3 posts tagged “aunts”
The cold war continues between my second oldest aunt and my uncle. Awwwwwkward.
I never knew this, but my two youngest aunts on my Japanese side are also in a cold war of their own.
My youngest aunt married into a wealthy family, and they were flying high back in the day. But when the economic bubble burst back in the early 90s, they lost everything. They lost EVERYTHING. The hardest thing for them to lose was their pride though.
So it must have been really hard for my youngest aunt to beg for money from her four sisters. After all, until then she had left her working class roots behind and was living the dream. The two sisters who married Americans were still poor as shit and couldn't really help, but my oldest aunt gave her a couple million yen, and my second youngest aunt also convinced her husband to part with five million. She then also secretly withdrew an extra 3 million for her baby sister.
A few years later, my second oldest aunt's husband also lost everything, and he left her. She asked her baby sister to please pay back some of the money, and that was the start of the cold war.
My youngest aunt didn't see why she should pay any of the money back, and pleaded her case to my oldest aunt (who is the matriarch of the family, and more like a mother/grandmother). My oldest aunt said "well you borrowed the money, pay it back." Youngest aunt shed angry tears and said she'll pay it all back to the last penny, just to make a point.
And she eventually did. But there is still a lot of anymosity between them.
Family is so stressful.
My mother and my aunts all love gardening and cats. Maybe they're witches?
My second oldest aunt's got a crazy garden. I think the soil around her house is super fertile because she'll put things out for compost, and next thing you know it's taken root and is growing. I was delighted to find some beets growing.
Here's her new kitten Jiji, sitting in front of some of her designs.
I am exhausted. I spent the last three days at my aunt's house. A million aunts came (there are almost no women in my family), and so did my cousin with her 7 month old (my arms hurt from carrying her around and throwing her up in the air). It was nice being with my family, and nobody can cook like my oldest aunt, but I'm exhausted. I get tired hanging around my Japanese family because you spend the whole time stressing out about what everyone's doing for you, and then having to do ten times more for whoever did something for you.
Also, hanging around the town my family comes from is pretty depressing (I feel bad saying that, but it's true). It's a suburb bordering Tokyo. Talk about gigantic strip malls and losers with babies all over the place. It's like the whole city's in a competition to live their life without having to use their brains.
Thank god my mother ran away. I had a weird breakthrough with my mother before we went to my aunts. She comes from a really big family and she thinks she was the invisible sister. She thinks her mother actually never loved her, and she remembers being thrown face-first on the floor when she was a toddler and stuff like that. She said she felt like she didn't really exist, and that she had a real family somewhere else in the world and that her life was some kind of mistake that had to be endured. She was so miserable. And when she was seven she tried to drown herself in a bucket. I tried not to cry when she told me that. But we're a healthy and happy family now, so I don't run away and pretend I didn't hear things anymore.
I'm glad she didn't succeed in finishing herself off, because her life got a lot better. Well you could argue that it got a lot worse first. She met a guy with his own problems and went and had a bunch of daughters herself and passed on her misery onto us. Like my mother said earlier this week, we were a family of kids. But then we all grew up. And that was a miracle in itself.
Me, my mother, and two aunts visited the family grave. The newer one's where my grandparents are resting. And I found out that I actually had an uncle that died when he was a few weeks old, because he was there too. He would have been the oldest I think. I said "what's up" to them, told them thanks for loving me. Then we went to the scary older grave where the ancestors hang out. I said hello to them. I imagined them to be grandmothers and mothers, aunts and sisters with the same problems and struggles that my mother suffered from and that I suffered from, because they passed them on all down the line. So I said "I feel you, my ancestors. And lets make it better from now on."
I wonder if they look at me and think "Who's that girl with the weird face? She's the wrong color."
On the way home we stopped by the "mizuko" shrine to say what's up to my baby ("mizuko" means water baby, or babies that were aborted or that died, and there's a goddess that protects them all). Actually my mother ran over there and ordered me to pray there.
Then my youngest aunt told me a really funny story about how when she was a little girl she thought "mizuko" was the name of a saint. And there were mizuko shrines everywhere so she thought mizuko must have been an amazing person.
We walked past the dried up old sewer-like excuse for a river on the way home, and the aunts started talking about how they used to come with my grandma to do the washing in this river (back when it was a real river). And vegetables would come floating down because the farmers would wash them upstream. I bet they didn't know the area would turn into a concrete jungle in a few decades.
That must have been why my oldest aunt made me help her clean the bedding by stomping on them in the bathtub. Taking the kids to help with the washing at the water source must be a tradition.
Okay, this post is long enough. I'll post some pictures later maybe.
My Groups
-
Asian Updated: 17 minutes ago
-
Japan Updated: 1 hour ago
-
Save The Hoe's Updated: 2 hours ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
