![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Papa go to bed now, it's getting late
May. 26th, 2012 12:21 amWelp, I finally told my mom that she was never really a parent to me and that I'd had to raise myself. This came up in the context of an argument about the phone bill. (Why am I paying my mom's cell phone bill, you might ask? Well, I'm not anymore!) Her response was actually -- for her -- shockingly mature: "you might feel that way, but I don't agree." I was expecting something more along the lines of "you don't really feel that way" or "you don't mean that".
Not that that didn't come up in another part of the conversation, in which she used my old name and referred to me as "her" in the space of about a minute, at which point I started yelling about how she's had five years to get it right and I'm not going to take it anymore. The conversation that followed consisted basically of her saying "How could you possibly think I would deliberately say that to hurt you?", me explaining that intent is not fucking magic, and then -- wait for it -- her repeating the exact same thing, repeating "But how could you possibly think I would deliberately say that to hurt you?" This cycle was repeated about 5-6 times. I asked her if she actually had listened to what I said, she said no because she said she had bad reception because her phone battery was low (phones don't work that way) and that I was talking too fast (I was talking at my normal speed). But instead of asking me to repeat it, she just saw fit to repeat what she'd already said, which I'd refuted, again. So in other words, she'd fit right in on Reddit... I said to her that every time she repeated that she didn't mean any harm by misgendering me, she was just hurting me worse. She said she was "flabbergasted" by that.
It needed to be said, but now I'm just staring at a wall (or more accurately, at my screen) instead of going to bed, even though I need to get up in less than 8 hours to go meet someone. The thing is, yelling isn't very productive, but there's just no productive way to communicate with someone who is either indifferent to or incapable of understanding the simple truth that other people have thoughts, feelings and perspectives of their own. When I was younger, my mom always told me not to air my dirty laundry in public, because she wanted to control who knew about her abuse of me (specifically, nobody). Well, fuck that.
Which reminds me, I never got around to doing my laundry tonight...
Not that that didn't come up in another part of the conversation, in which she used my old name and referred to me as "her" in the space of about a minute, at which point I started yelling about how she's had five years to get it right and I'm not going to take it anymore. The conversation that followed consisted basically of her saying "How could you possibly think I would deliberately say that to hurt you?", me explaining that intent is not fucking magic, and then -- wait for it -- her repeating the exact same thing, repeating "But how could you possibly think I would deliberately say that to hurt you?" This cycle was repeated about 5-6 times. I asked her if she actually had listened to what I said, she said no because she said she had bad reception because her phone battery was low (phones don't work that way) and that I was talking too fast (I was talking at my normal speed). But instead of asking me to repeat it, she just saw fit to repeat what she'd already said, which I'd refuted, again. So in other words, she'd fit right in on Reddit... I said to her that every time she repeated that she didn't mean any harm by misgendering me, she was just hurting me worse. She said she was "flabbergasted" by that.
It needed to be said, but now I'm just staring at a wall (or more accurately, at my screen) instead of going to bed, even though I need to get up in less than 8 hours to go meet someone. The thing is, yelling isn't very productive, but there's just no productive way to communicate with someone who is either indifferent to or incapable of understanding the simple truth that other people have thoughts, feelings and perspectives of their own. When I was younger, my mom always told me not to air my dirty laundry in public, because she wanted to control who knew about her abuse of me (specifically, nobody). Well, fuck that.
Which reminds me, I never got around to doing my laundry tonight...
