I talked in my last post about two letters I’d read in Care & Feeding (Slate), one right after the other. They had to do with highly sensitive people and how parents/grandparents reacted to them. The third and fourth letters were about gender identity and closely related.
The third letter is from a mom grieving as her daughter transitions from M-to-F. She was happy to embrace her daughter, but sad to see the son she took care of leave. She was honestly struggling, which was better than my mother when I came out as bi to her. I don’t know why I did given what I know about her, but I thought because she was a psychologist and because she was supportive of my cousin coming out as gay, she would be at least neutral about it. I should have known better; I really should have. When I came out to her, she said, “But you used to like boys so much!” At the time, I told her that I still did, but I liked girls as well. Now, I’d say that gender wasn’t important to me when choosing a partner or that I welcomed partners of all or no genders. My mother also made the tired old ‘next you’ll be wanting to have sex with animals’–I don’t know WHY sex with animals is always next–comment. In other words, she was not understanding at all. I dropped it because it was clear she did not want to talk about it. Years later, I mentioned something again about liking women and she said in a dismissive tone, “Oh, I thought you were over that.”
I introduced my first serious boyfriend in college to them. It was dinner. My father could not have cared less about meeting my boyfriend and I could tell my mother didn’t care for him. She wasn’t wrong, but they could have at least made an effort at the time. After that dinner, I vowed I would never introduce a partner to my parents again, and I haven’t. They are also a big reason I never wanted to get married and have children. Not only because they were a very bad example on both fronts, but also because I did not want to subject a loved one to their venom. I knew if I had kids, my parents would warp them the way they did me. My mom was so desperate for me to have kids (which was a mindfuck all by itself), she said she’d move back here to take care of them. As if that would be an incentive for me to have kids! Even if we were close, having kids to make her happy would be a stupid idea. In addition, it’s not even true. She likes the idea of being a grandmother more than she actually likes being a grandmother. She moved away after my niece and nephews were born and only comes back once a year (before the pandemic, of course. It was twice a year for some years, but then tapered off to a month in the summer–even though it was supposed to be six weeks–and all of this before the pandemic. And when she’s around the grandchildren, all she does is ask them stilted questions and basically ignore them. She complains about them every time she sees them, which again, remember, was maybe two or three times during the four weeks they were here. This time, my father said he was embarrassed that they had been here two weeks and not seen my sister-in-law and my brother’s kids. When they had been here for two months. And they could have seen my brother’s family; they chose not to. When they went on a cruise with my brother’s family a few years ago (I put my foot down for once and refused to go because I knew I’d be miserable. I hate being confined; I hate groups of people; I hate being with my family. Yeah, that would have been a recipe for disaster). I asked them how it went when they came home. They complained for a half hour about the boys (my nephews) misbehaving. The same thing happened when my brother took his family to Taiwan many years ago (again, I refused to go). I got to hear all about how one of my nephews misbehaved.
In fact, I rarely hear anything good about my niece and nephews from my parents. So as much as they claim they love being grandparents (and my mom pressured me for fifteen(!) years to have children), they don’t actually like kids. Same with being parents. My mom consistently claims that being a mother was all she wanted to do and yet, she never really liked me as a kid. Or an adult, to be honest. It’s because she (and my father) has very rigid ideas about how people should be, though she would deny it, and I don’t tick any of her boxes. I am a big disappointment to her, which preyed on me for many years. Until my therapist pointed out that she was a disappointment to me as a mother as well. I had been so beaten down about what a failure as a daughter I was, I had never thought of it from that point of view. It was a game changer for me and made me see how much I’d internalized the ‘bad daughter’ narration my parents were spinning.
It took me far too long to realize that I could never win as their daughter and be my authentic self. They had a proscribed (and exceedingly rigid) idea of what their daughter should be like and I didn’t fit any of them. I know my mother feels I’ve rejected her way of life–and it’s true, I have. What she doesn’t understand, however, is that it has nothing to do with her. Or rather, very little to do with her–directly. I didn’t choose my way of life AT her (to quote Captain Awkward), but I know she takes it that way. In part because of her brand of narcissism, she simply can’t see it any other way. My decision to not get married and have children (indeed, in being bisexual and not being a Christian as well) is because of her in a small part, but mostly, it’s because I don’t want either of those things. Well, to be absolutely honest, my decision to not have children had nothing to do with her, but it was later reinforced by her trying to guilt me into having them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that she brought it up consistently for fifteen years with many different reasons why she thought I should have children. Me saying I didn’t want them didn’t deter her one whit. Her desire for me to have them (which was more about what she thought her life should be like than because she actually liked children).
I will say that much of who I am today is in part because of seeing what she went through/put herself through and noping the hell out of it. But it was never anything that I had much interest in in the first place. I never wanted children–I just thought I had to have them. I never really wanted to get married, but what else was I supposed to do as a woman? And speaking of, I’m not sure I am a woman because I got told repeatedly throughout my life that I wasn’t acting like one.
The fourth letter from the column was about a mother who was worried about her child, Jay, who was nonbinary but not out to the extended family–namely, the mother’s father. When they went out to dinner, the grandfather would greet them, “Hey, girls!” and the mother would see Jay wince, but not say anything. Jay is willing to keep doing the dinners, but the mother doesn’t know how to address the issue–if she should at all. She said her father wouldn’t remember from time to time that Jay was nonbinary and not a ‘girl’. She didn’t say why, but I assumed some form of dementia/memory loss. She made pains to say that it wasn’t because her father was malicious and that he didn’t even know at this point that Jay was nonbinary.
I related to this as well because my father has no interest in who I am, but he’s malicious about it. It’s not just cluelessness on his part. Well, to be marginally fair to him, I’ve never mentioned to him that I don’t identify as a woman any longer. Mostly because it would be a pain in MY ass to try to explain what that meant. He can barely process women working outside the house and actually said the word ‘housewife’ with a straight face in this day and age.
His unremittent and grotesque sexism is one reason I never felt like a woman. He’s not the only one with that attitude, of course, but his view is comically outdated and frustrating. Probably because I had to be around it on a daily basis–and believe me, it seeps out in ways I hadn’t expected. It’s hopeless to talk to him about any of this, but it doesn’t stop me from getting goaded into it.
I know that I need to find a therapist to help me work through the family dysfunction; I just don’t have the energy to do it.