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My mother can’t help but busy herself when I’m over, and when I think about it it’s always been this way. My grandmother (her mother) had to be begged to sit for holiday meals. And so it may be with me. Again, Eve is assuming her Mom is already halfway to this conversation, when she has almost no context at all. She now knows her mother gets a lot of information from Hanna’s mom, but that doesn’t tell her what her mother is actually hearing, and even now that’s a hard and maddening thing to discern. The truth is Eve’s mother “only” cares about her daughter’s health and material wellbeing, things that Eve herself neglects over the emotional journey she’s on. |
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The little glimpses of family photos are revealing.
They make Eve's mom look like the monster?
OMG, that is such an Asian parent thing! The joke among first gen Asian kids is that their parents never say "I love you", they say "Are you okay for money?" or "Can I buy you anything?" or "Do you need help with <insert expense here>?"
I figured out a long time ago that hearing "I love you" or getting any emotional catharsis from my parents was never going to be a thing. Heck, one of my favourite family moments is when my cousin went on this self-help retreat, and one of the exercises was to call your parents and apologize for something that had been weighing you down. She called her mother in tears to apologize for some really bratty teen-related behaviour from 10+ years ago, and also to apologize for not appreciating everything her mom did for her, and her mom just laughed and said, "What the heck have you been drinking out there?"
So, yeah… The best I can do was just accept the $200 worth of porkchops, potatoes and fruit my parents carted over when they came to visit ("it was on sale!"), and just spend time fielding questions about my financial well-being and tell them about their grandchildren, and deal with the rest with friends or a therapist.