Survivor DW / LJ Idol Topic: when it Rains, it Pours

 My brother used to have this game he would play with his kids, sometimes in the car and sometimes around the meal table. It was called “The Quiet Game”. Ever heard of it?

 

The idea was to stay silent for as long as possible, not leave the table and to resist the urge to utter anything until the leader, (he), called time. It was a way for my bro to control the decibel level when 5 kids were packed into a tight space together. His wife and my mother, when she was visiting, usually joined in playing too. It was harmless. My brother would purposely try to make people respond vocally by telling a joke, offering up candy, asking you a question or doing anything else distracting. Pretty much the only immunity you had for not being considered a “loser” of the challenge was if, for some reason, you literally vomited and had to leave the table. It was all in good fun for the most part and was intended to mainly give adults a brief break from squeals, excess giggles, whining and general loudness of young kids.

 

I was visiting at my brother’s home in Florida about 10 years ago and found out about this game, which was starting to become more competitive as his kids grew older. (My family members have a heightened sense of wanting to win at even nonsensical, low-stakes rivalries, which I have always detested, but I was expected to play along.) I knew I could win this one. I have steel-tight concentration when I apply myself. The secret was to look down and find “The Zone” and stay there for as long as it took. It’s not as easy as it sounds when the dog is barking at something out the window, when a kid spontaneously sneezes and sputum jets across the table or when your brother decides to belch loudly or cut a big fart.

 

(I know some of you are already laughing and not keeping silent now because I just said, “cut a big fart”.)

 

The day this silly table game occurred I had been spending the afternoon helping my mom with whatever mundane chores she’d asked of me. She and I had been going through a very challenging year in our relationship and helping her do odd-jobs was not pleasant. Actually, I was not helping her do chores at all. She was doing nothing but sitting in a chair ordering me around and then criticizing every move I made. I was frazzled, feeling rejected and like a disrespected peon fool for doing her bidding. At the time my mother was demanding, demeaning and rigid about what she wanted and the way she wanted things done. (She drove restaurant servers nuts.) I was burned out of being her caregiver.

 

I always tried to cut my mom slack because she was elderly, had been through some difficult times in her life and was an uninformed product of the way she was raised. She did not know any better, but there were days when I understood there was more than one reason why my parents’ marriage broke up. My mother thought my brother walked on water and was incredibly clever, but she regarded me as her servant girl. Her treatment shredded my self esteem. I could do nothing right. I was a fully-functioning, professional adult, but my mother could still shatter my sense of self worth and lure me into a hailstorm of doubt and loathing for my own existence. I used to come home drained from visiting her, and my husband and children began to detest my mother because of the unhealthy headspace she created. This was way past the “no one can control the way you feel but you” stage. When your own parent does not have your back and laughs at your efforts, and it goes on for years, there is a problem. The thing was, she was over 80 years old, recovering from a near-fatal car wreck and had no one else for months to rely on but me while my brother was incarcerated. I couldn’t just “dump” her; I was brought up to respect my elders, and she needed care…like a fox.

 

Back to “The Quiet Game”.
 

That particular evening, I’d had it with Mom. For whatever reason, she’d already been eliminated from the game and was pissed, so she decided to chide in with my brother, the self-proclaimed emcee. She handed me her finished dinner plate. This was a sign that she was telling me to get up and clear the table. (She loved to infantilize me, as if I were 13 and living at home under my parents’ roof.)  If I responded I would be out of the game. Then my mother looked my way and called me “stupid”. My younger niece heard it and gasped. My niece was proclaimed “out”. I sat angrily in silence, determined to win this moronic, ridiculous family game because if I was being viewed as ‘stupid’ with no quality skill level at anything else but clearing the goddamn table, then I would never give in or bow to her pressure. I would win this miserable excuse of a control game, even if I had to piss myself and last all night in that fucking kitchen chair. I stared my mother down for the next 10 minutes while one other older niece and I competed for the top spot. I had nothing against my older niece. She was determined like me and usually did win the game, but my brother finally called “time” and ended it. We tied. 

 

I turned toward my mother. “You called me stupid,” I calmly but seriously said. My dignity had been destroyed in front of the rest of my family. I just called my mother out in front of people, but I had to be careful. Showing too much emotion would only cause her to respond to me that I was being “too super-sensitive”.

 

“I never said that!” Mom responded.
My nieces and sister-in-law all agreed with me. “We all heard it,” my sister -in-law said.

“Guess it’s time to clear the table now”, was all my mom could say. She rose from her seat and left the kitchen. 

No apology. Nothing.

 

My sister-in-law and I did the dishes together quietly. Meanwhile, I thought about how I would have the chance to go to the Y the next morning to work out and sweat my indignation in every direction. In the meantime, I retreated to the bedroom, vented to my journal and then fell asleep. 

 

What I learned from playing that shitstorm of a competition was that next time my brother loudly calls, “Quiet Game!” I will never again participate. I figured out a response, which my family never argued with: “I’m taking a bye”. It was the only way to avoid putting myself in such a position in the future. It took my mother deciding to permanently move 1,000 miles away to Florida (to be closer to my brother) for me to recover self respect and find perspective again. My Florida family is passive-aggressively dysfunctional with excessive competition and in understanding other people’s feelings. Setting boundaries with them never works 100%, but it’s all I can do to preserve my sanity. 

 

I will always love them, but it’s complicated. My mother is 90 and not in the best of health, (but not that bad for 90). I still call her daily and everything works great on the phone. We face time so that she can see her great grandkids, etc., but we know not to cross one another because she will provoke and I will shut down and retreat. The issue will be dropped and never worked out. It’s how I manage so that I won’t be swept away in a downpour of guilt, shame, obligation and childhood “programming” to always give in and be a certain way. I live my life and my brother lives his. He chooses to not speak to me because I have set boundaries and have called him out on a few things also. Some of his kids are adults now living on their own. Some are pre-teenagers. We have a “Facebook relationship”. Nothing gets too deep, but they know I am out there if they ever need someone. 

 

I have my own family as well; the family my husband and I have created through marriage and childbirth plus my biological family which is partially local and partially in other states. Last week, I wrote about how powerfully that sense of “my people” can suck you into a whirlpool of duty and need and keep you trapped in toxic situations.  Setting boundaries in some way will probably anger some people you care about, but sometimes the situation is sink or swim, and I choose to stay away from the water all together.