So, I'm very tired, and I have a lot of things that I actually need to do, but for some reason the compulsion to just... just write and sort things out on "paper" is taking priority. Please bear with me while I fumble towards coherence.
I do not like my mom. She is abrasive. She is myopic. She is politically aligned with people who casually legislate the misery of underserved peoples, with racially-driven drug laws, with grossly restrictive abortion laws, with debate about bodies that they do not understand or care about, with actual, "serious" discussion about which bathroom girls like me can use. She ignored me when I was a child, unless it was to abuse me. Usually verbally, emotionally. Sometimes physically.
My mother saw me then (and now, I imagine) as a mistake. She has always had a plan for every aspect of her life, and to the extent that she's made everyone around her miserable, it's been greatly influenced by her inability to adapt and deviate from plans. To try to force reality to match her plans, rather than adjusting her plans to deal with reality. This is why it does not surprise me that she is relatively far to the right, politically. She kind of is the Republican party, or at least their faux-inclusive version of themselves.
My mother would never acknowledge or admit to it, I don't think, but she carries no small amount of self-loathing. She was born and raised in Japan, and emigrated to America to be with my dad after they'd gotten married. I think. I don't actually know the story, I kind of don't care. She both loves and hates her ethnicity. She clings to the happy things she remembers from her childhood, like the yakimo vendors crying in the streets, and rejects the rest. She never taught us Japanese. It was like she came from nowhere. Her father was an alcoholic, a sort of by-the-numbers model of an alcoholic family man in a strictly defined culture. I had the misfortune of meeting him a couple times.
We were visiting Japan once, when I was in fifth grade or so. It was over winter holidays, so I'd been given some money by friends or relatives of that side of my family (I never did learn which). Being about ten years old, with some money, in a country full of really fantastic robot and sci-fi themed toys when I'd been raised and treated like a boy my entire life left me in a pretty happy place, for once. I bought a little die-cast robot figure, a better quality toy from a more interesting program than what I was used to in the US. He saw me playing with it and chastised me for not saving that money for my future. Me, a ten-year-old child who had few friends, for whom play was a vital escape.
Don't get me wrong, it's reasonable advice. Someone gives you money, maybe you should, I don't know, not go spend it all right away on toys. And to be fair, I still struggle with this. But I don't think that I struggled with it much more than your average ten-year-old struggles with it, at the time, because I was fucking ten.
My mother is not a fan of alcohol. She saw her father getting angry, getting drunk, and beating up his family, and thought, "the real problem with this whole process is the part where he drinks." She seemed philosophically okay with the abuse stuff, though. I mean. She rejected the use of alcohol, but was really pretty completely on board with screaming at and hitting her children because of her absolute inability to cope with life in anything approaching a truly adult fashion.
One of my mother's life plans was to have two children. A son, first (check), and a daughter, next (che— wait, what?). Bearing what she thought was a son when she had decided that nothing but a daughter would do put her in the uncomfortable position of reality not acceding to her wishes, a position she found herself in often. One she has never done well in. The irony, of course, is that if she had actually just accepted her child as they were, she would have found a daughter. Not the daughter she deserved but the daughter she needed. Nothing less than a princess. Shining.
My mother grew up somewhat poor, which filled her with a desperate fear of poverty. The relentlessness with which she pursues all things (even very wrong things, sadly) served her very well in this aspect. She is extraordinarily driven. Precise, mechanical. Extremely intelligent, and yet almost laughably ignorant. She has made a lot of money, and knows nothing about how the world actually is. (God, she really is the Republican party, isn't she.) She thinks a great deal, processes massive volumes of numerical data with really pretty remarkable insight. She devours these problems like a combine built to efficiently dismantle them. But she does not understand how to human.
My mother's relationship with my dad, like her relationship with basically the entire world, was (and by all accounts still is) one of grotesque power dynamics, gaslighting, and manipulation. Like all truly great gaslighters, she is a victim of her own distorted vision of reality. She does not convince other people that reality is one thing, while believing it is actually something else. She legitimately believes that reality is what she says it is, and when faced with the fact that it is not, interesting-slash-fucking-awful things happen. She decides a source is trusted because they tell her things she likes to hear, and reinforce her views of reality; and once she's decided that source is trusted, they are infallible, to her. What they say, is. You get one guess what news channel she prefers.
Conflicts between my parents would boil over and explode, constantly, almost always in the same way. My mother would be angry about god-knows-what. Then something unrelated and trivial would set her off. She would start yelling and screaming, maybe throwing things, swinging a belt at her kids, kicking a bit of dog or what-have-you. She punched down, essentially. She surrounded herself with people who were weaker than her (by design, in the case of her children and husband). Everything was, and probably still is, completely black-and-white to her. Either you are some kind of transcendent being who is far above her, or you are garbage and you are wasting her time.
I spent most of my life believing I was garbage. A waste of everyone's time.
Oh, and a guy.
I think the gender revelation thing is part of why I woke up today and felt this bizarre urge to call my mom. I wanted to have a casual chat. I had no idea why in the hell I would wake up and think or feel anything remotely like that, but on further reflection, I realized that this is the first Mother's Day since I realized I was a girl. I don't know if it's the fact of my gender becoming clear to me, or just the base fact that I now know who I am, at last, or maybe even something else that I am not aware of at all, but I felt like reaching out.
I had had myself convinced, up until recently, that what I felt towards my parents now was ambivalence. That I'd finally won, because I no longer hated them. I just didn't care. I did not feel hate, which, it has been argued, is sometimes just an expression of frustrated or misplaced love. I felt nothing. But that was wrong, of course, because it turns out I feel everything.
I still have old, unpaid student loans from the mid-'90s because I felt so terribly wronged by having been compelled to sign for them. I did not want to go to college right after high school. I was not ready. My closest teacher, I was later told by my brother, had advised my parents that sending me straight to college would be disastrous. That I had to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, and that if they compelled me to go, it would not end well. But my mom viewed him as beneath her. His advice and perspective were meaningless, because she knew best, and I would go to college right after high school, no matter that I did not know who I was (boy, did I not know who I was) or what I wanted to do in life.
I realize that this is self-destructive. I've known that for decades. I know that I'm not hurting my parents by not paying those loans, that they really probably don't even know that I still haven't. But on some level, I'm still waiting for them to notice. I'm still standing here, defiant, angry that they never bothered to learn who their daughter was, that they compelled her do something she was absolutely not equipped to do, stuck her with the bill, and then hid behind the idea that an 18-year-old is an adult who does not answer to their parents in any way, and cannot be meaningfully influenced by them. I don't even want their money, anymore. I mean I do, but it's not the point. I want them to apologize. I want to see that they genuinely regret all of the horrible ways they treated me, which have, to me, come to be symbolized by those old loans. Loans I signed for, so I could fail at trying to be the boy they wanted me to be.
So, I dropped out of college. I met a girl on the internet, which became sort of a sad meme in my life. I guess I did it before it was cool. I mean, I did it really terribly and without any sense of self-awareness, but I did it. A pioneer of awful things.
Anyway, the girl, Tina, was going to school in Los Angeles, while I was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (no relation). We spent hours and hours on IRC with each other, and physically mailed developed photographs back and forth, because it was literally faster than sending them digitally. DCC file transfers were so dodgy that we'd have to reset the transmission over and over. Mailing was slow, but we knew it would work. The first picture she ever sent me is still inside my guitar.
Tina came out to visit me in person, and we spent a week eating shitty instant college foods and fucking our brains out. We were both shell-shocked abuse survivors, and neither of us really understood that, so we tried to be together, and, naturally, it did not work out. But since I desperately needed a feminine presence in my life, I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years... even decades, just searching for any girl who would have me.
And, like most miserable, fear-driven ostriches, I was lying to myself. What I meant by "any girl" was "any girl I find pretty enough." I wonder how much happier I could've been if I'd been able to see people, then, the way that I've started to see them now. Surprise, surprise, when someone who is not a man tries to make themselves into one, and their best guide to masculinity is pop culture, they become a pretty shitty man.
My mother had succeeded. She'd done her job. I saw men as spineless idiots who could not be trusted, who needed to be commanded, not just guided, but commanded, at every turn, by a woman. Men were violent cowards, stupid brutes who needed to be saved from themselves. I set out looking for my commander, hating myself every step of the way, setting fire to everything around me. I hated myself very thoroughly. If there was a metric by which to judge me, I judged myself, and found myself wanting. Her parenting colored everything. It colored everything black and white.
One time, I put some jelly on a piece of bread. Okay, to be fair, I've put jelly on a piece of bread lots of times, but the time I'm talking about here, I was probably... eight? Maybe seven? Four? We were still living in Wisconsin, so I was pretty young. Being a child, I made my own food in comically oversized portions. I had not really considered that an adult-sized serving was proportionally much smaller to an adult than it was to me. So this was a pretty big piece of bread. I couldn't finish it.
My mom, continuing her relentless instruction in how to not waste food, demanded that I eat nothing else until I finished that piece of bread with jelly on it. Literally, nothing. It went into the fridge. Over the next several days, it became less and less appetizing. Mold began to grow on parts of it. But I still had to finish it. I could have water, and I could have that shitty, disgusting piece of rotting food. And I could have nothing else.
Eventually, I took what was left of the sad snack that I'd triumphantly made for myself a little less than a week before, and went, sobbing, to my mother with it. I told her I was sorry that I'd wasted so much food. So much! It was a fucking piece of bread, you miserable cunt. You filled your child with a lifelong disdain for grape jelly because you saw some shit on TV about starving kids in Africa, and somehow decided that if we didn't eat every fucking thing in sight, we were really just ungrateful for our bounty.
Another time, also still in Wisconsin, I microwaved soup. In a metal pot. (I haven't done that lots of times, just the one time.) It threw sparks everywhere, made a terrible racket, and lots of noise and smoke. I stopped the microwave as soon as I saw that it was not operating the way I was used to seeing it operate, and it wasn't permanently damaged, but I did have an $0.88 can of soup base just sitting there being gross in some cold water in a pot that now smelled like burning metal.
Yeah, she made me eat that, too.
These were not important lessons being taught in a loving way to a valued child. This was a hurricane who should have never had children slamming her child into trees until they were pulped and lifeless. This was a mother destroying her child's capacity to stand up for itself. It was contributing to her child's constant misery, to the agony of being alive. I was boneless, skinless. A weak and quivering pile of impotent fury that hated itself and everything around it, because sentience meant only one thing: being aware of how awful it was to live.
My brother once told my parents that he had had a startling revelation. He had realized that there were no adults. There were just older kids. That the myth of life stages had fallen apart when he really examined it, because he had come to understand that he was still basically the same person then, at, I don't know, maybe fifteen? as he had been at five. He was still just trying to make sense of the world, and he knew more than he had known when he was younger, but he had given up on the idea of reaching a certain age, and then just "getting it," and being an adult. Or, more correctly, no longer being a child.
My brother is an incredibly brilliant man. And he has probably not said anything more insightful than this in his life since. My parents are still children. In fact, I'm older than them, now, if we are using age as a metaphor for maturity. My father has always been infantilized by my mother, and once they retired, that only got worse. My formerly liberal-leaning, gentle father is now a die-hard Fox News bobblehead, because of my mother's relentless bullying. He probably thinks he grew up and realized how the world really works, and the Koch Brothers™ of the world could not be happier.
My mother still lives in fear of the world. She lives with the same fear of the world that her father had, and that he put into her when he beat the shit out of her mother, his wife, on a regular basis. She sees the world as being full of men who need to be controlled absolutely, because a man free to become his best and truest self might go astray, and start beating up her mom again.
I do not like my mom. To be fair, I do not like much of anybody. But I've come to realize, recently, much to my boundless joy, that I love really pretty much everybody. I love to different degrees, at different intensities, but whether (and how and when) I engage with someone ends up being a matter of priority as a function of how much I like or do not like them. It's not an expression of caring about their welfare, but rather an expression of enjoying their company. This is hard for some people to understand, and it has caused some discomfort when I've told people whom I do not know very well that I love them, because I was not always clear about what I meant.
To like someone is to prefer their company to that of other people's. To feel at ease and in accord with them, to be comfortable. But comfort truly does breed weakness. It breeds complacency. People we feel uncomfortable around are important to us. They help us find the truth. The fact of my existence makes so many people uncomfortable in so many ways. Suffering without purpose has no value. But suffering is not always without purpose.
I do not want people to be uncomfortable around me, but the solution is not for me to vanish. It's for me to gently assert myself in their spaces until they become accustomed to my existence. Until they get used to who I am. They may not ever be comfortable around me, but they can hopefully become, at least, not uncomfortable around me.
Love is caring about the happiness, health, and safety of someone. It could be your child, your sibling, your parent, your classmate, your friend, your best friend, your lover, your cat, that tree in your backyard, the crickets you pass on your way home every night. It could even be yourself. When people are happy, healthy, safe, they are free. They are free to become the best versions of themselves, and to help others do the same. I sometimes think that I'm free. But then I realize that if I only think that I'm free, and I do not use that understanding to help others also be free, then I am not truly free. Something is holding me back. Something is scaring me.
In the end, I love my mom. I do not like her at all. But I do want her to be happy and healthy and safe. I want that for everyone. I know that she is only a misguided and miserable person because she does not know how to be anything else. I know that she is seeking joy and avoiding pain, like every other living thing. I know that living in denial of the kind of fear that she has allowed to become intrinsic to her being cannot be anything but awful.
I love my mom in the same way that I love the man who groped me on the street last December. They cause injury because they do not understand what they are doing. I do not like either of them, but I cannot help them understand how to be better people unless I reach out to them. Because they will never reach out to me.
You better be home. You actual goddamn cow.
P.S.: Tangentially; if you don't have a mom (or don't feel like you do), I'm your mom, now. Sorry, I don't make the rules. I love you. You matter. Please be safe. Let me know if you need anything.
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