I am writing this after suffering from a bad bout of indigestion / acid reflux the past few hours, after I've gone to bed. After unsuccessfully trying to cure it with some clumped up ENO salts (does it mean it has gone bad, and isn't effective anymore? I don't know), I decided to get out of bed, go to the kitchen and rummage for a hot drink. No cereal drink. Saw a packet of dehydrated rice soup, so mixed that with some miso and drank it. That seemed to work.
Sitting in the kitchen, I was struck by a revelation, as “revelations” tend to come in the middle of the night. I'm going to put this down so I don't forget it when I go to bed.
Actually I can pinpoint the reason for this indigestion. My mother made me not one, but two burritos filled with mashed up avocado, cheese and fish meat. I ate one, and put the other in the fridge. But even one was too much. I think that the ability to put one into the fridge is an improvement over the past, when I would eat both. But the correct response is to eat neither and put both in the fridge. Then, tell my mother I don't need to eat them.
My diet for most of the week is generally very light, mostly salad / veggies and a small serving of potatoes or rice. It's not me trying to be healthy, it's just that I like the taste of such food. I sometimes eat a whole chunk of fish or an entire plate of fried rice, but only once in a few days, when I get the craving, usually after heavy exercise. So my stomach simply cannot handle – nor should I even train it to handle – the type of food I get in the weekends. Meat, more meat, meat soup, the fake “pizzas” and “burritos” and “pancakes” that my mother believes I like (and I can't dissuade her of that notion).
I must make the response of a reasonable man, and say no.
I feel, really, that my mother is out of control. My father too, but with buying alcohol for me. Both of them really if you look at it. They believe that I want or need some food, and they want to give me what they believe I want or need, whether I want or need it or not. It is not possible to tell them what I want or need, because they do not take feedback on such matters from me. More on that later. But now, even if I manage to convey to them what I want or need, they will provide it in excess. My father is the second, because he actually tends to be the observant one, and he knows I like alcohol. (This makes controlling my intake harder, so I suppose I must control harder.) My mother is the first.
Now....why do they do that? It's just the chinese parent thing. They focus on food. Food is the root of all health and the cure of all ills. But wait, there's more. There is nothing as too much food making you ill, there is only too little food making you ill. This is a culture of 5000 years of rural deprivation. Meat is good, it cures ills. Eating meat makes people strong and healthy. Eat as much meat as possible. In the poor rural where such a belief formed, it was absolutely true! People did not have enough protein and fat. Eat rice to get strong. Eat lots of rice. Again this was absolutely true for rural farmers who had to do a lot of physical work and lacked protein. No longer true today, but the culture is there, and the underlying causes for such cultural beliefs have become displaced, out of time and space.
As I sat in the kitchen drinking my rice soup, I suddenly realised that I had to change my internal relationship with food, and my relationship with parents. I must dissociate food with “precious things” in my mind, when food comes from my parents. Food obtained by myself can continue to be precious things in my own private life. In other words, I must think of my food as food, but my parents' food as just objects in a stall. This is not unlike how when you go to the cafeteria, you don't need to eat everything in the cafeteria. The hawker makes in excess, and of course they would like you to buy all of it, but you don't have to. The food in the hawker's stores are just objects. They only become food when I buy it, take hold of it, and mentally declare this to be my food.
This is the same thing with my parents. They have made a lot of food, and they would want me to eat all of it. The coin in the exchange is not material money. The coin is emotional coins. When I eat their food, I am “paying” them in emotional coins, and these coins make them feel good. This goes back to the complain I often make about this food situation, where I say they are doing it for themselves and not for me, because they doing something for me just makes them feel good about themselves. But now, we have set it out clearly. As emotional hawkers, of course they want to get as much emotional coin from me. Just like monetary hawkers, who want to get as much monetary coin from me.
The next step along the thinking is this: if my parents cannot control themselves, because the undercurrent of all of this is that they are emotional hawkers, I will just have to control myself. This is not because I am mean, cruel to my parents, or selfish. For the sake of my own health, I will say no. If my mother makes two burritos, I don't have to eat “at least” one. If she makes a giant pot of fried rice, I don't have to eat “at least” a bowl. This, I think she has realised, so she adapted her tactics into making as many different types of food as possible rather than one type in bulk. This then forces me to eat “at least some” of each type. See – emotional hawkers. Therefore, I have to adapt too. She can cook whatever she wants. What she cooks are objects that have nothing to do with my food.
This would be easy if she, like the hawkers, just stood there waiting for you to come get the food. (Fortunately, my father is like that. So with regards to alcohol it's more of a self-control issue.) My mother is more like a salesman. She will nag me to eat constantly. And the next part is a bit of a pop psychology from transactional analysis.
When I say parents, I think at this time I expect them to behave like adults, and treat me as an adult. But they cannot. They are stuck as parents, and to be parents, they need a child. Therefore, they cannot not treat me as a child, because they cannot stop acting like parents, otherwise they will become parents to a blank air. Why can't they stop acting like parents? No – it is not age. This has nothing to do with age at all. It is an individual thing, a cultural thing. Why? Because nothing about age says anything about someone acting in "parent" mode. These modes are inherent in everyone.
It's a bit sad because when I share all the information tidbits about various things with them, I am thinking that I am sharing amusing information with adults, as an adult. But now I realise that in their mode, they are treating me as a “little professor” child telling them about what it has learnt. This is why when my mother asks me to clean the house for her weekly, and I did it since it is reasonable request, she then wanted me to drink soup to “get a reward” (her words). If you look at it this way, it's disturbing and rather sad.
And when I say “no” to them, they don't consider it to be an adult telling them no. In their minds it is a “rebellious child” saying no to what parents know best, so they must be more controlling / give in to humour me. No wonder whenever I lose my temper in the past, they find it funny and start to laugh. "Oooh little kid is throwing a tantrum, hahaha!"
And of course, because they are constantly sending parental transactions, they keep luring me to responding with a child transaction, and I fall right into it. It takes two hands to clap. Losing my temper in anyway, criticizing them, is all “rebellious child” to them, and makes it even easier for me to slip into the child transaction mode. I really do not need to give them any further reason why I don't want to eat, other than that “I am not hungry, so I am not eating”, or “I don't want to eat that, so I am not eating”. This response is a reasonable response expect from any adult by any adult, given by any adult to any adult. Examine your interaction with any other adult colleague or friend – isn't that true? Yes it is.
As to my worry whether we will all become this way when we get old – the answer is no. Not while we are maintain awareness of our own behaviour. Not while we make sure that we can move between all modes of behaviour and not get stuck in one. Complaining about our parents, is in fact, trying to be parents. This way, we emulate them, to complain about parents (as senile children) and complain/control our own children, if we have any. Do this for the next ten to twenty years, which is when I guess they started complaining about their parents and their children, and we'll end up like them. I believe the correct response is to treat them as adults with a problem, and to come up with creative ways to manage them while retaining self-control.
This extends beyond parents. This extends to our interaction with others in our life and in our social games. Getting together to complain about the world is after all what is associated with grumpy old people. It is a statement of “they should be how I want them, but they're not, they're
And I am sure as we manage them, we'll find that sometimes their way is right too. Perhaps some of their ways are right, and some are wrong. Perhaps our way is wrong. Then we must learn, change, or adapt/compromise. But isn't this what being young is? Lose this ability, and we'll truly be going in loops.
So I issue the challenge: can we continue to evolve our own behaviour?
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