Disconnected and Disillusioned

 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.

With Fear for our Democracy, I Dissent - 2024 Election

I will preface this with, I’m not asking for a Trump supporter to try and convince me why they support him. I just need to say what I have been feeling. You can read or not read, agree or disagree.

We only have a week until the presidential election. A week to worry. A week to stress. A week to protect fragile hope. The 2016 results were shocking. I will always remember crying in our living room. I didn’t understand then and eight years later I still do not understand now how people could vote for a person who knowingly and happily denigrates women, disrespects military service people, mocks disabled citizens, and wants to actively rip away rights and protections for minorities and LGBTQIA+ Americans. It isn’t someone saying he did those things. We all heard his words and saw his actions. I know decent people who voted for that, and I still do not understand why.

In 2020, when he and his party lost, I dared to hope that it would be a turning point for the good. I thought perhaps those followers would wake up to the deceptions. And some did. But so many more haven’t even blinked. And now we are up for another election, and he is still using his followers and celebrity and sheer incomprehensibility to try and avoid punishment for the criminal activity he has been both charged with and convicted. When have we ever had a presidential candidate who has had dozens of convictions on their record and who has been investigated for treason against our country? If there was a hint of any one of these charges with a past candidate, nothing would have saved them in the eye of the public. The Republican party would have been the first to judge. Where is that judgement now?

All to say, I am scared about this election. I was horrified in 2016, but I had hope that good people were just misled. I thought if we all survived those four years, we (those people included) would come together to fix the mess we were in. In 2020, I was disillusioned at seeing the number of people still casting their votes for him with full knowledge of what he had done the previous four years. But, when he wasn’t elected, I was cautiously hopeful that there were more people who would stand against that sort of malignancy infecting our country. And now we are four years forward, still recovering, still fighting, still holding on to that tiny hope as we once again see our friends and family and neighbors continue to support a monster. I am more frightened this year than I was the prior two election years. We all know his wants and desires for this country. We know what he’s capable of, and we know that his party will not stand against him when it counts.

I’ve heard dozens of excuses for voting for him. That’s what they are … excuses. I’ll be honest, if someone tells me they are voting for that monster, I don’t care why anymore. It’s way past time for individual grievances and justifications. None of them come close to balancing the scale of what we know about what he believes, supports, and has actively allowed or participated in. There is no comparison.

I take my first statement back. If you, after everything, are still a Trump supporter, I would rather you just quietly unfriend/unfollow me on every outlet, lose my e-mail or phone number. No leaving announcement needed. If you support him as a candidate to lead our country and make decisions about our future, then I have to think you also harbor hate and disrespect in your hearts for women and girls, the LGBTQIA+ community, disabled individuals, military men and women, people of color, immigrants, and anyone else who does not fit into your tiny world view of perfection.

And before someone says I shouldn’t let politics come between me and the people I love. It’s not. This isn’t politics. This isn’t a discussion about tax rates or military spending or how state budgets are used or which party anyone belongs to. It’s about the most basic rights and common decency. It’s about being human and wanting equality in all areas of life for everyone whether we agree/approve of them or not. Will I ever understand your choice to continue to support Trump or anyone like him? No. Do I believe in the deepest part of my heart that you deserve the right to medical care when you are sick, the right to love and marry whichever adult you want, the right to be paid for your worth as an employee, to be treated equally regardless of your race or gender or sexual orientation, to have control over your own body and freedom? Yes. Without question. I do not have to agree with you, like you, or even know you to believe you deserve those things. My greatest wish is for you to want the same.

The Lie of Growing Up

When it comes to our relationships with our parents, do we ever really get to grow up?

I’m adult woman. I've spent almost as much of my life on my own as I did in my parents' home. Why does the thought of being in the house with my mother for six days create such a violently negative reaction? Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother. I would do anything for her. But … we rarely see eye-to-eye on anything.

Our relationship has been comparable to a destructive force of nature since I was old enough to refuse to wear the endless supply of frilly dresses she bought me. I was six years old. Things have only gone downhill since then. We didn't agree on what I wore, what toys I played with, or what activities I wanted to participate in. As I grew older she agreed even less with what I wore, she detested the people I chose as friends, and let’s not even start on how she felt about the few people I dated who were brave enough to come over to my house for a visit. Now … it’s pretty much the same, but she has more to dislike. Now she can add not linking where I live, what I do for a living, and the fact that I do not visit often enough.

I only visit my parents once a year for Christmas, and I’m a ball of nerves leading up to every visit. I should have ulcers for the hours of worry that goes into each holiday “vacation.” I purposefully limit our trips to three days plus travel just to reduce the time for conflict. You see I say reduce time and not reduce the chance of conflict. I know it’s going to happen at some point during the visit, but with only three days, it doesn't happen as frequently.

I think a lot of our continued conflict boils down to the fact that I've changed and she hasn't.

I spent the first twenty something years of my life being peacekeeper in our household. I took the verbal abuse that was dished out, and I held my tongue. My mother is like a hurricane. Once she gets going, there’s no stopping her until she’s done. Growing up, I dealt with that by making myself as unnoticeable as possible with the theory that if she doesn't notice me, she won’t start yelling at me for something. If she wasn't able to pick the fight then she didn't have the opportunity to push my buttons and engage me. Engaging in those fights only left me frustrated and hurt and crying.

I grew up, I moved a little farther away with each relocation, and in so doing slowly distanced myself from the chaos. At this point in my life, I’m just not willing to take the abuse and stay quiet. I don’t sit by meekly. I give as good as I get, but I like to be sneaky about it. I know if she starts an argument and I take the bait, it’s only going to end badly for me. She always wins in those situations. But if I never engage, I take that away from her. Nothing makes her angrier than someone walking away from her attempt at starting a fight. I hang up the phone, and I don’t answer the return calls. I delete the emails and Facebook posts. I disengage before anything can start.

I’m her only child, and I've decided if she wants to keep me in the loop she has to respect my right to make my own decisions even if she doesn't agree with them. I've made good choices and bad choices, but ultimately, I’m the one that has to live with the consequences. I refuse to be controlled and manipulated. I've made calculated decisions in my life to try to alleviate that constant strain, and I've been pretty successful at it overall.

And, yet, here I am feeling my stomach tighten into knots at the thought of being in the house with her for six days. No wife with me to put my mother on good behavior. No car of my own to use as a quick escape route. No support network to act as a buffer between what I know to be true and what I’m sure I will hear her say at some point during my stay. No alcohol or sex to take my mind off of things. 

It’s not a situation I want to put myself in, but I need to be there for more important reasons. It’s something I have to do. I'm not a teenager any longer pushing boundaries and establishing independence. That battle has already been fought. I grew up. An adult child and her mother at some point have to be able to set it all aside and be the friends they couldn't be during the growing period, right? And so I have to tell myself the lie that everything will be different this time. To quote one of my favorite movies and pieces of literature, "I like the pretty lies."