"Dry is good and wind is better"

[omnia_mutantur]

 I've been ghosting my parents since I discovered they were voting for Trump a second time.   I've been all sorts of hand-wringy about it, feeling like I should take a firm stand and send them a breakup letter, feeling like I should try harder to be a good daughter and compartmentalize.   I didn't do either, the first exhausted me and at least a small part of me knows after 45 years of shifting goalposts, I'm never going to be my parents definition of the latter.   I mean, I guess if not theirs, I'm never going to be anyone's good daughter.  

This morning, I got an email from my father.   It read 

[real name, the full three syllables instead of the shortened form everyone calls me]

It has become obvious that you have decided not to communicate with us as we have not heard from you in 5 months and you do not answer phone messages, emails or texts. I find these facts to be quite puzzling and disrespectful. While I do not understand your decision,  I will accept it. I wish you and Light a future filled with happiness and health.

 

Dad

 

And I felt sick and sad and anxious.  And then I felt foolish, because if this is the desired outcome, why should it matter to me the way in which it is arrived at?  But there's still the littlegirllost inside me telling me that this is dangerous, I should apologize and placate and if I can't make anything better, at least try to stop making it worse.  And while fear makes me smarter about some things, it also definitely makes me dumber about others and it's so hard to think through the fear to find out what it is I'm afraid of. 
 

My therapist asked me what I'd say to the bewildered younger me, and I said there was nothing to say that wasn't a lie, but if I could figure out how to believe it, I'd want to ell her that she was good enough already without having to work at it, and that it wasn't a game she could win or a secret code she could break, nothing was going to be good enough in their eyes.  And I talked to my sister-in-law, who has had ugly run-ins with my father (and has also  been called disrespectful by him) and then late tonight, my little brother (mech)  called me to assure me that nothing I could do would make him cut me out of his or my niblings lives.  And maybe I'll lose Media, or my favorite uncle, and I know that my father is going to tell the story that he's the victim of his ungrateful daughter who he did all the things for and I have to let the desire to correct that go.    But Mech loves me in a way that means that he felt comfortable promising me that he wouldn't cut me out and I kind of guessed I needed to hear it said, but I had no idea that I'd be able to believe it so completely when he did. (and I still suspect if/when I think about it too much I'll start worrying again but for now I'm going to try to just bask in it)

It's such a boring old tune, but I feel like I keep going back to it to see if I can figure something else out, and keep looking at other people's experiences of the families they're born into and/or raised by to see if I can find something that feels true or that explains something, and I'm worried the reason I can't is that I'm dead inside, I'm lacking something important that would make me a decent human being and I'm just not trying hard enough at anything because if I was, I'd feel these connections and understand better the ways they happen.  But I don't and it's late and the dog is snoring.  

 

Comments

[sabotabby]

It's not you, it's them.

I got a bunch of guilt-inducing messages from my father when I cut off contact. I had to do it a few times before it stuck. He had a medical crisis and almost died and I got another round of guilt from his wife. Then he died and it was a month before I found out.

No regrets. The man was a toxic garbage fire. He liked to frame it as I was ungrateful, brainwashed by my mom, etc., but the truth is that he was physically abusive to my mom and emotionally abusive and neglectful to me, and every attempt to have him in my life ended badly. It meant losing whatever peripheral relatives I have—including my brother—but it was worth it.

For awhile I started reading estranged parent forums and I was struck by how similar the language was to what my father said. He wasn't a big internet guy so I doubt he was getting it from the same place—maybe there's an ur-language of abusers. But I found it cathartic—the affection and befuddlement he claimed to feel for me were not real emotions grounded in a family relationship, but weaponized platitudes.

You're not the one who's dead inside.

[cutieperson]

I'm glad you believe Mech. If it helps, I cut my father out a decade ago and when my sister chose to rebuild some relationship with him for the sake of her kids she continued loving me and keeping me in her life. So it's possible.

[kitchen_kink]

ugh this stuff is all so hard. Your commenters above are right: this isn't you. At the same time I know how horrible it is to receive messages like that and try to hold your ground against the crushing sense that you're a Bad Daughter or whatever.

If you ever want to talk more about it, let me know. <3