Its been a year since Amelie was born, ye Gods! Time has certainly flown by!
Just the other day she started to take her first steps! Rather proud of that she's growing up healthily.
On another note though, as we celebrate 1 year after life was born, we must mourn for a life lost. Our mayor of Taipei (Ma Ying Jou) has recently lost his father in a hospital not far from where we currently live. There were a lot of reporters, cameras and microphones all staged around the hospital, making it difficult to get to the clinics. Had been a busy few days though, especially for the local food businesses serving the reporter's hunger!
Current state of affairs? Well living in Taipei sure is a challenge, especially with in-laws who are as useful as a chocolate teapot. My expectations of them has certainly gone down since we arrived. More to the case is that I really surprised that my wife is so different from the rest of the family - she's a lot of what I call "normal".
I'm not sure where to start to be honest. But for me, the in-laws seem to talk a lot, take no action and complain to us on a daily basis. Maybe is the society here, I'm not sure, but for certain, the last thing my wife and I needs is grief and stress from people who doesn't want to help us.
Before we left home (UK), we were promised by my wife's father that he'll sort everything out, get the house ready, making sure its clean, stock up the fridge and generally welcome us. He said and convinced us over the phone: "Come back to Taiwan, you'll both find work easily, take it easy, I'll take care of everything, welcome to Taiwan!"
When we landed and arrived "home" (I use this term loosely), the house was not cleaned, the bedding hasn't been changed for 4 years, our room was leaking water from the ceiling, the kitchen was a farce with no food or decent utensils to actually cook and we were dragged around the city buying essentials (like a steriliser for the baby's bottles and a cot) after 16 hours of flight and jet lag, Great what a great start.
Next we were instructed to clean the house ourselves, sort out our belongings and clean out the old junk that was in our room, all on the same day we landed. Fantastic. Fine. We just got on with it.
It was rather stressful juggling a baby and doing the cleaning chores. That on a whole wasn't too bad until the mother-in-law decided to start yapping about how unhealthy our child looked, how ugly she looked, questions about why the house isn't cleaned and that we have to look for work immediately. Hello?!?! We just landed, we didn't get much sleep, the baby is crying because of jet lag and now you want us to look for work now? Again, whatever happened "Welcome to Taiwan! Take your time! Everthing will be alright!".
What ticks me off even more is that the father-in-law is never around. He's always away down South with his 3rd family (yes, that's right, he has two concubines), and never spend time with us. What's the point of telling us to come back when you are not even around to see us? He makes regular trips back to Taipei to pick up his disabled son (oh yes, you see we have to look after him too aswell as our own daughter because the mother-in-law doesn't even bother) to take him to his mother's house and spends the weekend there.
To be honest I don't really want to see him, but there are times when I want to take advantage of his car so we can go to the big hyper-markets to stock up on nappied and baby milk. No way jose! We ask him a take us to a hyper-market and gives us some lame excuse saying he's too busy. Not once, not twice but on 4 occassions. Whatever happened "Don't worry, I'll sort things out and help you out"?
Sure he gave us money to spend while we try to settle in, but sometimes we just need the extra hand to help us sort the house out and get around the city to buy necessities. I'd rather he gave us less money and spent more time helping us, as he promised before we left.
I feel sorry for my wife, having to put up with, in my opinion, a broken family. They don't care for each other, they are selfish and whats more they don't keep their promises. I'm more surprised that she turned out to be the person who I love very much.
Its just frustrating for me. We were made promises which were never fulfilled. You know that's fine, we can sort ourselves out, and we did. But as we did sort ourselves out and try to settle in, we got nothing but grief, complaints and mental torture from both in-laws (and not to mention the sister-in-law in Australia who constantly calls my wife to talk about herself). What have we done wrong to deserve this? On top of this, we were pressured in finding work, which is fine, if the father-in-law actually fulfilled his promised of finding nanny to look after the our daughter when we arrived. Nope, instead we had to juggle our house chores, looking after our daughter and look for work. On three occassions we had to take our baby daughter to job interviews because there is no-one who can look after her, and often the people who organised the interviews weren't very considerate with the scheduling. Have you ever taken your baby to an interview? I think not.
When will the "settling in" start? So much to say, so little time. Until then...
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