Above Greenland, 7:47 pm, on my way to Hong Kong
thoughts on unmothering, anger, frustration, disability, familiarity, boundaries, sharing (information), intimacy, and family (lol)
cw: SA mention
I’ve got a headache because I’ve barely slept in 48 hours and am off food and meds schedule. I don’t know where my metformin is. but it’s okay, we gon do with what we got.
for very many days I have been trying to manage frustration and anger with gratefulness and appreciation. I did not expect graduation celebrations to go down like this. within a few hours of being alone on a plane chock full of (mostly) unmasked strangers, I have been (slowly) dissipating the anger and getting to a place of clarity. I’m not completely there yet (imma need a helluva more time than four hours) but lucky for me I’m on a 15 hour flight to another continent 😎 (smiling with sunglasses emoji) so time we do have.
My mother and sister wanted to celebrate me, but what I’ve learned from this experience is that they are very very far from understanding me (and my people) and that there are huge gaps and understanding of what blood family should mean to each other.
and I’ve written a bit about blood family before, but in my eyes, being blood is not a full access pass to who I am or my life. connection to me is earned through trust, which we do not have with each other. not on my end.
I wanted a disability friendly gathering, and it didn’t happen. the details are important in sorting out our issues, but not relevant to the words I need to write out in this moment since I cannot vent about it to a trusted friend or partner, so they won’t be here. I know the effects of this on my people and I’m really sorry that happened to all of them.
I know my twin will say that I was lying, and I was lying to my mother in the car, but that lying is what keeps me safe. What my twin and my mother didn’t understand (and still don’t) is how important the way things need to be done for me, or my reasons why. Which I understand is also difficult for them to know because I am not open about sharing, but that’s because they have proven to me in the past (and also in this current situation!) THAT THEY ARE NOT FULLY LISTENING TO ME.
I’m going around in circles, so let’s start with the mother wound. I came across this concept in a class, Writing About Family, I took summer 2020 online with Professor BriAllen Hopper. I believe it was a queer Latina writer, Vanessa Mártir, whose work we read about unmothering. I know my mother loves us with all of her heart, I know life circumstances weren’t fair and my dad was an asshole, but truth is, she was not directly in my life for about 10 years (longer, if we think about queer time…ah, my not finished thesis). She moved from Philly when I was 7 or 8, and the last time I saw her in person was summer 2010. And the same things that was true when we saw her at graduation 2018 are true now. I understand that for her this was the first time she was seeking her kids again in so long. And she thought/thinks that because she gave birth to us and was there in our early years that she knows everything that there is to know about the foundations of who we are. but she missed out on formative experiences. there are 8+ years of things she has no idea about and will never know about unless she hears it directly from me. and this part of what I told her in the car today was true. the best way to understand me is to know the people I surround myself with and choose to be in community with. and I tried to do that the best way I knew how, by telling her about the two most important people to me at that time. And she wanted to reflect on the past and why had I never sent her a Mother’s Day card or why I didn’t include her in my graduation speech. And it all boils down to this fundamental misunderstanding: she thinks she already knows me, and I know she needs to get to know me. I saw our re-connection in 2018 as establishing a new relationship, and she saw it as continuing a relationship she already had. this will be very hard for her to hear one day but that relationship was dead by the time we reconnected at high school graduation. She was a literal stranger to me. She just happened to be a stranger that I had a blood connection with and because of that reason, I was willing to share so much more of myself than I typically would have. But she needs to understand that for me, that was the opportunity for a beginning, not a continuation of something.
I tried my best for two years with the skills I had at the time to share who I was and who my people were. I am a much more effective communicator now. I definitely could have done better. But by 2020 I realized that things were not compatible for me. So walls permanently went up as protection until I got to a place where things could be sorted through. And actually, now was not the time. I was not ready. But the stupid thing about being a queer gender-fluid person having to exist at the intersections of queer/trans/crip/AND straight time is that sometimes I have to do things according to the straight time world, like celebrate occasions like graduation with bio family. And so things were forced to happen at a time when I was not ready.
To get into some specifics that are not insignificant but also not central—disrespect came up on the last night we were together, and that also comes from how we see our relationship. My mother believes that because she gave birth to me she has a certain level of authority over me. And when I enter her space/her household, for sure. But in MY space??!! Fuck no lmfao. I have been managing my own money since I was 16 (younger than that really) and living on my own, paying my own bills, since I was 18. I had to mother my two siblings and other people’s kids since as young as 8. I literally got sat down at 8 by my aunt and told that because I was the oldest I had to be responsible for everyone. I’m doing homework help and making breakfast and dinner and remembering doctors appointments and making sure everyone’s clothes and medications and whatever else are in the duffel bag that we lug around from auntie’s house to stranger’s house because we slept in a different place every night because my father had no one to take care of us. We all grew up too fast, and that is the byproduct of growing up poor in a metropolitan area in an immigrant family in the U.S. I have been on call for mental health crises and have managed my health emergencies and continuing disability ON MY OWN. I have been sexually assaulted and provided support to other survivors (including my twin). I provide housing and food for trans people, I support unhoused folx. I’ve travelled internationally on my own. I’ve had to learn how to become an advocate for myself. I have been doing so much shit solo and AT MY BIG AGE nobody is telling me what I can and cannot walk outside wearing. No one can tell me how to wear my hair. No one can tell me it is unsafe for me to be walking around outside at midnight. If you don’t like the way I do things at my place, get out. You don’t have to be here. My mother told me we are more alike in ways I don’t even understand and that is not true. I actually know quite a lot about the ways we are like each other. But that does not mean she can order me around at my spot. That’s not how things will work. And so what she saw as disrespectful because I did not follow her wishes was only the tip of the iceberg. I could’ve said fuck outta here, but those words were nowhere on my lips (or on my mind) because i DO have respect for her.
Writing this part made me more agitated so going to try and decompress by watching something (though I wish I could be reading smut 😭😭😩)
idk just words yameen 