It’s been three weeks since my mom asked K‘s full name (I’m only using his first initial for sake of privacy) and she started verbally attacking me because I didn’t give him our last name.
Now I will confess that my parents were extremely helpful in purchasing many of the baby items we needed, and helping us financially. But I never forced them to do this, and with each gift I feared it would be smacked back in my face ten times harder. My mother has always been this way and that’s why I always feared her generosity.
I understand they are hurt for my failure to give K their surname, and for being in upstate New York and not seeing their only grandchild until who knows when. But I’m now dead to my parents (my mother’s words) and she has disposed of everything of mine: photo albums, my artwork, graduation certificates, etc. “Photo albums and everything else I’ve kept for you will be trashed, just as you’ve trashed us.” She also cancelled my life insurance policy.
The last words my mother said to me were “Fuck you!” I called the house the third day of her threatening texts, and began to leave a voicemail because my parents would not answer their cells or the direct line. I started to get choked up as I left a message and then my mom answered angrily, “Oh, stop!” Even as a child when I began to cry, my mother would have zero empathy for me and convinced herself I was faking my tears to just gain sympathy.
I sent my father a Father’s Day card, but I didn’t call him. I was too scared to. But the fact that I wasn’t able to speak with him while my mother was flying off the handle, and still hasn’t reached out to me, tells me I really am dead to them.
This bothers me a lot. There have been times where I have not spoken to my mother for a year or two (my father would call me randomly every few months to check in on me) because her toxicity has infected me since childhood, and I needed a break from it in order to try and heal. But now their silence and their disregard for me hurts a lot more. Maybe because many of my friends and acquaintances have lost one or both parents these past few years. Or maybe because K is their only grandchild and they’re abandoning him by disowning me.
It’s always been severely painful for me to witness loving families with me being a Korean adoptee, and having an adoptive mother who would love me one minute and hate me the next. This is why I struggled and still do with feeling abandoned and worthless. (To have my whole existence erased by my parents, and to not be able to do anything about it because 3,000 miles separate us is devastating and frustrating.) And because I never thought I could even get pregnant, the fact that I have a son that my parents want no connection with, saddens me down to my core.
My parents have been showing up in my dreams consistently, and I woke up the other night to nurse K, and cried for an hour thinking about their choice to be absent from his life because of my decision on his names.
I want to send photos of K to them, and share the photographs I just received today of his birth and his newborn session. But I’m scared to interact with my parents out of fear my mother will belittle and reject me once again.
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