First of all, you have to judge what kind of empress dowager is at this time. Is it an empress dowager like Wu Zetian or an empress dowager like Cixi?
Are Wu Zetian and Cixi different? It's really different.
Wu Zetian was an extremely greedy person for power and cruel and ruthless to those who dared to seize power from her. However, she did not "see the Buddha kill the Buddha, see the ancestor kill the ancestor", but the relatively close but different "Buddha blocked the killing of the Buddha, the ancestor blocked the killing of the ancestor". That is to say, if you don't "block" her and obey her, she will not kill you casually. this?
Therefore, if you are a puppet emperor and the empress dowager who holds power is Wu Zetian, you should not think of "taking back real power" but obey your mother. Anyway, your ability to govern is not as good as your mother's (how many emperors can match Wu Zetian?). If you have seized power and cannot govern the country well, why bother to seize power?
Cixi was also extremely greedy for power. In addition to greed for power, she is also psychopathic, can not see others are good, even if the son and daughter-in-law have a good relationship, she will not be able to see it, but also to find a way to destroy.
Wu Zetian's greed for power is constructive, while Cixi's greed for power is mainly destructive—not only from the perspective of the emperor's son, but also from the perspective of history, Cixi's rule has clearly hindered social progress.
If you are the emperor and meet an empress dowager like Wu Zetian, as long as you obey and be patient, you may not have a head start many years later. And if you meet Cixi, you will not wear heaven together and will not die endlessly.
Rise up and fight back, and stop being loyal to the empress dowager with the signature of "Quan Zhong" like the Guangxu Emperor imprisoned in Yingtai. No matter how loyal you are, you may not be able to avoid death (Guangxu's corpse contains a large amount of arsenic, which proves that he was poisoned by someone with arsenic); if you fight back, you will only die.
If you can only live in Yingtai and only humiliatingly, it is not much better than death.