastest? So of course the fact that you put hotels on Pacific when you knew I only had five hundred dollars is an attack on me. A genuine serious attack. Like you think you’re better than me? Cause I make more money than you in real life so sucks to suck. Never mind that this correlation is stupid and the amount of anyone’s annual salary has no relation to a fucking board game. It doesn’t matter, we all look at it that way. I’m working on it though. But just to be clear, no, my brother does not make more money than me. And yeah, I put those hotels there on purpose.