I find myself at a bit of a judicial conundrum. For years my family has operated on a transactional basis. One of family duty and obligation. One of where we overlooked abuse and damage because of all the good things people did. We simply didn't talk about the awful things people did. My grandmother was a terrible abusive person but we all just grit our teeth and went along with it. The inauthenticity of that was outrageous and I couldn't stand dealing with it. I long ago cast off my ability to be inauthentic with myself, and even now can't stand doing it for long, if at all.
I've had arguments with them before over their attempt to leverage family to get favors, as if my labor or time wasn't valuable. "Yes I can fix your website for you, if you pay me to. I'll teach you how to do it for free, but I'm not going to be at your leisure anytime you want".
Which brings me here, where I've asked my father how he plans to vote, knowing everything that's going on. He sent me back a list of all the good he's done to support and help me, along with a paragraph of insane right wing ramblings that are both verifiably untrue, and paranoid terrified rantings justifying voting GOP. I say GOP because they aren't republicans anymore, If you want a republican policy vote democrat. If you want a liberal policy you're screwed, sorry, I digress.
What unnerves me about this though, is the transactional basis of the letter. It's balanced out in a way to make it seem like I'm asking a lot of him. A relationship is not a ledger, where you put in good times to enable your abusive behavior later on. It's 2/3 a list of all the support and emotional ties that we have together, and 1/2 a justification of why he feels it's okay to enable people who want me to not exist. People who will put into place policies to enable that, policies to pursue that goal.
That cognitive dissonance doesn't sit with me. You don't get to say you love me, and then vote for people/enable people who actively want to harm me. Your choices, have consequences.
So there's that. My position, on one side, is thus: I hold fast, and maintain my policy of choices matter, of being authentic to myself and not tolerating a two faced relationship, of not compartmentalizing someone's enabling of a threat to me, of believing that a family is not duty bound by anything, and nothing is owed anyone.
The alternative side, is the huge guilt factor in that my position as it is now, and much of where I am in my life, is owed to my family supporting me. The privilege I've had in growing up wealthy, of having financial support in college, in having financial support in moving to a different city, of going to Thailand to have a surgery. The emotional and time commitments of him coming with my to Thailand, the guilt of him not being able to be at his mother's (my grandmother's) funeral when she passed, because he was helping me recover in Thailand. I owe much to him, and his money, and also his willingness to accept me when I came out, and to continue to support me in getting to where I am in my life, and to help me when I need it.
When I was fired from my last job he sent me money, and he continues to do so on my birthday and during the holidays. That isn't lost on me.
There's also the "he's your family, and he's the only dad you'll ever have" argument, but that falls a bit more hollow on me given how terrible my upbringing was. Still, Nostalgia is a bitch at times. I owe him a lot. So is my overlooking this, that big of an ask? Why not compartmentalize like my brother does and reopen that line of communication and relationship?
That's the other side. And I'm here debating between the two.
I don't know. I think in some ways, it's easier for him this way. It's not like he doesn't know why I don't talk to him, he knows what my sticking issue is, what is causing this divide between us, but he's continuing to stick to his absurd beliefs. If nothing else, he's gone even further to find new means to justify them, rather than self-reflect or admit he may have been wrong.
Maybe, if I was a cisgirl, I'd have the strength of will or emotion to attempt rescuing him from the cult that he's joined, but, that's just not in me anymore. I'm exhausted from this all, and I simply can't put in that much energy in what feels like a lost cause. In that since, it's easier for me as well to simply drop out of this relationship. If that means having to tolerate the guilt of it, well, maybe I'm too exhausted to give a shit about guilt.
