Northern Attitude

‘Lo child!

Or, well, how about for a change…

‘Lo, Dad!

My dad signed up to get these mails recently and it made me happy. So, welcome to the cult, Dad! Mostly it’s me blithering into the ether about how people should be nicer to each other and their own brains. Maybe someday it’ll be more. Maybe it’s enough.

To bring the rest of the congregation up to speed, Dad is the only member of my family I’m still in contact with, though we’ve never gotten to spend much time together. I like to say I was raised by wolves — it’s close enough to the truth, and conveys the right impression without me needing to go into specifics. I was raised by creatures in survival mode, creatures who saw their child as competition. I was raised out in the cold, to quote this clever young man who’s been on the radio lately singing lyrics that make me feel personally targeted…

I tried to find a way to coexist with my mother and stepfather, I really did. For a very long time. I tried from a thousand miles away, and I tried from right down the street. The best I ever managed was when we were all able to merrily pretend that we had no history at all, just deal with one another on a surface level. But it wasn’t sustainable. I still needed their approval, and they still needed mine, so we couldn’t keep it light — feelings rise, and the façade falls.

But every approach I took up until about… oh, four years ago… had one thing in common: I never held them accountable.

They knew it, too. I started this whole process of therapy and transition on the back of a letter I wrote to my favorite blogger, asking her how I could get my parents to stop asking me if they were good parents. I didn’t want to answer. I knew how it would go. I didn’t have any hope that they could face up to our history without violently thrusting it away from them. The idea that they might ever have made bad choices, or acted inappropriately or abusively, is unspeakable to them. Hell, even the word ‘no’ is unspeakable to them. I can still hear my mother’s voice, that dangerous, snarling tone, as she demanded, “…DID YOU JUST SAY ‘NO’ TO ME?”

Hashtag rape culture? Something something training your children in consent and boundaries early? Nah — training your kid that they aren’t allowed to say ‘no’ is called solid parenting, apparently.

And then I said ‘no’ to her

So, obviously, they were deeply and painfully aware that they were not good parents, which is why they kept asking me to tell them they were. About four years ago, I started answering that question in detail, and they enjoyed those conversations even less than I’d expected.

Long before that, I’d started writing about their abuse on my various blogs. I’d been cross-posting everything from there to the social media accounts I used to keep in touch with my family for a couple of years by the time my mother actually read any of it. I know when she did because my blog’s analytics told me, and also because she promptly lost her entire shit.

It was… a couple of months of horrendous messages, then. I established a policy about ten years ago of never answering the phone when my mother called if it was after nine pm — later extended to after five pm — because she would definitely be drunk after that time. So instead she started sending drunken Facebook messages.

Which means it’s time for another song from this post’s Official Troubadour:

Ahh, yep. That’s the stuff. It’s that disturbing ambivalence you’ll see in any message from the bottom of a bottle, that tendency to shift from sloppy affirmations of love to spitting, shrieking hostility, and then to blithe amnesia of the outburst, in the space of two hours.

The thing is, I was a drunk for a long time. I love drunks. I love them the way I still, against all reason, love my mother— with fear, and painful tenderness. I get trying to treat trauma with booze. Cheaper than therapy; I did it. What I didn’t do was brag about my ongoing “brainwashing” campaign against my own child while subjecting that child to my untreated PTSD and vigorously self-medicating with alcohol.

One of the messages I got from her toward the end there said nothing except “RUN”, like that, in all caps. Charming, right? Reminded me that when I was small, one of her favorite books to read to me was The Runaway Bunny, in which a little rabbit tells his mother that he’s going to run away, and she methodically describes how she will find and catch him each and every time, until he resigns himself to stay where he is and remain her little bunny.

…Kind of chilling in the context of enmeshment, isn’t it?

I also have not, to date, threatened to sue my child for libel for describing my parenting decisions in public. That’s another difference between mom and me. And that’s why she doesn’t get this newsletter — or any other form of communication from me — anymore.

What the wolves said

I’ve always struggled even to speak at all, in a way I don’t think most people were aware of… mostly because when I open my mouth, as you’ve seen, thousand-word paragraphs pour out, and I don’t relish others’ boredom or annoyance nearly as much as they seem to think. I try not to burden others with my words because it’s been conveyed to me that they’re a burden, is all.

I’ve got a fuck of a lot to say, largely because I’ve spent my life being told that even one word of it was too much. As a lover and writer of preachy, exposition-heavy books, I’ve grown resentfully into a world where people struggle to focus their eyes on more than 280 characters at a time. Still people regularly tell me how much better their life could be if I would say less.

This… used to be an emotional matter, for me. Something that made me cry. It’s gone beyond that now. I don’t feel anything about it except a clear certainty that I need to be honest about what’s happened in my life, and feel free to speak my perspective and express myself, or I will die by my own hand. 

When it’s that simple — and having been suicidal can make certain things so simple, so starkly black and white — there’s no real question about what to do. It’s a survival thing. I was raised by wolves, and the first thing they taught me was:

When it means survival, when it’s you or them… survive. Tear your foot off with your teeth and leave it in the trap if you have to. Tear off every single part of you if you have to… only survive, and run, and howl. Never let them catch you. Never let them cage you and muzzle you. Never again.

“Question all authority… except mine!” my mother used to say, laughing.

I wonder if she ever actually thought that would work. Did she genuinely think the hypocrisy inherent in that statement wouldn’t undermine every bit of her authority forever? Did she even hear herself?

I don’t know. I was never able to make her hear what she said to me. And unfortunately without that capacity, to reflect upon her behavior without slipping into toxic shame or narcissistic grandiosity, there’s no progress we can make between us. 

That’s the one thing no relationship can survive — if you can’t talk about a problem and brainstorm solutions together, allied against the problem rather than seeking to assign blame and salve a wounded ego… you can’t solve anything. Issues that you don’t bring up will accumulate until they block all sight of the person you love. You’ve got to be able to talk about it. You’ve got to be able to look at your own behavior with clarity, without self-loathing, with compassion toward yourself and those around you.

What’s that they say about good fences?

And that — that clear-eyed compassion, that merciful, accountable honesty — that’s how my Dad treats me. How he always treated me, even when I was a little kid. Dad was the one who winced when I spouted elitist sarcasm my mother taught me, and said, “Hey, let’s be nice, there’s no reason to be mean and judgmental about other people, even if they can’t hear you.”

At one point when I was about twelve, on the phone with Dad, he started to scold me for being grounded again. I had no fear, no difficulty at all, at twelve, in simply saying, “Dad, you can’t do that. You’re not here every day, you don’t deal with me every day and you don’t know all of what goes on here, so it’s not fair to scold me when I get in trouble with them. You can’t just show up when it’s time to punish me if you’re not here all the rest of the time.”

Dad heard me. It was crazy — I’d never had that experience before! He just… accepted the boundary. Like it was normal. Like it was allowed, for children to set boundaries with parents. “You’re right,” he said, “I’m not there, so I shouldn’t assume I understand the situation completely. I’ll try not to lecture you about that stuff anymore.” And he never did.

I could never have said anything like that to my mother, back then. I could never even have framed the thought that her behavior might be questionable, let alone question it aloud. She reacted to my boundaries as if they were blows to the face. Any autonomy I claimed was violence to her… because I belonged to her. She didn’t see me as a person. She still doesn’t.

But my Dad does. And that’s why he’s still here, with me, with us. With my new family, the one I’m building from scratch. It bears no similarity at all to a pack of wolves… because our life bears no similarity at all to a survival situation, and we don’t have to eat each other’s flesh to survive. The scarcity is artificial, the work of insecure people like those who raised me, people for whom your privacy is robbery and your healthy boundaries are violence. I won’t live that way anymore.

Come and live with us in the new world.

APRÈS LA VIE — MORT; APRÈS LA MORT — LA VIE DE NOUVEAU.