📃🪶 "But She's Your Mom!"
Last Updated: 3 months, 3 weeks ago
My Frustrated Response to a Video on Going No Contact with Your Parents as an Adult Child
I was inspired, nay, compelled to write something in response to this, because it just hit too close to home.
My Background with (Some Of) My Parents' Abuse
The video hits too close to home as someone who had to cut contact with my abusive parents because, love or not, they are people who cannot and will not respect my boundaries or cease doing me harm if I allow them any part in life, and that is just an immutable fact.
The frustration I have with people who have said everything from "but they're your parents" to one absolutely repugnant statement (in response to my actually talking about how they were abusive) "but nobody will ever love you the way your parents will though!" said with a condescending smile.
Seriously? Telling an abuse victim that the worst abuse they have ever known is the best love they can ever hope to receive in life? I actually put that on a par with my parents' own gaslighting, the time my mother told me that she felt like I had died when I came out as my true self, and all the times they told me they knew me better than I knew myself, the awful ways my dad would make homophobic jokes and smile delightedly and triumphantly at how it had hurt me, the way my mom would smile gleefully when she had manipulated people who worked for her into turning against each other and then make racist excuses for why it was necessary. All of which are situations they would deny, of course, because how could I be so unkind as to even say that they could do such a thing?
At the age of 36 I have only now gotten to the stage where I can even allow myself to say that these things happened, either to me or in my presence, without feeling guilty, as if they were my fault somehow and my acknowledgement of them is what is wrong! I somehow feel guilty for responding harshly towards someone who could say such an utterly disgusting thing as to gaslight someone else simply because it is a status quo that is comfortable for them that parents should get to do whatever they want to their children "because they are your parents". And of course, this privilege, nay "right" of no accountability gets applied to biologically related parents, not adoptive parents, because of course it does.
So here goes my response:
"But She's Your Mom!" ie "But the Status Quo Dictates!"
Because.
How terrifying the thought that you might have to have been a good parent and are now subject to a performance review by your children when they become adults instead of having consequences for having assumed free rein to do what you like while they were kids.
How dreadful the possibility that your children are people in their own right and not simply dough to be moulded into your own shape.
"But I didn't sign up for this! I just wanted to have children because they're meant to be an experience for me! I deserve to have this!" That is what you're thinking, and what you tried to sell to your children in order to have grandchildren and have your line continue, a myth you bought into because it served your needs for validation and your security in having people to take care of you in your old age, a guarantee that you would not be abandoned in your old age just as you felt abandoned in your youth and so you had children simply as your insurance policy, not to give them the best life possible for them and their needs, with the responsibility to find out what those needs truly entailed, but lied to yourself and created a narrative in which this was the moral, loving thing to do and forced those children to conform to your fantasies.
But you're trying to keep those thoughts quiet so they don't register consciously.
Your cognitive dissonance becomes noticeable whenever your children make a decision you wouldn't make in the process of living vicariously through them, such as when they come out as gay or trans, or pick their own career, or plan a wedding different to the one you wanted, or move out of town, or decide not to have children, or to raise their children differently to how you raised them.
Suddenly you become dangerously close to realising children aren't possessions, like giant dolls to play house with, and that maybe you actually did things wrong, maybe you actually weren't a perfect or unconditionally loving parent like the image you constructed, and maybe you actually need to ask their forgiveness and work to earn their trust again, and somehow it's easier to double down.
Even if working to be a better person would be worth it, would actually possibly repair the relationship or help you to not lose the relationships you still have and not do further damage to other people.
You'd prefer to cling to the illusions and your ego because your whole identity was in telling yourself you did everything right, you were a certain type of person, a certain type of parent.
You'd rather believe you were right and they were wrong than try to have them back in your life, or at least to do no further harm to others, to not incur more losses due to your ego and beliefs, and to be a better person yourself.
Because you don't want to own the belief that you spent, or by your own stricter criteria, utterly wasted decades doing harm to others, so instead you will spend, nay waste your whole life doing more harm in living for those lies simply because they make you feel validated.
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