queerbychoice | I Want to Be an Orphan

I'm falling apart. On Saturday I went to visit my parents for my father's birthday, and left on distinctly unwelcome terms, and since then not a day has passed when I haven't started sobbing. I managed, with considerable difficulty, to write to both of my Franks about the most important parts, but I've been trying to write more background details in a journal entry here and I can't get beyond a paragraph or two before I choke up and can't function anymore. Today at work I wanted to hear nothing but sad wistful clichéd easy listening love songs (amazing how the one time I actually want to hear those, it's suddenly almost impossible to find any) and interpret them as being about my relationship with my parents. Then when I finally found a station that was playing them, they unexpectedly started playing "Cat's in the Cradle" and suddenly I just couldn't handle it anymore and tears started rolling down my cheeks. It's a good thing I have my own office now, but a few minutes later a coworker came in to talk to me and I can only hope my eyes weren't obviously red.

I'm considering informing my parents that I don't wish to see them ever again. The biggest drawback to this plan is that they have my address and phone number and several of my email addresses so it's unlikely I'll ever really escape them. They'll just hang around outside my apartment trying to beat my door down.

What does it mean to love someone? There are some people on earth who I love dearly. When I say "I love you" to someone it can mean a lot of different things, but two of the most basic that are always included even when I say it to almost complete strangers are "I like being with you" and "Your existence is part of what helps keep me sane." Neither of these things is true of my parents. I dread being with them, and their existence is probably the number one most dangerous threat to my sanity I've ever experienced.

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if you're considering breaking ties with them, you should perhaps also consider ending a secret or two. to some large extent, gayle, they don't even know who you are.

if you're going to tell them off anyway, you should go all out: "this is who i am; this is why you cause me pain; fuck you for not paying enough attention to notice."

It means to be helpless on a rock, chained, open to the elements. The times of balmy sun and raging waters. It means that the good is always balanced by the bad. Outside the "I love you's" lurks an "I hate you" and the balance is sublime. It means knowing the black and white of it and being able to hold them both in your open hands and breath it in, drink it down with greed and doubt, need and want.

Loving someone means rolling your eyes and chuckling later. It means, cliche, your heart on the ground, stomped, but also your heart cradled in someone else's arms... and your arms. It means everything you are and everything you aren't. All someone else is, all that they are not. It means the illusion and the really real reality.

It means.
It is.

****

I know nothing about your parents or your situation with them and so I don't feel that I can comment. What I do know is how it feels to be an orphan. I self-estranged myself from my family for three years because I was afraid of how they would deal with my sexuality because I was told they would take it horribly by people who couldn't have known me or my family worse. I can tell you of the intense emptiness, the palpable longing to hear a voice, smell, touch. I can tell you of trying to destroy myself because I needed them and I wouldn't allow myself, couldn't allow myself, to face up to their love because what if it wasn't what I wanted?

However, in then end, all was reconciled and healed.

Not knowing, I can only say that what Frank said sounds very, very wise. We aren't telepathic (yet) and if we don't communicate, let people know what's up, then they have no incentive to change.

*hugs you*

Love,

Q-ster

Welcome to my world Gayle :)
you've just described my most memorable feelings.

I remember I used to cry myself to sleep listening when the dad hit us... it was comforting somehow...like a message warning us not to grow up and be like him... I can sing the entire song still...

*Daemen*

you gots gud words for our gud fren Gayle, we liks you ^_^
sam an saria
~Myst collective~

i am considering ending secrets. i am considering many things right now. nothing is decided yet, though.

to some large extent, they've ordered me not to let them know who i am. that's what makes Saturday such an interesting possible place for cutting off contact: because my father finally spelled out in so many words that he doesn't want to know who i am, and that expressing even such simple and (one would think) relatively socially acceptable opinions as pacifism and the desire not to die for my country provokes him to start yelling things like "you'd better change the subject right now or else i'll come to blows with you because i feel very strongly about this!" over and over.

the orders to not tell them anything real about myself have always been there from both parents on a very tanglible level but usually conveyed in such a way that it would have been hard for me to reference it and explain to them what they were doing. but on Saturday my father finally spelled it out so explicitly that if i'm going to cut off contact it would be easier for me to explain why if i do it while the memory of that incident is still fresh in their minds.

*hugs back*

Yes, Frank is often wise. He also has the advantage of knowing me exceptionally well.

Background info on my parents: it's nothing special really, it's not like they ever hit or abused me or any of the other horrible things that so many other parents seem to have done to their kids. My parents are just the classic 1950s storybook adoring suburban parents who have the unfortunate drawback of not being able to handle it when I express the slightest opinion that in any way differs from the approved dialogue for 1950s storybooks.

On Saturday my father informed me that my entire generation should march proudly off to war to die for our country, and I informed him in response that I consider any parent who would send their child off to fight in this war to be a horrible parent and that any parent who sends me off to die for my country, I'm disowning that parent and never speaking to them again. He then began yelling at me over and over, "You'd better change the subject right now or else I'll come to blows with you because I feel very strongly about this!" and so I yelled back "Well, I feel very strongly about this too!" and left and went home. It's not as though he'd ever actually have hit me; I've never seen him hit anyone in my life. But I'm just sick to death of this macho image he cultivates of himself as someone who has to be verbally coddled and placated by me constantly suppressing every possible glimmer of my true selfhood and individuality or else he'll lose control of his own fists.

I've estranged myself from my family for 10, 15, 20 years even (and I'm only 25 years old) because I've seen how they deal with not only my sexuality (which they were informed of once, but have gone into denial about) but pretty much every possible sign of my independent thinking. However, my estrangement has always been only on the inside, while on the outside I put up my very best pretense of being the 1950s storybook child they expect (and a very convincing pretense it is too). I can't even remember a time when I felt anything I'd consider to be "love" for my parents. I don't hate them, I don't desire to hurt them, but I don't desire to associate with them either and I don't call that kind of attitude "love."

I've never tried to destroy myself; I'm not inclined in that direction and I don't anticipate ever becoming so. I'm on quite good terms with myself and always have been. It's my parents who I'm not on good terms with, and if there were a way to just get them out of my life completely that's what I'd most like to do. I don't believe any amount of effort trying to make my parents into better and more lovable people could ever create a profound enough change in my parents' personalities to be worth the huge amount of pain that it would cost me.

You can't miss someone very much when you never knew them in the first place. The distance between myself and my parents has been there for as long as I can remember, and although it did deepen and widen after I turned queer, the fact still remains that it was a miles-wide uncrossable chasm to begin with, even when I was het. So yes, it would be nice if I had warm cuddly parents I felt real love for, but living without that is nothing new and I've long since found friends whose love fills in all the empty spaces I need. All I want now is to stop having to associate with and pretend to like my parents, as I would have stopped years ago already if our culture hadn't taught my parents to be so bullheadedly dead-set on the ridiculous notion that just because they raised me when I was a kid we have to continue to pretend to like each other for the rest of our lives. Couples who meet and choose each other as lovers are allowed to get divorced if they outgrow each other. Parents and children don't even choose each other in the first place, so why is it so much less socially acceptable for them to divorce each other?

*hears you and feels you*

Man... I don't know what I would do if my father threatened to hit me... Yes I do. When he was alive, he tried to... I picked him up and body slammed him.

Lesson: Don't fuck with me.

But... you don't live with them.
And you don't have to respond to them.

(1950's... 4 reals tho'?)

*hugs again*

Well, I am sure we are all here for ya.

Peace,

Q

My dad needs a kid who can body slam him. Unfortunately my brother and I are both about 6 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than him, and he's a marathon runner whose weight is 100% muscle. So he has no fear of being body slammed.

And yeah, they're 1950s for real. I've been looking for 25 years for the slightest sign of anything un-1950s about them lurking under the surface and I haven't found a thing.

The 50s were the scariest decade ever.

Okay, that's not true, but they were the scariest decade in the 20th century. To me personally.

*hugs you*

I Want to Be an Orphan

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