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There's a meme going around Facebook right now that makes me feel rather uncomfortable.
And no, I don't mean that ridiculous one where People With Boobs are supposed to change their status to say where they like to put their handbag. I found that one annoying partly because of the assumption that if you have boobs, you're automatically going to have a handbag and be feminine about it, and because I kept being sent reminders about that meme by people who really should know better in regard to my gender identity.
I know that one was supposed to be a follow-up meme to last year's "Post what colour your bra is" meme, designed to confuse guys and raise awareness for breast cancer. This one was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer too, but as I posted out at one point, unless women have started detaching their boobs and carrying them around in handbags, there's no correlation. At least the one related to bras had a clear connection to breasts!
But no, the meme that's making me uncomfortable right now is the following: My parents were MEAN to me when I was a kid. They made me do chores, and go to school. They gave me a curfew, made me get a job and work for the things that I wanted. They insisted that I do my best at school, at my job & to take pride in my work. I grew up with morals, a good work ethic & respect for the law, and my elders. I'm thankful everyday for my MEAN parents. Copy and paste if you agree! LOVE & THANK YOU
I see what this is. This is supposed to be an adult mockery of all the kids who rant about how mean and stupid their parents are for not letting them do everything they want, for trying to give kids some responsibility in life. My problem is that my parents actually did most of the things suggested in that meme... and yet were crappy parents and I am not thankful for what they did to me.
My parents were the kind of people who weren't terrible enough to warrant the intervention of the police or social workers (though my mother and I did try when my father started throwing things violently to vent his anger), but were bad enough to make my life very difficult, and some of what they did had very lasting consequences that I'm still trying to sort out amost 10 years after I got out from under their thumbs.
They didn't make me do chores, not exactly. I tried to do some when I was young, as an incentive to both of us to establish a whole, "I do work, you pay me small amounts of money," thing. It worked... for about 3 days. I came up with a chore list and we all agreed on the amount I should be paid for doing them. Then my parents just got to owing too much for what I'd done when they couldn't be bothered to pay me for it, and backed out of the agreement.
I didn't learn to cook anything until I was on my own. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen to cook or bake anything, even in my teens, unless one of them was there supervising me. (Because making a batch of sugar cookies is oh-so-difficult...) That sounds fine in theory, except they always just told me they didn't want to supervise me. In retrospect, that was, purely and simply, because they were being lazy, and it would have cut into their TV-watching time. The fact that I was willing and eager to learn a skill I was almost sure to use at some point in my adult life meant nothing to them. If it interrupted their sitcoms, then it was a no-go.
They made me go to school, and I'd say this is a good thing, except it was illegal for them not to school me and neither of them was interested in homeschooling, so what choice did they have? When I wanted to transfer high schools to avoid the serious bullying problem I had, though, they made sure to express their dissatisfaction at how inconvenient it was for them to call a few people to get me registered at the new school and to make sure my records were sent over.
Note that I made the decision to transfer between school years, so it's not like there even had to be some rush to get me switched in the middle of a semester or anything. But it was inconvenient for them to have me try to get away from people who were physically and verbally abusing me.
Curfew? Sure. I had a curfew. Through most of high school, I was grounded, so my curfew was pretty much as soon as I could get home from school. Why was I grounded a lot? Some legitimate reasons, like skipping classes. Others not so legitimate, like being grounded for a month for accidentally forgetting that I left a banana peel on my bedroom floor for a day when I was at school.
Rei told me once that he was sure I was lying about being grounded so much in high school, that he thought I was just using it as an excuse to not hang out with anyone. To his eyes, and to the eyes of just about everyone else, there was no reason for me to be grounded so much.
Grounding wasn't much of a punishment, I admit. Most of the time, it meant that I just came home after school and didn't hang out with anyone, which just reinforced the idea that social lives are too difficult to maintain. I could still watch TV, I could still read books, all that stuff. And usually they'd let me off the grounding early, for "good behaviour."
Even when I told them not to. I went to my dad, on the last time I was grounded, and told him flat-out not to end the grounding early this time, because I was losing respect for him. "Good behaviour," you see, didn't actually involve me doing anything different than what I would have done anyway, if I wasn't with friends. I came home, watched TV in my room, did my homework, read some, and went to bed. Rinse and repeat. And because I'd been so good, they figured I'd learned my lesson and give me a reprieve.
I told them not to do that. They agreed. And did it anyway. That was the last time they ever grounded me.
No, the punishments to be afraid of weren't the groundings. They were the isolations. Twice in my life, I did something that my parents deemed needed a very harsh punishment. I don't remember what the first once was, but the second was me hiding food in my room so I didn't like, so that I could throw it out later, but I'd forget and so it went moldy. I agree, that deserved punishment. But not what they did.
They removed everything from my room except for my bed and the dresser that held my clothes. My toys, my games, my books, all of it was gone. I wasn't to go out of my room except to go to the bathroom and to eat meals. The rest of the time I was to be quiet in my room.
It was like this for a month. I was 9 at the time. I can't count the amount of times I read my social studies textbook from cover to cover, because I had nothing else to do. Sometimes when my father was out, my mother would sneak out a book or a toy for me, or let me watch half an hour of TV, before he came back. But the rest of the time I was in isolation. I wasn't shunned, exactly, but nobody really went out of their way to talk to me or to try to draw me into some family situation.
I suspect that my father had no real idea what I was doing by myself all that time. On the first day, he called me out of my room in a loud angry voice to demand what I was doing. I remember holding up a textbook as an answer. He didn't check again after that. Maybe he expected me to be crying or something, I don't know. Maybe if I had cried, he'd have relented on the punishment a bit. But facing him down by holding up the only thing he had allowed me to have as entertainment, the school books he couldn't keep away from me, was the only answer I thought to give him. I was meek, I was quiet, and I was messed up.
Let's see, what's next on that meme. Ah, right, working for the things I want, and getting a job. Yes, my parents made me get a job. They, in fact, got me my first job. When I was 15, young enough to still need express parental permission to work. Without even asking me if I wanted a job. I called home one day after school to tell them I'd be at the library for a little while, and was told that I had a job the next day. I asked if they meant an interview, and was told no, a job. My mother had badgered her boss into hiring me at a fast food place.
The thought never crossed my mind to say no. The thought never crossed my mind that I might be allowed to say no. I wasn't even asked if I wanted a job. Just told that I now had one.
This worked out well for my father. He'd told me for years that once I got a job, he'd no longer pay me allowance, and I'd agreed, since it made sense to me that if I was earning my own money, why would I need him to give me more? But once the place that didn't want to hire me in the first place stopped giving me hours and eventually just let me go, he didn't reinstate the allowance, and so if I wanted money at all, even to buy Christmas presents for friends, I didn't have a choice but to get another job.
At least the next job was one I got to look for and choose myself, rather than having it suddenly forced upon me.
Insisting I do my best and take pride in my work? Sort of, in a backwards sense. If insisting that I do my best can be conveyed through punishments if I did less than what they wanted my best to be, then sure, they did that. They didn't encourage, except when I was in elementary school and in the top of my class. Then they encouraged, and gave praise. But when it got into junior high, started doing French Immersion, and started suffering apathy and depression, encouragement gave way to vocal disappointment.
Once, my father said he was so disappointed in me that he didn't even want to hear me speak. I don't even remember what I'd done to warrant that. All I know is specifically, at the time he said it, I was trying to engage him in a talk about what I'd learned and done that day in gym class. He cut me off and told me, in essence, that I wasn't good enough to talk to him.
I grew up with eating disorders, a fear of authority figures, and abandonment issues. I can't love them for that. I can't even thank them for that. They did some good things for me, sure, but sometimes it seems like they were done by accident. I toed the line and learnt morals and ethics, but only from fear of making the wrong decision and getting punished for it, and punished out of proportion to the crime.
When my parents bought me my first computer, they said it was my computer, but that I had to allow them to use it if they needed. I agreed. I didn't know at the moment of that agreement that my mother would be coming into my bedroom every hour to check the status of my father's eBay auctions, not giving me any real time to myself. I didn't know that my father would be obsessed with installing random programs and messing with settings until the whole system crashed and had to have an OS reinstall, meaning that all of my files got deleted about once a month. And I couldn't complain about this, either, without a loud lecture about how selfish I was. I couldn't password-protect anything, even my ICQ account, without demands to know what I wanted to hide from them.
They finally got a new computer for me and I gave them my old one, as was part of that agreement. Great, I thought. Now I can stop worrying that all my stuff's going to disappear, and they can give me some privacy. Then I came home one day and found out that my system had crashed and needed an OS reinstall. Why? My father had downloaded a program on his computer, and then did the same thing to mine to see how it ran differently. A screwy conflict happened, and there went Windows. And I couldn't even put a password on what was purely my system then without accusations and suspicion.
This is not good parenting. It wasn't good parenting then, and it isn't now. I may not have been the easiest child to raise, what with my mental health being shaky at best, but I also could have been a lot worse. I can't be thankful for that.
I can't be thankful for my father greeting me by saying, "Hi, sexy," and then asking why I don't pluck my eyebrows, because they look like two hairy caterpillars on my face.
I can't be thankful for my mother leaving me alone until midnight when I was 12 years old, saying she'd only be gone for a few minutes, so that she could cover a friend's car with branches as a prank. I had no idea where she was, got more worried each minute she was gone, had no way of contacting her, and needed to sleep but was too afraid to. I can't be thankful for the anger she expressed at me when I didn't share in the laughter of her prank.
And that's why the meme makes me uncomfortable. I agree with what it's attempting to do, poking a bit of fun at the kids who insist that they have lousy parents because they're not allowed to stay out until midnight and go drinking and have to keep their bedrooms clean. But I can't, in good conscience, repost that message. I wouldn't mean a word of it. My mother would see it and thank me for being so sweet and kind and go on believing that she's done the right thing all along and that none of my problems were due to her negligence. My father would see it and ask why, if I felt that way, I acted so often as if they did so many things wrong.
This gives me the same feeling that shopping for their birthday cards does. I can't get them the sappy ones that gush about what good parents they were, how much I love them, how thankful I am for everything they did for me, because it's a load of sugar-coated lies. And I don't want to give them lies, no matter how nice they taste, no matter how much better it makes them feel about themselves, because it isn't real.
And then I feel selfish and mean and keep asking myself why I can't just do something nice for a change, make them feel good about themselves even if it's not entirely true, because everyone likes to feel good about themselves sometimes. I feel like a jackass for feeling like they made some monumental fuck-ups and for not just putting it all behind me.
If I had to describe that feeling, I'd sound all emo. It really is like a hollowness in my chest, like somebody stuck this bubble of negativity where my heart should be, and I can't tell if I want to cry or hurt myself for being such a bad person or shout a lot or just ignore it, because all of those options suck.
Family is a complicated issue.
And no, I don't mean that ridiculous one where People With Boobs are supposed to change their status to say where they like to put their handbag. I found that one annoying partly because of the assumption that if you have boobs, you're automatically going to have a handbag and be feminine about it, and because I kept being sent reminders about that meme by people who really should know better in regard to my gender identity.
I know that one was supposed to be a follow-up meme to last year's "Post what colour your bra is" meme, designed to confuse guys and raise awareness for breast cancer. This one was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer too, but as I posted out at one point, unless women have started detaching their boobs and carrying them around in handbags, there's no correlation. At least the one related to bras had a clear connection to breasts!
But no, the meme that's making me uncomfortable right now is the following: My parents were MEAN to me when I was a kid. They made me do chores, and go to school. They gave me a curfew, made me get a job and work for the things that I wanted. They insisted that I do my best at school, at my job & to take pride in my work. I grew up with morals, a good work ethic & respect for the law, and my elders. I'm thankful everyday for my MEAN parents. Copy and paste if you agree! LOVE & THANK YOU
I see what this is. This is supposed to be an adult mockery of all the kids who rant about how mean and stupid their parents are for not letting them do everything they want, for trying to give kids some responsibility in life. My problem is that my parents actually did most of the things suggested in that meme... and yet were crappy parents and I am not thankful for what they did to me.
My parents were the kind of people who weren't terrible enough to warrant the intervention of the police or social workers (though my mother and I did try when my father started throwing things violently to vent his anger), but were bad enough to make my life very difficult, and some of what they did had very lasting consequences that I'm still trying to sort out amost 10 years after I got out from under their thumbs.
They didn't make me do chores, not exactly. I tried to do some when I was young, as an incentive to both of us to establish a whole, "I do work, you pay me small amounts of money," thing. It worked... for about 3 days. I came up with a chore list and we all agreed on the amount I should be paid for doing them. Then my parents just got to owing too much for what I'd done when they couldn't be bothered to pay me for it, and backed out of the agreement.
I didn't learn to cook anything until I was on my own. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen to cook or bake anything, even in my teens, unless one of them was there supervising me. (Because making a batch of sugar cookies is oh-so-difficult...) That sounds fine in theory, except they always just told me they didn't want to supervise me. In retrospect, that was, purely and simply, because they were being lazy, and it would have cut into their TV-watching time. The fact that I was willing and eager to learn a skill I was almost sure to use at some point in my adult life meant nothing to them. If it interrupted their sitcoms, then it was a no-go.
They made me go to school, and I'd say this is a good thing, except it was illegal for them not to school me and neither of them was interested in homeschooling, so what choice did they have? When I wanted to transfer high schools to avoid the serious bullying problem I had, though, they made sure to express their dissatisfaction at how inconvenient it was for them to call a few people to get me registered at the new school and to make sure my records were sent over.
Note that I made the decision to transfer between school years, so it's not like there even had to be some rush to get me switched in the middle of a semester or anything. But it was inconvenient for them to have me try to get away from people who were physically and verbally abusing me.
Curfew? Sure. I had a curfew. Through most of high school, I was grounded, so my curfew was pretty much as soon as I could get home from school. Why was I grounded a lot? Some legitimate reasons, like skipping classes. Others not so legitimate, like being grounded for a month for accidentally forgetting that I left a banana peel on my bedroom floor for a day when I was at school.
Rei told me once that he was sure I was lying about being grounded so much in high school, that he thought I was just using it as an excuse to not hang out with anyone. To his eyes, and to the eyes of just about everyone else, there was no reason for me to be grounded so much.
Grounding wasn't much of a punishment, I admit. Most of the time, it meant that I just came home after school and didn't hang out with anyone, which just reinforced the idea that social lives are too difficult to maintain. I could still watch TV, I could still read books, all that stuff. And usually they'd let me off the grounding early, for "good behaviour."
Even when I told them not to. I went to my dad, on the last time I was grounded, and told him flat-out not to end the grounding early this time, because I was losing respect for him. "Good behaviour," you see, didn't actually involve me doing anything different than what I would have done anyway, if I wasn't with friends. I came home, watched TV in my room, did my homework, read some, and went to bed. Rinse and repeat. And because I'd been so good, they figured I'd learned my lesson and give me a reprieve.
I told them not to do that. They agreed. And did it anyway. That was the last time they ever grounded me.
No, the punishments to be afraid of weren't the groundings. They were the isolations. Twice in my life, I did something that my parents deemed needed a very harsh punishment. I don't remember what the first once was, but the second was me hiding food in my room so I didn't like, so that I could throw it out later, but I'd forget and so it went moldy. I agree, that deserved punishment. But not what they did.
They removed everything from my room except for my bed and the dresser that held my clothes. My toys, my games, my books, all of it was gone. I wasn't to go out of my room except to go to the bathroom and to eat meals. The rest of the time I was to be quiet in my room.
It was like this for a month. I was 9 at the time. I can't count the amount of times I read my social studies textbook from cover to cover, because I had nothing else to do. Sometimes when my father was out, my mother would sneak out a book or a toy for me, or let me watch half an hour of TV, before he came back. But the rest of the time I was in isolation. I wasn't shunned, exactly, but nobody really went out of their way to talk to me or to try to draw me into some family situation.
I suspect that my father had no real idea what I was doing by myself all that time. On the first day, he called me out of my room in a loud angry voice to demand what I was doing. I remember holding up a textbook as an answer. He didn't check again after that. Maybe he expected me to be crying or something, I don't know. Maybe if I had cried, he'd have relented on the punishment a bit. But facing him down by holding up the only thing he had allowed me to have as entertainment, the school books he couldn't keep away from me, was the only answer I thought to give him. I was meek, I was quiet, and I was messed up.
Let's see, what's next on that meme. Ah, right, working for the things I want, and getting a job. Yes, my parents made me get a job. They, in fact, got me my first job. When I was 15, young enough to still need express parental permission to work. Without even asking me if I wanted a job. I called home one day after school to tell them I'd be at the library for a little while, and was told that I had a job the next day. I asked if they meant an interview, and was told no, a job. My mother had badgered her boss into hiring me at a fast food place.
The thought never crossed my mind to say no. The thought never crossed my mind that I might be allowed to say no. I wasn't even asked if I wanted a job. Just told that I now had one.
This worked out well for my father. He'd told me for years that once I got a job, he'd no longer pay me allowance, and I'd agreed, since it made sense to me that if I was earning my own money, why would I need him to give me more? But once the place that didn't want to hire me in the first place stopped giving me hours and eventually just let me go, he didn't reinstate the allowance, and so if I wanted money at all, even to buy Christmas presents for friends, I didn't have a choice but to get another job.
At least the next job was one I got to look for and choose myself, rather than having it suddenly forced upon me.
Insisting I do my best and take pride in my work? Sort of, in a backwards sense. If insisting that I do my best can be conveyed through punishments if I did less than what they wanted my best to be, then sure, they did that. They didn't encourage, except when I was in elementary school and in the top of my class. Then they encouraged, and gave praise. But when it got into junior high, started doing French Immersion, and started suffering apathy and depression, encouragement gave way to vocal disappointment.
Once, my father said he was so disappointed in me that he didn't even want to hear me speak. I don't even remember what I'd done to warrant that. All I know is specifically, at the time he said it, I was trying to engage him in a talk about what I'd learned and done that day in gym class. He cut me off and told me, in essence, that I wasn't good enough to talk to him.
I grew up with eating disorders, a fear of authority figures, and abandonment issues. I can't love them for that. I can't even thank them for that. They did some good things for me, sure, but sometimes it seems like they were done by accident. I toed the line and learnt morals and ethics, but only from fear of making the wrong decision and getting punished for it, and punished out of proportion to the crime.
When my parents bought me my first computer, they said it was my computer, but that I had to allow them to use it if they needed. I agreed. I didn't know at the moment of that agreement that my mother would be coming into my bedroom every hour to check the status of my father's eBay auctions, not giving me any real time to myself. I didn't know that my father would be obsessed with installing random programs and messing with settings until the whole system crashed and had to have an OS reinstall, meaning that all of my files got deleted about once a month. And I couldn't complain about this, either, without a loud lecture about how selfish I was. I couldn't password-protect anything, even my ICQ account, without demands to know what I wanted to hide from them.
They finally got a new computer for me and I gave them my old one, as was part of that agreement. Great, I thought. Now I can stop worrying that all my stuff's going to disappear, and they can give me some privacy. Then I came home one day and found out that my system had crashed and needed an OS reinstall. Why? My father had downloaded a program on his computer, and then did the same thing to mine to see how it ran differently. A screwy conflict happened, and there went Windows. And I couldn't even put a password on what was purely my system then without accusations and suspicion.
This is not good parenting. It wasn't good parenting then, and it isn't now. I may not have been the easiest child to raise, what with my mental health being shaky at best, but I also could have been a lot worse. I can't be thankful for that.
I can't be thankful for my father greeting me by saying, "Hi, sexy," and then asking why I don't pluck my eyebrows, because they look like two hairy caterpillars on my face.
I can't be thankful for my mother leaving me alone until midnight when I was 12 years old, saying she'd only be gone for a few minutes, so that she could cover a friend's car with branches as a prank. I had no idea where she was, got more worried each minute she was gone, had no way of contacting her, and needed to sleep but was too afraid to. I can't be thankful for the anger she expressed at me when I didn't share in the laughter of her prank.
And that's why the meme makes me uncomfortable. I agree with what it's attempting to do, poking a bit of fun at the kids who insist that they have lousy parents because they're not allowed to stay out until midnight and go drinking and have to keep their bedrooms clean. But I can't, in good conscience, repost that message. I wouldn't mean a word of it. My mother would see it and thank me for being so sweet and kind and go on believing that she's done the right thing all along and that none of my problems were due to her negligence. My father would see it and ask why, if I felt that way, I acted so often as if they did so many things wrong.
This gives me the same feeling that shopping for their birthday cards does. I can't get them the sappy ones that gush about what good parents they were, how much I love them, how thankful I am for everything they did for me, because it's a load of sugar-coated lies. And I don't want to give them lies, no matter how nice they taste, no matter how much better it makes them feel about themselves, because it isn't real.
And then I feel selfish and mean and keep asking myself why I can't just do something nice for a change, make them feel good about themselves even if it's not entirely true, because everyone likes to feel good about themselves sometimes. I feel like a jackass for feeling like they made some monumental fuck-ups and for not just putting it all behind me.
If I had to describe that feeling, I'd sound all emo. It really is like a hollowness in my chest, like somebody stuck this bubble of negativity where my heart should be, and I can't tell if I want to cry or hurt myself for being such a bad person or shout a lot or just ignore it, because all of those options suck.
Family is a complicated issue.
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With a strong dose of *we* weren't like that!
Um. Really, Mom? Really? You don't want me to go into the details that prove we *were* like that, do you?
Yeah. Family is a complicated issue, made worse when people refuse to acknowledge what really happened.