Monsters Escape from Boxes

Yesterday morning, one of my monsters escaped from its box.

My dad sent one of his right-wing propaganda e-mail forwards to my brothers and I. This one was about the ways that the "Founding Fathers" were all evangelical Christians and that this nation was founded on the principles of evangelical Christianity, blahblahblah, bullshit.

That annoyed me, and he is always sending these sorts of things and I am always asking him not to send them, but sometimes he still does. I find it distressing because it seems as if my rational, somewhat Deist father has become this raving lunatic. I mean, this is a man who did, in fact, teach me to quest for the truth through evidence and now he is espousing these cracked, Faux News, thoughtless party lines that make me wonder if he is just drifting toward dementia...except he isn't.

This doubly annoyed me because I have asked, demanded, pleaded, and publicly shamed him through "reply all" to stop sending me this stuff, pointing out that I don't send him left-wing information. That he continues to do so seems to me an act of disrespect.

This one, however, cut me somewhere deep that had very little to do with the actual attachment and everything to do with the personal message that he wrote to my brothers and I. He thinks that the country is in a religious war over an interpretation of God that will make this country less free and less just than it has been in his life. He was born in 1942. I'll let you do the freedom and justice math on that one. He also thinks that his failure to raise his children in a religion was his great failing as a parent, and that our troubles growing up would not have been so bad had we gone to church.

That last one pisses me off to no end as my difficulties with the sexism in my house are well-known and had nothing to do with God or any deity and everything to do with the fucked up ideas about women, and sexuality, and independent individuals, and specifically women as independent individuals with sexuality, which he perpetuated.

Anyway, I wasted half of the morning going on a rant in reply to him, a rant that I did not send. Or at least that I have not yet sent. I did show it to my aunt. She'll give him the gist. She also reminded me that my dad's message had more to do with a combination of his denial and his regrets than anything real having to do with me or my brothers. He's trying to get into heaven in his last years. There's something kind of sad about that.

To him, I instead wrote, "hahahahaha! What a funny joke, because you wouldn't actually send this in earnest to an actual historian, especially one who grew up in your household." Then, I sent a P.S. in which I told him that, if he wants to feel guilty about something, I could give him a list, but that lack of religion was not on it. In fact, lack of religion was one of the good things that he did for which he can feel proud.

Still, his message may not have had anything to do with me, but it still hurt me so much. It seems so silly, but it did. Then, I accidentally opened a saved message that I had received from my nasty brother a couple of years ago, but never read. In it, he told me that I was too high on a pedestal to see the real world. I think he meant "ivory tower," but you know he doesn't know that term. So, I spend the second half of the morning trying to put this monster, this primal feeling of alienation, back into its box.

Sometimes, you get a view of yourself through other people's eyes. You see what they see when they look at you. In graduate school, I realized that some of my guy friends really weren't my friends when they would say different things to me, or about me, that exposed their belief that I was not as smart as they were, that I would get a job to which they felt entitled just because I was a woman and therefore clearly not qualified. Or that they thought that I was pathetic because I couldn't date a good man and that, ultimately, I was a little bit of a slut because I, you know, had a disastrous sex life that might involve more than one man in a period of five years. That's not a nice thing to realize about the people whom you think are closest to you.

It's not an unfamiliar feeling over my life, but it never gets easier to know; and when it comes to my family, I have always felt this. This feeling gets worse rather than better. They think I'm essentially a child with no knowledge of the "real" world, and all of my ideals are sterile, coming out of a book (which, of course, can contain no wisdom) rather than any experience.

I'm realizing that the anger that I feel is actually, for now, healthy. The anger is the rebellion. The anger says, "wait a minute! That is not how I am, and your are wrong to think that way." I used to swallow the anger and think, "wait. Maybe they have a point. Maybe I really am that way." I find I have less and less energy for that, now. I think I'm accepting that anger. The next thing to do is to think "wrong, wrong, wrong," and the thing to do after that is -- well -- rise up and say "dumbass, be gone!" The think to do after that, even, is to just laugh at how ridiculous it all is. What a grand joke that you can spend nearly a quarter of a century with people who gave birth to you, who raised you, and who still get you all wrong because they don't even try to understand you.

In fact, that may be the bigger picture right there: understanding. No one in our house tried to understand anything about anyone else. They just judged. Understanding takes effort and concentration and questioning and listening. Now, at the end of his life, my dad may think he's looking for some understanding of us, his children, and his role as parent; but, really (to judge) I think he's just looking not to go to hell -- or to get out of his own hell, which is perhaps a guilt or a regret that he really can't look at.

I mean really! Religion? That's what he thinks was the big problem? Not the beating, not the yelling, not the disrespect, not the constant atmosphere of violence, but that we didn't go to church on Sundays?* That is, in fact, quite laughable.

Meanwhile, I can't be around them at all. I can't go straight to the laughing just yet. I still muck through the anger and the hurt. I was starting to get sentimental and thinking of maybe visiting. I can't. To visit means to cut myself into little fragments and prevent those fragments from integrating into a full person. Hell, that was my childhood: bunches of unintegrated fragments that formed my person. I sometimes think that maturity, and intelligence, and rationality all slipped through the cracks between the fragments. Honesty sure did. Perhaps that's my father's state right now. Perhaps it always was.

Right now, when I try to think about my family in any constructive way, I feel like my skin has turned hard. I'm all mushy inside of it, but my skin is turning into some sort of horned, metallic shell with them, they just seem to find a crack in it here and there and piss me off. Having a horned armor with them is probably wise for now, until I can automatically say, "dumbass, be gone!" or until I can reflexively laugh at it all. I don't need to waste mornings putting the monster of their ignorance back in a box.

I need to jettison the box over the nearest bridge.

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*Incidentally, I think religion is a bit like alcohol in that a person is still who they are when they are religious, just like they are when they drink. The alcohol and the religion just amplifies their personality.