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I'm sure there's a Smiths lyric for this
Nov. 7th, 2020 05:37 pmI haven't talked to either of my parents since early August, when I found out they were supporting Trump. I didn't actively break up with them, I just ghosted. I've seen them once since, on my nephew's birthday zoom, and didn't talk to them there either. My life is better for not having them in it, even if I wish I'd had the resolve to tell them why I was finally closing that door. (I've gotten one email but haven't returned it). Now I think I'm afraid my resolve will fade or afraid my little brothers will start pressuring me to engage again. It feels small and petty compared to the larger win but I think I'm hyperfocusing on a small personal thing in order to not have to feel ways about half the country.
I've struggled with my parents my whole life. I do that thing that all the emotionally abused people I know do, and mostly when I talk about my childhood, I've got things to say like "they didn't hit me, except for a couple slaps, and they kept me fed and housed". I still think something is wrong with me most of the time, because they don't love me and I don't love them.
I can see what happened to my mother more now I think. She moved from Boston-area to rural Vermont while pregnant with me, they only had one car between them which dad took to work so she was trapped in a house, her dad died while she was pregnant with me, and she had what sounds like pretty extreme postpartum depression. Hell, she'd also had to leave college a few years before getting married because she was what she referred to as manic-depressive. (I didn't find this out until long after it would have been useful to know, and when I asked why she hadn't told me early, she said it wasn't any of my business.)
Once when we were talking about one of my niblings, she told me "you didn't let me hold you when you were a baby." She sounded genuinely hurt, and I think intellectually I can understand that it must have been awful to have happen to you in your mid-twenties alone in a house. But she also sounded accusatory, like it was my fault and it's validating and super-painful to know that I never had a chance of making it out of the narrative where everything I was sad about or struggled with was my fault and if I'd just been different, everything would be better.
My mother's called me both hard as nails and hard to love and she meant them both as insults, but I kind of like the first idea, especially to her.
There's a couple stories I tell about my father. Like when he told me getting into college was an expensive husband hunt. Like when he tried to use as many racial slurs as possible to get a rise out of me at my little brother's MIT graduation. Like when he told Light that I'm his problem now. My father didn't notice when I had a tongue piercing and I kept waiting for him to notice and be shitty about every time I visited but eventually realized he didn't make eye contact with me most of the time, that that level of detail was definitely going to escape him.
Even when I'm not sure I'm the protagonist of this story, they're both the antagonists, just in different ways.
In 2016, shortly after the election, I went and got NC (noncompliant from Bitch Planet) tattooed on my inner right wrist, to remind me over and over that now more than ever, I needed to take my noncompliance and make it a badge rather than a shame. And that I needed to only be in situations where having something that labeled me that was acceptable, if not actively cherished. It was my first almost completely unhideable tattoo as well, which was also a step down that path and a mark of when I stopped trying to hide my already significant number of tattoos from them.
I'm almost to the point where it would be worth it to see if the boys would be up for going through the quarantine for two weeks, drive down to baltimore, get tattooed while both the artist and I are masked, drive back up the same day and quarantine for another two weeks process. It's possible, if nothing changes, I may opt to spend the month of January doing exactly that. My ugly internal voice says that other people are doing the exact same thing in order to see family members (or a lot less) and my ink a lot more fucking important to me than my family members.
I've struggled with my parents my whole life. I do that thing that all the emotionally abused people I know do, and mostly when I talk about my childhood, I've got things to say like "they didn't hit me, except for a couple slaps, and they kept me fed and housed". I still think something is wrong with me most of the time, because they don't love me and I don't love them.
I can see what happened to my mother more now I think. She moved from Boston-area to rural Vermont while pregnant with me, they only had one car between them which dad took to work so she was trapped in a house, her dad died while she was pregnant with me, and she had what sounds like pretty extreme postpartum depression. Hell, she'd also had to leave college a few years before getting married because she was what she referred to as manic-depressive. (I didn't find this out until long after it would have been useful to know, and when I asked why she hadn't told me early, she said it wasn't any of my business.)
Once when we were talking about one of my niblings, she told me "you didn't let me hold you when you were a baby." She sounded genuinely hurt, and I think intellectually I can understand that it must have been awful to have happen to you in your mid-twenties alone in a house. But she also sounded accusatory, like it was my fault and it's validating and super-painful to know that I never had a chance of making it out of the narrative where everything I was sad about or struggled with was my fault and if I'd just been different, everything would be better.
My mother's called me both hard as nails and hard to love and she meant them both as insults, but I kind of like the first idea, especially to her.
There's a couple stories I tell about my father. Like when he told me getting into college was an expensive husband hunt. Like when he tried to use as many racial slurs as possible to get a rise out of me at my little brother's MIT graduation. Like when he told Light that I'm his problem now. My father didn't notice when I had a tongue piercing and I kept waiting for him to notice and be shitty about every time I visited but eventually realized he didn't make eye contact with me most of the time, that that level of detail was definitely going to escape him.
Even when I'm not sure I'm the protagonist of this story, they're both the antagonists, just in different ways.
In 2016, shortly after the election, I went and got NC (noncompliant from Bitch Planet) tattooed on my inner right wrist, to remind me over and over that now more than ever, I needed to take my noncompliance and make it a badge rather than a shame. And that I needed to only be in situations where having something that labeled me that was acceptable, if not actively cherished. It was my first almost completely unhideable tattoo as well, which was also a step down that path and a mark of when I stopped trying to hide my already significant number of tattoos from them.
I'm almost to the point where it would be worth it to see if the boys would be up for going through the quarantine for two weeks, drive down to baltimore, get tattooed while both the artist and I are masked, drive back up the same day and quarantine for another two weeks process. It's possible, if nothing changes, I may opt to spend the month of January doing exactly that. My ugly internal voice says that other people are doing the exact same thing in order to see family members (or a lot less) and my ink a lot more fucking important to me than my family members.
