Deuce

This might be oversharing but I've been doing a lot of soul-searching with respect to family recently and this post of people sharing happy memories with their families is so alien to me. My mom told me she wanted to divorce my dad when I was around 9 years old. It took her another 9 years to make good on that promise formally but in those interim 9 years there was nothing resembling a normal marriage or family in my household. My dad was permanently exiled to the guest bedroom. My mom would scream at my dad on a routine basis, mostly about money (I watched their marriage go from fine to apocalyptic more or less over night after my dad was laid off). On some level I internalized that love was transactional to ruinous effect later in life. I hated the family dynamic. I hated it more when my mom would try to make us do things as a family. I recall one Christmas in particular she wanted us to decorate the tree together. As a young child I could not reconcile my mom's decision to terminate the family unit with what I felt was a pantomime of normal family life. I felt like she was trying to have her cake and eat it too. "What do you mean you want us to do this all together, you rejected the family and decided to end it." I didn't want to participate in what I felt was a "sham" family. Today I would describe it in Baudrillard's language of Simulacra. From the outside we looked like a family. There was a dad, a mom, a son, a daughter. But the actual heart of it, the core, the connections were gone. Destroyed. But the "zombie family" limped on, absent of anything that made it real, but maintaining the outer form, the "sign" of a family, hence the "Simulacrum." My revulsion to this hollowed out "zombie family," and the generally tense environment that existed whenever my parents were in the room together saw me retreat into my room. It was the only place I had any control over. Retreat became a habit, but so did leaving me alone. "He's moody, he wants to be left alone." And so they did. And leaving me alone became normal. Very normal. Eventually it became more or less total. From the time my mom decided to break up the family it didn't take long before I de facto had no real relationship with her whatsoever. It was different with my dad. First of all, I am my dad. I am very much so my father's son. He was still taking me to sport practice multiple times a week and my disposition is naturally inclined towards him because we are so similar. I felt the way my mom treated him was egregiously unjust. The truth is I hated her for it. And her more or less total disengagement from me once I started to withdraw to my room exacerbated things. But on another level I was just a hurt child. I didn't understand. I watched her throw away her wedding vows, seemingly over money. I saw very up close how devastating this was for my father, who was trying so hard. As my father's son my mother's rejection of my father also felt like a rejection of me. Like, if my dad was so bad my mom felt she had to destroy our family over it, it implied she felt she made an enormous mistake in marrying him, which implied that I too was a mistake. A feeling easily reinforced by her behavior towards me. I am somewhat "eccentric." Even when things were "normal" she could get furious at me for not being however she thought I should be. But to a young child your mother is your creator. In this respect she takes on an aspect of "God." To feel rejected in this way feels akin to being rejected by God. I felt like unconditional love was a lie. When I was neglected alone in my room for years it only reinforced that feeling of having been abandoned by God. Of being excluded from love. To this day I feel like I don't experience "being loved" like most people do. It's hard to say because I can't know other people's inner worlds, but it somehow feels "mute" or "dampened." Like whatever part of the nervous system is responsible for that atrophied. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but that's how I experience, or more accurately how I don't experience it. It took me a very long time and devastating experiences later in life with characteristics of "echoes" of this past to fully dig into it. I'm not sure I will ever get a chance at a happy family life now. But suffice to say the last genuinely "happy" memory I have of my mother is so far in the past, and so buried under significantly more memories of misery, as to feel basically meaningless. In some respects I feel like I didn't really have a mother. Things remain strained to this day. I tried to have a conversation about these things with her in the interest of attempting to mend a bridge that maybe isn't burnt, but is dangerously without maintenance at risk of total collapse. She ran away from it because she didn't want to have a heavy conversation. There's another layer to this which is her enthusiastic celebration of the destruction of our nation. She is a die hard faithful "Progressive" and over time I've come to understand that her only real principle is whatever the Democrat party tells her. She has in more recent years told me to my face that they had to discriminate against people like me and that I should just accept it for "the cause." I see in her modern politics the same ideology that allowed her to throw our family away, as well as the entitlement to then be shocked when I didn't want to play pretend family afterwards. It's a deep wound that did immeasurable damage and it gave me a new appreciation for the prior generation for whom divorce was rare. One more Chesterton's Fence torn down with no consideration for what lay beyond it. I hope one day it might get better but I have increasingly little expectation that it will. Some things can't be mended. And so I have to just make the best of it. There is no alternative, but it does hurt.