I find myself feeling disconnected and disillusioned. Since my parents passed away five years go, the already thin threads that tied me to my family have become thinner and have been stretched to the breaking point.
The calls, which were always rare, have almost disappeared completely unless I am the one doing the calling. I occasionally reach out because I promised my mother I would if something were to happen to her or my father. But there's only so much I can take of always being the one reaching out. In the 26 years I have had a home of my own, my family has never knocked on my door or stepped over my threshold no matter how near or far I lived from them. I have always been the one expected to travel to them, and I'm made to feel guilty when I can't or don't want to spend my little free time and money doing that. Not to mention that, without my parents, I feel even more of an outsider than I always have. It's a place of pain for me.
With the current state of our country, it's not particularly safe for us to travel there, but I fell beneath the weight of the guilt. I am stressing and anxious, and if I even breathe a mention of it, they blow off my fears as ridiculous and unnecessary. They aren't though. They do not read and hear the hate spewed at people considered "other" every day. We're other in so many ways, it would take ages to count them all. That makes travel particularly stressful. Where is it safe to stop along the way? Where should we avoid? Where can we stop for the night? Air BnB's are out because we do not want to surprise anyone with our existence in their home. Can you image inadvertently ending up in a rental home in the middle of nowhere and have the homophobic or transphobic owner show up for a surprise visit?
Yeah, I don't want to risk that. I don't think my family will ever understand the inherent danger involved in that. Or maybe they do because there certainly weren't any open doors or empty beds for us once we got there. Guilt-tripping, Christian relatives who might as well have been reenacting the part of the Christmas story where there is no room at the inn. There was no room for us with any of them. I cried until my eyes swelled and I felt empty. Then I filled that empty with protective anger. I'm sure I'll grieve again later, but for now the anger is better.
Maybe the threads have finally snapped, and some things aren't able to be mended.
