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I have a friend, more of an acquaintance really, whose mother thinks she hung the moon. She is told constantly how smart/talented/attractive /creative/perfect she is. It’s a strange thing to witness. I wonder what it would be like to grow up with a parent like that, one who told you that you could be anything and do anything. That hasn’t been my experience.
My mother, God love her, is a sweet Southern belle. She lives by the Scarllette O’Hara philosophy “I‘m not going to think about that today, I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Of course, tomorrow never comes. She is the queen of denial. She’s so adept at ignoring reality. It’s sometimes funny and usually a little scary.
For instance, she’s currently giving my sister hell because she’s getting married and moving from Alabama to Minnesota. My mom thinks that is the craziest thing she has ever heard. “Why would you want to marry a Yankee and move that far away?” I’ve been trying to tell her that I also plan to move to another state when my daughter graduates from high school, but she simply ignores this information. My sister tried to make excuses about the economy being bad here and unemployment being high. But I finally said “Look, you don’t have to have a good excuse to go live somewhere else. It’s perfectly okay to live in another state just because you want to.” I don’t think the concept really registered with my folks. I could tell by the blank looks on their faces.
Mother can’t fathom why anyone would want to move away from this godforsaken, homophobic, Bible thumping, redneck place. She thinks it’s great. She also believes that children should never move away from their parents, no matter how old they get. My dad is sort of the same way, although I’m pretty sure he has regrets about not taking opportunities for new experiences when he was younger. I mean, my family still has lunch together every Sunday. You have to see your family at least once a week. That’s the rule. I don’t know if this is just a Southern phenomenon or if families everywhere are this enmeshed.
So, back to my sister. She pointed out to my mother that she didn’t give our younger sister this much grief when she moved away. Mother said (and she was serious) “Well, she didn’t move away. I didn’t know she was moving. She just went to visit her cousin in Texas and hasn’t come back yet”, which is nowhere near how it actually happened. Maybe in her mind it went down like that. I said, “Mother, you don’t usually quit your job and move your furniture out of your apartment when you’re just going to visit a relative. And besides, she moved to California first then to Texas.” She had conveniently forgotten most of the facts to fit what happened into her idea of how things “should” be.
Also, even though my cousin Kenny is a big flaming out of the closet queer, my mother refuses to believe that he is gay. She doesn’t believe in homosexuality. She doesn’t believe it exists. About Kenny, she said “You know he got back in the church and quit that stuff.” Okay, mom.
So, this is what I come from. I don’t know how I turned out to be what I am—a liberal feminist agnostic lesbian with tattoos. Needless to say, I’ve been a constant disappointment to my parents since the day I was born, literally. My father wanted a son more than anything. In fact, it never crossed his mind that he might have a daughter. When I was born, which was before they let fathers into the delivery room, the nurse came out and told my dad that I was a girl. He just looked at her a second and said “A girl? Huh.” It’s been pretty much downhill from there, even though I was actually a good kid-quiet, obedient, studious, shy but nice. Most parents would probably be proud to have a daughter who was able to complete graduate school and then succeed in a professional career while raising children as a single parent. That’s not good enough for them. My mother constantly harasses me about finding a man. She wants me to get married to fulfill her dream for my life, whether I share that dream or not. I have told her repeatedly that’s not going to happen. That’s not what I want. Don’t you want me to be happy?
And the sad part is, I don’t think she really cares if I’m happy or not as long as I do what she thinks I should do. As long as I don’t embarrass her or do something other people will talk negatively about. How crazy is that? I have to hand it to them, my parents have never given me that line “We just want you to be happy.” I think that even they know that that would be a lie.
So, what do you do? How can you be close to your family when you’re pretty sure they would reject you if they really knew you? When they’ve practically told you that they would? Because what they already do know about you is bad enough. We’ve gotten by so far with a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They don’t ask me much about my life and I don’t tell them many details, which is why they don’t really know me at all. It makes our relationship very shallow. I know my parents know I’m gay, but we can never talk about it. Come on, I’m over 30 and I live with a woman. We share a bedroom. How many 30 year old women with children have a “roommate”? I often consider coming out to them, but I don’t want to force them to take some kind of moral high ground and ban me from their home and cut me out of the will. Think I’m exaggerating? You don’t know my parents. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve played the martyr, choosing their values over their children.
All this shit really interferes with my ability to feel close to them and to respect them. I do love them and have a strong desire to be as close to them as I can be. But the closer I am, the more grief it brings. I feel like they don’t love me enough, and I guess I resent that. And I can’t pretend to be what I’m not. Moving away from here would probably be the best thing that could happen to me, even though they’re going to be crying and slinging snot when it happens. They can have their fantasy of a “good daughter”. That’s what they really want. Then we can call each other a few times a week and talk about the weather or shopping or anything besides how we feel and what is really happening. If I made a preemptive strike and cut them off because of how they think/feel/behave, would I be just as bad as they are for doing that to me? It’s a dilemma. I’m not always sure how to handle it. What can you do when the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down?
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