Hmm. My mother is vicious, indeed. I have a sore throat, and every dish on the table has copious amounts of chilli in it.

I suppose it is no secret that I am arguing with my family again, seeing how I stormed into school in very attention-grabbing civvies grumbling very loudly about how I got pseudo-thrown out of the house. (By pseudo, I mean that they will probably call me at night and ask when the bloody hell I'm coming back home, so it's not really counted). I swear my mother is a loony-bin sometimes - women, in general, are irritatingly menopausal twits.

On a side note, I really wish that people wouldn't ask me things like "eh don't you hate your mom" or tell me to report her etc. etc.

Every family interacts in different ways. To quote Leo Tolstoy, "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Since not many families can claim to be happy, it thus follows that most families are unhappy, and hence unhappy in their own way. When you put four people together under the same roof for 18 years, the amount of contact and interaction is simply too much for all four to be happy. Heck, we have trouble finding lifetime happiness between two people, what more four?

But in the same vein, the 18 years has developed a system of interaction, a framework in which all four of us work to minimize the unhappiness as much as possible (Or to maximise the happy moments, but I feel pessimistic today). Me running into school and grumbling and whining is really part of this system of interaction - my mother knows, to some extent, that I have featured her as the Evil Witch Of The East amongst my friends. She accepts it, just as I accept that she will always be a crazybitch at times. In the same way, I accept that they will always impress upon me the fact that I owe them a living, and I accept that they will always pull this up when I argue with them. It cannot be helped, this is how it has always been done. The children will argue, the children will lose, the children will go out and cry boo-hoo.

Admittedly I have been unfair to them, demonizing them does little justice to the care and concern that they have, at times, shown me. Unfortunately, care and concern is never really appreciated by the children. As my mother often says (in hokkien), "sometimes feeding dog is more worth it than feeding children." It is a hokkien proverb - I think that in itself should say something about the system of interaction in most chinese families.

I hope you see that at the end of the day, all this childish provoking of each other is simply a time-worn drama that we have been playing out all our lives.

So I really wish people wouldn't ask me to hate her or report her or do other things that would tear down this delicate framework. I'm aware that this would appear to be the logical thing to say, but it simply shows that they don't understand. To do so would truly be ungrateful - not just to the effort my parents have spent bringing me up, but also to this constant system of interaction that we can always fall back on. You may have different ways of interacting with your family, and in the same vein so do I. If I don't stand on the moral perch and go "tsktsktsk" at my mother, I don't see why you should either.

Sigh I wish Suwee were here. She'd understand.