My children’s grandmother values boys way over girls. She was eager to come to America when my son was 10 months old.  So I brought her here.  Within one month after her arrival she got sick with gallbladder rupture and ended in hospital for 48 days. She left for her home after she recovered. Needless to say, this resulted in a mountain of trouble for me. 

In the fall of 1990, I was teaching, working on my dissertation, raising my one-year-old son, taking care of my husband who started having gallstone attacks every other week since the grandmother visit.  I tried to get my mother over to help me with the boy but never succeeded because of the debt generated by my husband’s mother’s medical bill — over $45K. 

Sometimes, when I was too much stressed out and felt like unable to handle it all, I cried and took it out on my son, “All because of you. If you were a girl, your grandmother could not have come over here.” He looked at me with his big innocent eyes, trying to finger out what this mad woman was yelling about. Poor boy. I hoped he was too young to remember all this.

It is so easy to shift blame to the children, the weaker one when you do not have the guts to confront the stronger one — your spouse or the spouse’s parents or some other adults.  Scapegoating the children not only unfairly shifts the anger onto the innocent, hurting the children but also left a guilty feeling in the parent. No amount of apology can erase this feeling.

Last Sunday 8/24/08, similar incident happened. This time it was done on my daughter.  Lucky for my son.  I was extremely upset with some members in my family.  Have been a nice person all my life, I pressed down my anger and did not confront the adult offenders.  Instead, I yelled at my daughter like a mad dog, which I regret deeply.  There is no excuse for this bad behavior on my part.

The hurt and damage on her seem ireversible.  I wish the child could be resilient enough to stage back. And I need to have a good memory so that the same thing will not repeat itself in the future.  I really need to be nasty sometimes to the right person, of course.  I wish I knew how. Maybe I never have this guts, unfortunately for my children.

By the way, isn’t this another stupid thing that a parent can do best?