Please, What Else Is On?

[Take A Bow – Glee Cast cover, original by Rhianna]

(Have I used this song already?)

Day 29 — The person that you want tell everything to, but too afraid to

Dear Mom,

Aren’t you feeling special that you got mentioned twice?

I do wish I could tell you everything. You used to watch Gilmore Girls and remark that the mother and daughter had such a close relationship they’d tell each other everything. You used to say you wish we had that.

But do you know why we can’t? Because you’re too narrow-minded. Anything that is different from how you were brought up, you reject. But you don’t seem to see that we’re living in a Western culture, and that is where I have been brought up. You don’t seem to see that I’m no longer that little Chinese girl, but I’m a grown woman with my own opinions, and they mostly all differ from yours.

You also make it incredibly difficult to trust you. In the past, every time that I had trusted to tell you the truth about something that I’d done wrong, you never failed to disappoint me in not taking my side. When I got a detention for a stupid uniform rule (I wore short socks instead of long), you told me off instead of saying, “Well that’s a silly rule.” I don’t even mind getting a detention; what the school thought of me meant nothing. When I was suspended for unfair reasons, you didn’t say, “I agree, the school is being a dickhead.” Instead you said that the school was right in their actions, and you never fail to bring it up every time I say I don’t want to attend a Uni lecture – despite the fact that lectures and high school classes are completely different matters.

Yes, I remember these little betrayals, because they hurt.

There are so many more major bridges that I have yet to cross, when it comes to telling you things about me, your own daughter. But I can’t cross those bridges when you’ve already sealed them off to your own views on what should happen. I know that it sucks for you that your only daughter doesn’t share the same wishes and wants as you’d envisioned her to have, but at the same time shouldn’t you be happy that she’s healthy, she’s got great friends, she’s not out on the streets every night shooting up drugs and having sex? Shouldn’t you be happy that she’s got a goal in life, and that she’s working towards being happy, even if that path is different to the one you want her to take?

I can’t even tell you about how my friendships have all changed, because you keep telling me that I’d lost my friends because of my own shortcomings in being able to keep them, and didn’t even consider the possibilities that it wasn’t my fault at all, that, hell, I’d fought tooth and nail to keep them.

So, no, I can’t tell you a single thing about me and, to save myself the pain, I don’t plan to.

Alex.