Day 03 – Your parents

This one can't help but be properly personal, and rather dark.

I have a complicated relationship with my parents, and it's just going to stay that way, because neither of them are capable of taking responsibility for their mistakes, and one of them died recently. Sometimes the only closure is accepting that there's going to be no official closure and moving forward anyway.

If we're being honest, neither of them should have been parents. Both had some degree of mental illness which they refused to get any help for (clinical depression for dad, very pronounced bipolar disorder for my mother), both struggled with addiction (mostly legal ones, but still), neither were especially responsible. Dad was mostly hands off, very bare minimum in every way he could get away with without actually abandoning me. Mom was more like a fucked up friend than she ever was like a mother.

(I should add my grandparents to the "parent" mix, given that they basically took over half the work, after my parents divorced and my dad moved back in with them. We're 99% sure my Grandmother had Narcissitic Personality Disorder, and my Grandfather was a conservative, racist control freak. So, that didn't exactly improve things. I was frequently reminded of every imperfections, by them, and made aware of every single way my presence in their life was an inconvenience.)

Add to that the fact that I was the picked-on kid at school (gifted, creative, almost certainly autistic, with a case of ADHD nobody would figure out until I did it myself, as an adult), and needless to say, it was a far from idyllic childhood. I am mystified by people who actually miss theirs.

It's weird, growing up feeling like everything's wrong, and upside down, and you shouldn't even be here. To this day, I don't entirely feel like I'm a human being, if we're honest. I play games with myself, pretending I'm a changeling goblin, putting on sophisticated airs, or an alient just passing through and observing this strange species until this body wears out. It's really the only way things feel like they make sense.

That said, adulthood is much better. My relationship with my dad has improved a lot, over the years, even as my relationship with my mother proportionately deteriorated. (I maintain that she was incapable of having a healthy, close relationship with another adult. The older I got, the wiser I got, the more aware of her games I got, the worse our relationship became, until I just couldn't be around her at all. We had no contact, in the last five years of her life, and I cannot regret the blissful peace of those five years.)

I'm essentially at peace with the fact that my father will never take responsibility for the ways he could've made my childhood less shitty. That's his damage, and, having spent a significant chunk of that childhood living with his parents, I know he came by that damage through no fault of his own. I do wish he would do something more toward healing himself, if only for his own sake, but, as the (unfortunately) popular saying goes, it is what it is. It's not as if I can make him get therapy.

At least we can talk, so long as I never mention his flaws or mistakes. 😑 We can enjoy a number of the same things, and have fun together. It's not perfect, but it's something, and it's nice enough. I have my own life, out from under his roof, and have for a couple decades, now. It seems to be the key to getting along with family: not living together.

Bit sad, but, you deal with things as they come.