Struggling with my mother's childhood trauma

One of the reasons why I no longer speak to my mother is because we have such different views of the world and she has made absolutely no attempt to try to see things from my point of view. On the other hand, I do understand her point of view and it will be the topic of this post. So we must go way back to the period of my mother's childhood where she experienced two traumatic events within a very short space of time in order to understand her mindset. Both of these events happened around the period 1950 to 1951. Let's begin with the death of my grandfather, my mother's father. He had seven children and before you exclaim at that number, it was common for people in those days to have that many children even if they were very poor. My grandfather ran a small business, he would buy items like handkerchiefs, hair clips, toothbrushes and other household items in bulk, then he would use a small pushcart to peddle those items in the streets of the neighbourhood. He would be up at the crack of dawn and would work non-stop until sunset. It was a tough business as his profit margins were tiny and many people preferred going to the bigger shops where they would have a wider choice of goods - my grandfather was limited by what he could physically push around. He offered his customers the convenience of bringing the shop to them, albeit with a limited range of goods. Being an uneducated man, his employment options were very limited and he thought this was better than hard labour, which was what most of his peers did just to put food on the table. There was no financial stability, some days business was good, other days he sold little or nothing. Then one day in 1950, he woke up with a fever and my grandmother told him that he was too sick to work in that state, it was raining on top of that but my grandfather said, if he didn't go out to sell, then there would be no money for food. So he went out to push his cart in the pouring monsoon rain and got even more sick. The flu turned into pneumonia, but he still insisted on going out to work the next day and by the end of the week, he died from what was a preventable death - if he had simply taken a few days off, went to the doctor and got the medication he needed, but that was a luxury that poor people like him didn't have, thus that is a good example of how poor people make bad decisions. 

My grandfather's untimely death left my grandmother with seven children to raise, but that soon became six children because one of my aunties died at the age of seven. As a widow with so many children to bring up, the family went from poor to clinging on to survival, on the edge of starvation. There was simply no spare money for anything beyond the very basics. One morning, shortly after my grandfather had passed away, my auntie woke up with a fever and was clearly very ill. My grandmother didn't have money to take her to the doctor or get her any medicine, so she told my auntie to stay in bed to try to sleep it off. The fever never went away and my grandmother just didn't know what to do - there was no money to deal with the situation. Then a few days passed and my auntie has lost consciousness altogether, my grandmother was in a real panic and ran to a neighbour for help. The neighbour rushed my auntie to the hospital but it was too late - she passed away a few hours later and that's another example of how poor people make terrible decisions because of their poverty. All this happened whilst my mother was between the age of eight and nine; losing your father and sister like that under very similar circumstances scarred her for life. Not only had life become so much harder after her father had passed away, she was worried that the moment she sneezed or had a headache, she was going to become sick like her sister and die from an illness because the family simply had no money for medicines. That fear wasn't irrational at all as she had witnessed both her father and sister die as a direct result of their poverty and there was no reason to suggest that she would survive to adulthood under those circumstances - the fear was real, it was there every single day, every single hour and it haunted her for most of her childhood. My mother suffered from malnutrition when she was a child and was scarily thin because of that extreme poverty, one teacher at the school even forced her to drink cod liver oil as that was what was prescribed to the kids suffering from malnutrition at the time. Her immune system was weak as a result and my mother was constantly ill throughout her childhood, she struggled with a whole range of diseases into adulthood but she managed to stay alive against the odds and she is still alive today. Thus it wasn't an exaggeration that my mother seriously believed that there was a very real possibility that she could die as a result of her poverty during her childhood and sadly, that is the grim reality for a lot of working class people living in extreme poverty. 

I grew up poor and working class, but I never experienced the kind of extreme poverty that my mother experienced as a child. You would only find that kind of extreme poverty in war zones today, in places like Gaza or Haiti where poor people literally die from hunger or diseases. My mother managed to get out of that level of extreme poverty when she started working and earning a decent wage as a teacher, that was in the year 1961. Now she didn't go from poor to rich at that point, she simply became less poor in that she finally had enough money to buy all the food she needed, she had enough clothes, she had a roof over her head and if she fell sick, she knew she could afford to go see a doctor. It wasn't much but it was a vast improvement from her childhood because the threat of death has finally been removed. So now we have set the context, the question is how that traumatic childhood experience affected my mother as an adult? I recently visited the Auschwitz memorial in Poland and in order to prepare myself for that trip, I did a lot of reading about how the survivors of the holocaust who lived through the war in those concentration camps emerged from that experience - one story that struck me was how this survivor said he could never quite forget the hunger he experienced in the concentration camp. It led him to always want to save a bit of food, just in case another war broke out and it led to him hoarding a massive cache of dried and tinned foods in his basement, despite the fact that he lived just around the corner from a massive supermarket. Most people would be able to say, "oh we're all out of bananas, no worries - I'm just going to pop over to the supermarket to get some more." But it was that fear and haunting memory of that hunger that made this holocaust survivor have this compulsive urge to hoard huge amounts of food, it wasn't a rational response. This holocaust survivor has a lot of pain, anguish and trauma but he didn't know how to process all these complex feelings but at the same time, he couldn't just ignore them. Thus this hoarding behaviour was one way he is letting those feelings out a little at a time, given that it was impossible for him to bottle up his feelings altogether. The way I see it, that survivor's basement full of dried and tinned food was a cry for help - it was his way of saying, "I'm still in so much pain after all I've been through, this is my way of letting you know that I'm not okay, I really need help now so please help me."

To be fair to my mother, she hid her trauma from me as a child - we rarely talked about it and I had to piece together what happened before I was born slowly, bit by bit, often getting information from third party. Knowing my mother, she was probably ashamed to admit the way she suffered or the way death was a real prospect for her - being so Chinese, she probably thought she would lose face if she even talked about it with her children. I do wish she had been more open about it as that would have helped explained a lot of things but I am only still piecing together the pieces of this puzzle. On one hand, let me be the first to say that my mother was a victim of poverty and she suffered a lot, but on the other hand, what she suffered really affected her behaviour in the most irrational ways that made her a really bad parent and in turn, I suffered the consequences of that which once again, was not fair on me as I was not responsible for everything that had happened to her before I was born. My mother was different from other Singaporean parents - you see, most Singaporeans would make their children study very hard in order to become successful, they want their children to be rich and become doctors, lawyers or investment bankers. Whilst my mother made me study very hard, she had a different motivation - she put aside any evidence of how well I was doing academically and was so haunted by the trauma that she had gone through as a child that she feared for my death: quite literally, her mantra was, "if you don't study hard enough, you won't pass your exams, you will not be able to get a good job and earn enough money then you will end up like my father or sister, where you're just too poor to solve simple problems in life like getting enough money for medicines when you fall ill, then you will die very young." Look, I believe it is important to make children focus on their studies, but my mother's risk assessment of the situation was totally wrong. The very worst case scenario for me would have been if I didn't focus on my studies because I got distracted by other activities like sports or my hobbies, I would end up with below average grades that didn't reflect my true abilities - that would then be a missed opportunity because I actually had the intellect to make it to a top university, but then that wouldn't happen without me actually working hard for my important exams. If I had messed up those important exams, I might not make it to university or be forced to do a degree at a terrible university at the wrong end of the league tables, then I would face a lifetime of challenges trying to prove that I am actually not stupid despite having ended up at such an awful university with other stupid students who flunked their A levels. I have a good friend who was in that exact difficult situation, thus I'm grateful that I avoided all that. 

In this worst case scenario, say I flunked my exams because I was a playful kid who didn't study hard enough, then I would have spent my working life handicapped by a mediocre or below average degree, this would lead to me being stuck in terrible jobs which I would have found boring and mundane. Oh I would have regretted not studying harder for those exams to have avoided that situation in the first place. However, my mother didn't realize that was the situation - no, she was so traumatized by what she had gone through that she thought I would literally die from poverty if I didn't study hard enough. She applied the same principle to my nephew who is autistic, my nephew had his challenges with school because of his autism and thus my mother went directly to the worst case scenario: death. She thought that if he failed his exams, he would not be able to get a job and die an early death from poverty related issues. In my opinion, my nephew isn't in mortal danger of dying from poverty, rather it is a fate worse than death - if he performed poorly in his studies, he would end up in a mundane working class job where he is simply doing hard labour without once being asked to use his brains. He would end up so bored and hating every moment of such a menial job - imagine if you have a prisoner on death row and instead of sentencing him to death, the judge sentences the prisoner to a lifetime of the most boring, mundane, menial job which he must do until the day he dies. The prisoner would say, "please, can you just execute me instead? I'd rather die than to spend the rest of my life like that." How you would react to that sentence would depend on your decision - if you had suffered the kind of hardship the way my mother has, any kind of life without the threat of death is a luxury. So if you offered a refugee from Gaza a job in Egypt, but it is a terrible job - you'll have to work seven days a week, long hours for very little pay and it is a mundane, boring job. The refugee would say yes to that offer at once with immense gratitude as that's better than facing death and destruction everyday in Gaza. But if you take someone with a good life, who has a rewarding job and has plenty of money to do the fun things in life, then that offer would be a fate worse than death. Thus it is all relative and dependent on what we are comparing. My goal in life was to be in a position to have a lot of fun and I recognize that it costs a lot of money to do all the fun activities I enjoy, my huge mother simply wanted me to do everything I could to stay alive and avoid death. This huge difference in opinion caused a lot of friction, my mother believes I was fundamentally wrong and so she needed to rescue me from the path to disaster. 

Herein lies my mother's mistake: my sisters are both intelligent, hardworking and capable - they were never in any danger of failing their exams and ending up on the scrap heap of society. Even in the case of my nephew, whilst he may be autistic, he actually performed pretty well academically and did well in his exams, in fact he is just like me - one can be both intelligent and autistic at the same time. The key reason why my mother felt she needed to save everyone from death stems from unresolved trauma from her own childhood, rather than because anyone of faced any real threat. However, given her bizarre and poor decisions made in light of this, I'm afraid that meant she was a bad mother who made rather poor decisions for her children. I was forced to defy her and do what was right for me, whilst my two sisters were too Asian to challenged my mother's bad decisions and they suffered the consequences of her bad parenting. Quite simply, if my sisters and I were really stupid, like I mean seriously low-IQ struggling to do even the most basic functions in life, then fair enough, let's take an approach that would set the bar very low and do the bare minimum. But the fact is, we're really not that stupid - yet my mother still adopted that approach as that was what she had to do back when she was clinging on for survival as a child. A good parent needs to adopt the right approach according to the situation presented to the parent rather than just be guided by their past traumas. Thus if a patient turned up at the hospital with a fungal infection in the big toe, the doctor needs to treat that fungal infection rather than just amputate the entire leg. The latter would be simply too drastic and not a step that is warranted for the situation. Yes my sisters and I needed some guidance and parenting when we were children of course, but no, we should not have been treated as if we were retarded, mentally disabled kids who were not capable of doing anything more than the bare minimum. The irony was that my mother worked as a primary school teacher, yet somehow she couldn't tell the difference between a smart kid and a dumb kid - she just assumed that her strategy would apply to all children regardless of their circumstances. Both my sisters were held back by my mother's approach to parenting and I missed out on so many opportunities as a child - for example, there was a chance for me to get some work experience when I was in secondary school but my mother said no way, you need to spend that time revising for your exams and that ought to be your primary focus. I think that was a terrible mistake on her part - I can't remember most of the stuff I learnt in school and none of it was that important. 

Another problem arises when my mother refuses to budge from her point of view and accept that she might be wrong: my second sister (whom I shall refer to as Erjie, that's Mandarin for second sister) has done pretty well for herself. Her husband also has a good job and together as a household they earn enough money to afford them a comfortable lifestyle that most Singaporeans would dream of: they live in a nice condominium, they drive a fancy car and they can afford to spend money on anything they fancy like most rich Singaporeans. Now you might think, surely my mother ought to see that and be happy for Erjie, right? But actually, my mother refuses to accept Erjie's comfortable lifestyle and went as far as to confess to a family friend whom we shall refer to as Mrs Lee that Erjie was "living beyond her means". Now this was not based on any kind of evidence that Erjie and/or her husband were in debt (for the record, they are not), but rather my mother simply refusing to believe that it was possible for Erjie to become this rich despite the fact that my mother had pressured Erjie all her life to settle for the most basic options available in order to avoid failure. Allow me to explain my mother's logic - if Erjie tried to do a difficult job, like if she became a brain surgeon then a patient died because something went very wrong during an operation, then her career would be ruined if she got sued for malpractice. But if Erjie simply became a nurse instead, she would still be in the operating theatre during that same brain surgery but have a lot less responsibility; so even in a worst case scenario, she could simply say, "I'm just the nurse, don't blame me, you need to speak to the surgeon in charge." Thus Erjie had rejected my mother's advice and became a lot richer and more successful than my mother had thought was possible. Now most mothers would be delighted with such a situation, but my mother actually went to a family friend (whom I shall refer to as Mrs Lee) and told Mrs Lee that my sister was living beyond her means, that she was way too materialistic and cared only about money - if my sister had been a better wife and mother, she would have accepted a job that had far less responsibility. She even accused my sister of choosing money over her family, in fact she said so many awful things about Erjie that Mrs Lee had to go tell Erjie what my mother said. When Erjie confronted my mother about it, my mother just freaked out and called Mrs Lee a liar, she denied everything. I know Mrs Lee, she isn't a liar but my mother is. So that's how warped my mother's view of the world is, she isn't just a harmless victim of poverty just suffering in silence - she is a loose cannon wrecking havoc on her own family. 

The key problem that leads to such situations is an issue of trust - my mother refuses to accept that Erjie is better educated and wiser, thus she is in a much better position to make such decisions for herself. On one hand, I can see why my mother has trust issues: the very people who were supposed to take care of her and protect her made such terribly bad decisions. Her father made so many bad decisions, starting with the decision to have seven children despite being so poor - that led to the circumstances of both his death and the death of my mother's sister. Therefore it was only natural that my mother didn't trust her parents, I have a childhood memory of my mother trying to explain something to my grandmother - my grandmother had been quite sick and my mother was trying to translate a letter from the government that was written in English - being uneducated, my grandmother was reliant on my mother to read and translate that letter. The one thing that stood out from that memory was just how frustrated my mother was with my grandmother and how my mother spoke to my grandmother as if my grandmother was a total idiot. I think my mother even got some kind of power trip in such situations, as she knew she was more educated than my grandmother and thus could afford to be condescending. I do also remember how my mother spoke to my sisters when we were kids in that same condescending tone as if my sisters were idiots who needed to be saved from their own stupidity. You could argue there was a point in time when my sisters were under the age of five and as very young children, needed a sensible, responsible adult to take care of them but my mother never seemed to be able to step back and say, you are now an adult, I trust that you will take care of yourself now. I don't know if it is simply a question of trust issues stemming from her childhood trauma but my mother often chooses to trust her own instincts rather than simply say to her children, "okay I don't know, you tell me how this works, you're smarter than me, I paid for your education so at the very least, I may as well take advantage of that now." My mother did not even trust our family GP, once she was prescribed a steroid cream for a skin infection but she refused to use it because she had heard on the news of athletes being banned at the Olympics for taking illegal steroids, so she equated steroids with illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine. I remember shaking my head in utter disbelief and asking her if she really believed our family doctor would give her illegal drugs like a dodgy drug dealer? Why didn't you ask anyone else for their opinion and would you have 'lost face' by talking about it? 

I could go on and on to give you loads more examples of my mother's irrational behaviour but I need to address one important question: clearly, my mother is a victim of her childhood trauma, there's no doubt about that. One would usually respond with sympathy in this situation - surely a victim deserves a lot of compassion, patience and sympathy. But I'm afraid this is where things fall apart for me, you see my family have a very different concept of what family means to me. I believe that a family should be defined by love - so as long as you love the person, you can consider them your family whether or not you are related by blood or not. Whereas with my family, instead they believe that you have a duty of care to your family, so my parents believe they have every right to expect their children to take care of them without needing to reciprocate in any way, shape or form; thus you can remove love from that equation altogether.. So remember what my mother did with Mrs Lee? Well, you'd think that after behaving like that, Erjie might react by keeping her distance but no, as Erjie is so Chinese, she still does nice things for my mother all the time. Erjie even once told me this story, she took my mother out shopping because my father would never ever buy my mother anything nice. So Erjie took my mother to this lovely boutique and told my mother, pick something nice, treat yourself, I'll pay for it. But Erjie then spotted a nice dress and decided to try it on. When my mother saw Erjie in that dress, she said, "you look ugly in that dress, that dress is for a much younger woman and you look ridiculous wearing it. You're too fat for that dress." Firstly, my mother is hardly the most fashionable woman in town and is in no position to give anyone fashion advice. Secondly, you wanna talk about being too fat? My mother is way fatter than Erjie. There was no tact, no concept of being kind and my mother was so blunt she didn't care how my sister felt hearing those words. Now if I were to be charitable, I think what my mother was trying to do was to stop my sister 'wasting' money on that new dress. She was probably thinking, "that money should not be wasted on new clothes as she has plenty of clothes already - I must do something in order to stop her from buying that new dress so she can then still have that money left in the bank to spend on something more useful and practical." Even if that was that case and her heart was in the right place, all her blunt and hurtful words can never ever be justified.

Hence in this situation, Erjie is really trying so hard to shower my mother with love, compassion and kindness and getting nothing but pain, cruelty and frustration in return. How do you think I would react after hearing a story like that? How would that affect my behaviour with that knowledge in mind? So let me explain it like this, if you took a selfie and posted it to Instagram, would you do the same thing again tomorrow? Well, a lot of that would depend on the reaction you got on Instagram. If you got loads of likes and positive comments from both friends and complete strangers, then you would be basking in all that positive feedback and you might not even wait till tomorrow before posting your next selfie there. But if your selfie was ignored by your friends and you got a lot of nasty, cruel comments from strangers telling you how fat and ugly you looked in that selfie, then you would probably take down that post at once and not want to upload anymore selfies in the future given how awful that experience was. Allow me to use another analogy: imagine there is a new restaurant on the street where you live and you're curious to try it, so you ask your neighbours if they have tried this new restaurant. If your neighbours told you that they went there and the food was really good, the service was excellent and they can't wait to go again, then you'd be making plans to visit that restaurant as soon as possible. But if your neighbours told you they had a terrible experience there and they would never spend money there again, you're would be far less likely to want to visit that restaurant after hearing such an awful review. Recently a new Singaporean restaurant called Singapulah opened in London Chinatown and it promised to offer an authentic taste of Singaporean street food to Londoners who were sick and tired of Anglo-Chinese food that has been catered to British customers. Was I excited? Admittedly, yes I have actually tried their food when they did a pop-up a few years ago during the pandemic and actually, it was pretty good back then, especially the beef satay. However, I have read some reviews online first and actually found a rather scathing reviews, mostly to do with the fact that they promised a lot but failed to deliver - the restaurant was poorly run, understaffed and customers were left waiting a long time for their food and the portion sizes were tiny, even stingy despite the hefty price tag. So the question is, did the management of Singapulah imagine that all Singaporeans (and Malaysians) in London would be queueing up to spend loads of money there the moment they heard the word 'lah', or did they actually try to make a genuine effort to deliver a truly unforgettable dinning experience for all the customers?  

Thus on one hand, if anyone can understand what my mother has gone through and why she deserves a lot of sympathy and kindness, it is me. But on the other hand, after I had witnessed the way she treats Erjie, I have decided that keeping my distance was the most pragmatic thing to do. This reminds me of a story that my friend Kelvin told me a while ago, you see Kelvin is a dog lover and once he was walking his dog in the park when he saw a very thin dog sheltering by some dustbins - it was clear that this dog was the victim of some kind of abuse and neglect. It looked hungry and thirsty, on top of that it was also sick, probably in need of medical attention as well. Kelvin was walking his dog at the time and didn't quite know what to do, he was thinking about how his dog might react to that sick dog he just discovered - that was when an older lady came along, she had noticed Kelvin looking at the area by the dustbins and she too saw the sick dog. Without a moment's hesitation, the older lady reached past Kelvin to try to pick up the sick dog but instantly, the dog barked at her and bit her. She recoiled in shock as Kelvin quickly checked on how bad the bite was on her hand, "I was only trying to help him, I meant him no harm but he bit me," the older lady explained to Kelvin. "Yes I know," Kelvin said to her, "but the dog doesn't know - that poor dog has been abused by humans all his life that he simply doesn't trust any humans." People who have faced abuse and neglect like that dog will have trust issues and will lash out at anyone who tries to get near to them, even if like the kind older lady or Erjie, they have nothing but good intentions. So in the example of the sick dog in the park, on one hand, you can objectively say, oh it's not that dog's fault but on the other hand, that older lady got bitten on her hand when she reached out to try to help the dog. So where does this leave us? We have sympathy for both that dog and my mother, but we know that if we make an effort to help, we will get bitten. Where does this leave us? I don't know - in an ideal world, good behaviour, as shown by the kind lady in the park trying to help the sick dog, ought to be rewarded and that would make sense. But when good behaviour isn't rewarded, then people are less likely to want to offer kindness. Kelvin had to tell that older lady to go get some first aid as her hand was bleeding and he would figure something out; in the end, Kelvin, didn't know what he could do either, so eventually he just left too.

So where does that leave me? I am in a position whereby I feel like I understand why my mother behaves the way she does, yet looking at the way she treats my two sisters, I have no incentive to be nice to my mother. There's something very basic about responding to the way people treat you to manage such a situation - you're supposed to reward people who are nice to you and punish or at least ignore those who are mean to you. But if you punish those who go  out of their way to be really nice to you, then nobody would want to be nice to you. I feel sorry for my mother to the point where I can even understand why she behaves in this irrational manner but at the same time, she has discouraged me from engaging her after I have witnessed the way she has abused my two sisters who have gone out of their way to be the perfect filial Asian daughters. If their reward for that is abuse, then I'd rather give my mother a reason to be disappointed in me and hate me. After all, my mother never ever took any interest in me - my friends and colleagues know me a lot better than my parents. My parents have no interest in me, they don't know what I do for a living, they don't know what I am interested in, they have no idea what my hobbies are or what kind of music I like. It is shocking just how little they know about me but then again, should I be surprised? They weren't interested in me when I was a child and nothing has changed now I am an adult. They know nothing about my sisters either and that's mostly because they got married out of a sense of duty to start a family, rather than because they loved each other and if there's no love in that marriage, how can you love your children? If you don't love your children, then how can you even begin to take an interest in them? Thus you have this kind of Asian family defined by duty and responsibility rather than love. So my sisters are putting up with my mother's constant abuse out of a sense of duty and responsibility, even though in private, Erjie has confessed how she really hates the way my mother treats her. Since my mother has never loved me, hence I feel no love for her either but then I don't have my sister's sense of duty or responsibility either. This is probably why I can take a step back and objectively explain to you why my mother is the way she is, whilst I don't think my sisters could bring themselves to do that openly. I don't feel bad about cutting off my mother, but I feel bad about leaving the burden for my sisters to carry. 

So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Can you sympathize with the way my mother's childhood trauma still affects her as an adult today? What do you think is the best way to handle someone like that who is highly irrational as a result of their trauma? If she simply refuses to ask for help, is it possible to offer her any kind of help at all? Should I even try to speak to her again before she passes away and what would I try to achieve if I did that? Would most people think I'm a nasty monster for not speaking to my parents? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.