Why is this happening to me!

I know. You think I’m getting emo again. But what you don’t understand is, I’m really, seriously, stuck in a shit hole at the moment.

I guess I’ve really aged. I was reading some of my past blog entries and found them extremely repulsive. Damn, what was I thinking? All that effort gone into trying to be edgy and different could have gotten me… wait. It’d not have gotten me anywhere anyway, since I would probably have been distracted by some other random factor in my life.

So my Father is hospitalised. And have been told to leave his company. Very nice. He’s going through the entire mid-life crisis phase and is refusing to take the treatment seriously. It’s wearing me thin, and sometimes I wished I could just walk away from all this painful recalcitrance rather than sip it in like poison. My Mom is half of her old self.

Personally I believe in Karma. But lately, I believe more in pre-destiny and fate. Because my parents are the most endearing people I know on earth. They are kind, they treat people with respect. I don’t understand why such tragedy struck our family. Our past lives? Over dinner, Mom and I were discussing about how it would be utterly depressing if all this is happening to us due to a “stroke of bad luck”. In a self-deprecating and cynical manner, I told my Mom, “You probably killed someone in your past life. And this is your retribution. Else, there’s NOTHING that you have done in this life to call for such painful consequences.”

And in true tragic-hero fashion, we laughed. Resigning to fate a little, feeling a little comforted that we have at least each other to hold on to. She’s the reason why I’m not putting all this away and walking on. I am doing this more because I care for my Mom than for my Dad, really. Because to me, a consequential victim is the most pitiful in any situation. Just like a passive smoker. Or a housewife who accidentally stepped into an armed robbery. Or a random Singaporean who was held hostage at the Oberoi. Hah. I know. I hate all these innocent implications. To me, they don’t deserve it. Let the person who caused it face the effect. To me, to be sacrificed conveniently just because you’re there at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person makes me very upset.

I feel more for my Mom because I can identify with her pain. It’s like working for a pitch that is never going to come to fruition. It’s like calling a Client who hangs up on you. Everyday, we’re strategising how to coax my Dad into accepting his current situation and believing in the treatment that he’s going through.

He is a traditional fatalist. He thinks all doctors and surgeons practicing western medicine are evil. He chooses to not seek treatment because he doesn’t want to face the pain of the treatment. Can you imagine how frustrating and ironic this whole situation is? It’s like trying to lug a buffalo across the field. At midnight.

To my Mom and myself, this entire episode is a very simple process of logic. ie. Cause and effect.

Sick -> Diagnosis -> Treatment -> Pain -> Recovery

To my Dad it’s like this.

Sick -> No Diagnosis = No sickness -> Drag and cough and pain and complain -> Sympathy from the world -> Miraculous Recovery

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HIS PSYCHE. Is it just middle-aged andropausal behaviour? Or is it his upbringing in a traditional Hainanese environment? Or is it because, sadly, he didn’t have a chance to receive the luxury of education sufficient enough for him to realise CAUSE LEADS TO EFFECT.

I don’t know. Sometimes my Mom thinks it’s the whole education thing. And that’s why she’s always stressed on it so persistently. She believes education opens up our minds. Cause and effect seems very simple and taken for granted by us. But that might be because we have always been immersed into this concept by our syllabus.

Like, Math. Formulas. Input affects Output. Constants, Variables, Expectancy, Probability.

History. Mistakes that even great kings and emperors made that caused their demise. How civilisations have evolved due to paradigm shifts.

So on and so forth.

Maybe that’s why I fail to understand why my Dad’s thinking is so. Out this world. Maybe it’s just, out of “my world”. His frame of reference is different. His experiences were different. He learnt about the concept of independence and responsibility on his own at the age of 12. This is what keeps me going. That it’s not that his obnoxious just because he wants to be a wilful and difficult patient. It’s that his mindset disallows him from letting him perceive things from a different point of view. He is locked in his own world because he learnt and interpreted all of life’s lessons himself.

If there was anything that his family taught him, it is selfishness, self-defence, self-interest, escapism. To them, a problem doesn’t exist if you choose not to identify it. Hide it under the carpet. Out of sight, out of mind.

And maybe his trying teenage made him realise that as long as you ignore a problem, it will cease to be a problem when it implodes and slowly becomes forgotten. No money for dinner, starve. The next payday will come. Met a motorcycle accident, repair the bike, but live with a limp for a month.

At this point in this entry, I feel like crying. I love my family very dearly. And it is ridiculous for them to have to face all this.

I’m tired. My brother dropped my Mom and I off at Bugis (of all places) to take bus 80 home from Novena because his girlfriend was getting off class and he had no time to send us back before fetching her from Somerset.

I am numb. So is my Mom. There’s always this sense of dry bitterness at the back of my tongue. Why is this happening to me? Is there more to life than this?

~ by janathema on March 5, 2009.