Ask Auntie Millie: Psychological Games With Mummy

Dear Auntie Millie,

I’m twenty-five years old, single and newly settled in KL. I was brought up by my late grandparents in a small town, attended university in another part of the country where I also worked for a few years, and only moved here late last year for a great job opportunity. The job is everything I hoped it would be, but I’ve not had the time to make any new friends at all, and I actually don’t know anyone in KL, so I’ve been quite lonely despite telling myself that it will all get better with time. Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, I heard from my mother, whom I’d not seen since I was five years old.

A bit of background: my mother got pregnant with me when she was eighteen. She wasn’t married to my father, whoever he was. I’m not sure why she chose to go through with the pregnancy. Her family wasn’t Catholic, and knowing my grandparents, I think they would have supported her choice whatever it was, but she chose to give birth to me even though she wasn’t interested in being a mother. She then left me with my grandparents when I was two months old. For the first few years of my life, she would show up a few times a year with clothes and presents for me. I have close to zero direct memories of that time; it’s mostly from my grandparents that I know she would take me out for ice cream and spoil me with whatever she could afford, more like a visiting auntie than a mother. But when I was about four or five years old, her visits slowly grew more infrequent and then fizzled out completely. Although I don’t know the details, I heard she was in many other relationships with men, and over the years I would hear whispered rumours about her affairs and marriages and separations and divorces. At one point it was even believed that she’d had other children, but I don’t know if that was true.

My grandparents were loving and kind people who gave me a stable childhood and a good education. Unlike our other relatives, they also never badmouthed my mother. They would always stand up for her, saying that she wasn’t an evil person just because she had made some poor choices and mistakes, and assuring me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, I sometimes used to get really sad as a child, thinking that I was so unworthy of love that even my own mother didn’t want me. Although my grandparents faithfully attended all my school functions and ceremonies, I was still acutely conscious of not having any parents, unlike the other kids. For a few years in primary school I invented a family for myself — mum, dad, and a younger sister — and told my classmates that my parents were just very busy with their jobs, but I’m sure the truth got out and everyone knew I only had my grandparents.

When I was fifteen, I asked my grandparents for my mother’s last known address and wrote to her, telling her I’d like to keep in touch. To my surprise, she did write back, and we ended up exchanging letters for a few months. During that time, I asked her who my father was. Then I didn’t hear from her for quite a while, but eventually she wrote back. She told me that my father was a family friend of my grandparents’, an older married man who seemed to have groomed her (although she did not use that word) from a young age, showering her with attention and expensive gifts before luring her into a brief fling when she was eighteen. She even gave me his name, but she made me promise never to divulge this information to anyone else or even to tell my grandparents. The man she named as my father was of a different race than her and my grandparents, but it all made sense to me because people had always commented that I had “different” features for someone of my race. As I was young and lost and looking for an identity to cling to, I became quite fascinated by my supposed father’s race and culture. I even took classes in his mother tongue, and over the years I sort of stalked my him from a distance. Occasionally I would fantasise about approaching him one day. I wondered if he might actually feel some guilt and regret for what he’d done if he knew I existed, but I never let it go further than wondering because I’d promised my mother never to reveal what I knew.

When I heard from my mother a few weeks ago, I was quite excited, because her message came at the end of a particularly hard period at work, and I was even doubting my decision to move here. Since my grandparents passed away a few years ago, I’ve really been quite alone in the world. So I messaged my mother back immediately, but now I’m starting to feel uneasy about her, and I’m scared that I’ll naively trust her just because I’m vulnerable, when she doesn’t seem to deserve that trust. For one thing, she now denies that she ever told me who my father was. I no longer have her letters to prove that we once corresponded about this, but I know I couldn’t have made the whole thing up. Yet she says that she’d never have “cooked up” a story like that because my father was “just some classmate” she slept with only once. As for my father being of a difference race, she basically laughed and asked me, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

What is even more disturbing to me is that she says my grandparents were not at all who I thought they were. She claims that they were psychologically and even physically abusive to her, and that she “fell into bad company” and started drinking, smoking, and sleeping around in secondary school just to get away from them. According to her, they shamed her constantly for not being a good student, and went as far as to deny her food and other basic needs when her exam results were not good enough for them. I don’t know what to make of all this; I feel as though I’ve stepped into a horrible alternate universe. My grandparents are not here for me to ask them what they have to say about these accusations or to get their side of the story. My memories of them were so precious to me because they were all I had left in this world, and now I feel like my mother has stolen the one good thing about my childhood. I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter whether her accusations are true or not, because even if they are, my own memories of my grandparents are just as true — that what my mother did or didn’t experience doesn’t cancel out my own experiences — but I can’t get my mother’s stories out of my head. It’s as though they’ve cast a permanent dark cloud over everything, all my golden memories of good times with my grandparents. I don’t even get to remember them fondly now without feeling bad.

My mother is now begging me to help her financially. She’s even hinted that I owe her whatever help she needs to “get back on her feet” because my grandparents gave me all the love and care that she should have had from them. She compares our situation to families in bygone days where the oldest child’s studies would be paid for all the way with the understanding that that oldest child would then support their siblings financially: she says I benefited from the money, time, and attention my grandparents invested in me, and that I should “pay it forward” now, although she just means I should pay it back to her, not to other people. As you can see, I’m finding it very hard to think about this objectively and rationally. I admit I still harbour quite a lot of resentment against my mother for abandoning me (and probably lying to me about my father). On top of that, I’m a young woman just starting out in my career. I don’t have any family network or even close friends who would drop everything for me in an emergency. I don’t have a partner and don’t even know if that’s in the cards for me. So I feel that I need to build my career and save up for my own future, but my mother argues that she is my family and that “family should be there for each other,” even though she was never there for me. She has made many excuses for this, telling me that she was unwell and “falling apart” and struggling with addiction and other challenges, and I try to be sympathetic but the fact is that she wasn’t there for me. She’s also forty-three years old and in my opinion has had enough time to get her life together; if she’s not managed to save any money at all for her basic needs, it can only be because she has issues she chooses not to resolve.

All the same, I’m still torn. Just like me, my mother is alone. Part of me feels that if I helped her and tried to build a relationship with her even at this late stage, the two of us would at least have each other instead of each of us being alone in the world. What do you think I should do, Auntie Millie?

Sincerely,

Single Red Rose, PJ

***

Dear Rose,

I have no doubt that your mother has had her struggles and battles. Having struggled doesn’t necessarily make one noble and good, though, and your mother, I’m sorry to say, sounds like a selfish, manipulative person. At the age of forty-three, she hasn’t even managed to take that first essential step of admitting her own mistakes; she continues to blame her parents for everything that has gone wrong in her life. I happen to be of that old-fashioned generation that holds that there is an age past which one needs to take responsibility for one’s own life and stop blaming one’s parents and ancestors, first of all, but what your mother is doing is even more insidious than simply refusing to take responsibility: she is also blaming the very people who are not here to defend themselves. I find it hard to imagine that she is not doing this knowingly, having calculated her options; she knows enough not to blame anyone you could ask for their side of the story.

It’s not that I think parents are perfect; it’s entirely possible that the same grandparents who were wonderful to you did make some mistakes as parents. In fact, they may even have been so wonderful because they remembered and regretted their mistakes, and chose to learn from them. All these are possibilities, but that is not the point. The point is that your mother does not come across as someone you should trust, and your misgivings are very much warranted. The story you’ve shared about your mother feeding you a rather detailed story about the identity of your father, and then flatly denying it, is very telling. The whole episode hints at pathologies I am not qualified to diagnose, all of which are infinitely more amusing in the pages of a Saki short story than when one is forced to endure them in real life. Already, weaving a tale and then passing it off as real is bad enough (and which one is the tale and which one the fact? Your mother has left you to wonder about that on your own). A person who does this is either unable to, or does not care to, distinguish clearly between reality and fantasy. But to turn around and claim she never wove the tale is even worse: such a person cannot be relied upon to stick to truthful versions of events. Either her memory is genuinely unreliable (for example, she may forget which versions she has told which person), or she is in the habit of assuming that other people won’t remember what she’s told them, or she knows that other people may remember, but doesn’t particularly care. Honestly, it doesn’t matter which of these is the case here; for your purposes, all that matters is that you should not trust her.

I wish I could tell you something simple and reasonable-sounding, such as “lend her a small amount of money, make it clear that it is a one-time-only thing, and don’t expect to get it back.” But the money is the least of my worries, and the smallest possible loss. The greater worry is that she would wear down your emotional defences through her appeals to sympathy or through her charms, and that you would be susceptible to all of this because you are, by your own admission, lonely. A loan of five hundred ringgit can be written off even if it pinches; having one’s heart broken by one’s own mother — the one figure around whom all of human civilisation has woven so many great expectations and grand myths — is a much harder thing to heal from. So much of every culture — so much literature, mythology, and religion — sells us ideals of motherhood, a mother’s love, maternal sacrifice, and so forth that it is impossible to be completely impervious to these ideals. This is why it is probably harder to accept abandonment by a mother than by anyone else, and also why the temptation to give multiple chances to a person who doesn’t deserve them is that much greater when the person is your own mother. It is natural to long for a relationship with your mother, and natural to want to believe that you could, somehow, build a relationship in which you will “have each other.” Given everything you’ve told me about her, I’m afraid such a relationship is highly unlikely.

I can’t tell you exactly what to do — to lend or not lend the money, for example, is your own decision, though if you do lend it I would strongly advise doing as I describe above: small amount, one-time loan, don’t expect it to be returned. But in your place I would tread very, very carefully, investing as little hope and emotion in this new relationship as I possibly could, and choosing instead to use my time and energy to find and build friendships elsewhere in order to be less lonely and less vulnerable. I hope these loose guidelines help.

Yours ever,

Auntie Millie