[888] Know Mother Best

 

Know Mother Best

12/22/2020

This is gonna get weird.

“Violence” has many seemingly at-odds with each other definitions. I have a problem with this.

The first definition from Merriam-Webster says: a. the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy b. an instance of violent treatment or procedure.

This one makes sense to me. This is how I generally understand when I'm feeling violent or when I describe the kind of violence perpetrated towards me.

If you skip to number 4 on Merriam-Webster, you get: undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text.)

What? It's violent to misrepresent text? This feels like the familiar refrain of the modern “culture wars.” I know the last time I touched a “sensitive” topic like trans issues, I certainly felt like my words were being violently ignored, reconfigured, or used to express sentiments that were the exact opposite of my views.

The degree of violence perpetrated in “mislabeling” people or in not reading the sheer depth of in-built racism into every interaction is insisted upon a lot lately. Don't want to give up saying Ellen Page even about her earlier works? Violent. Don't want to too seriously entertain a body dysmorphic teenager's appeal to transition? Egregious violence. Think the Civil War had other factors in conjunction with slavery? You're working hard to start lynching again, aren't you!?

I was a psychology major. If there is ever a time to learn how “soft” the study of human behavior is, it's during a series of classes where it's considered a revelation that we're composed of our bio-psycho-social environments. I'm also a person who was unfairly beaten a fair amount as a child. While that sucked, what was considerably worse was the emotional violence of my mother who left me anxious, vicious, and sociopathically cold in my attempts to cope.

I respect both kinds of violence. I still have trouble controlling anxious impulses. I still dig at my skin. I don't flinch any time someone goes to brush their hair or adjust their glasses anymore, but that took a deliberate effort. The pain of not knowing how to figure out where I sat relative to my mom, myself, and the feedback I was getting from my environment is a huge contributor to my ongoing writing. Was I hurting myself? Was I responsible? Could anything he helped or fixed? I didn't know, so I tore myself apart.

To be sure, I think the vocal and angry wing of any activist trope works against themselves by not parsing how they're going to employ charges of “violence” and who the oppressors and oppressed really are. We're all someone's victim, and lashing out at anyone who can't pick apart the flavors of your recipe is no way to the top of the mountain.

My mom reached out to either my dad or brother or both. She's “curious” about what I've been up to the last 10 years I haven't spoken to her. Around this time back then, I went on a verbal texting tirade calling her different variations of “fat cunt” at random times throughout the day and night for several days. Our last phone conversation didn't go well, and the preceding 20 years weren't exactly great.

I shut that shit down.

I called my brother and asked him what precisely this inquiry was about. He had, at one point, also discontinued talking to her for a year or more. Back in the saddle, he's playing pleading middle-man to his hopes and dreams for some kind of resolution or forgiveness. I won't belabor my perception of his naivety, but picture nothing short of a waterfall of pitiful and empty sentiments. Takeaway comments from him include, “I don't believe we were abused,” and “I can say one thing, I know she loved us.” Those were, of course, sandwiched between in-depth relays of the *serious discussions* he's had with her about every single person in her life she's chased away and his agreement that she is a total “head-fuck.”

I don't place my hand on a stove, nor in a fire, nor let boiling water run over.

I don't negotiate with fire. I don't empathize with fire. I don't make excuses for fire. Fire is ambivalent in burning down my house or cooking my food. Fire doesn't love, and if you deliberately burn someone, you're abusing them. When I explained that I've literally removed children from homes for the kinds of things enacted on us, my brother didn't buy it. He recalled *knowing* he would not have responded to anything but spanking at certain points in his life.

There's little doubt in my mind that my mom is severely sick. Whatever confluence of forces molded her, she did not, cannot, control. She can mouth all of the words of “love” or “family” she wants, but they exist in her universe her way. This is the nature of severe mental illness. Sometimes it's banal and is just weird or annoying. Sometimes it's predatory.

I recognize the difference because I've taken the time to extrapolate the kind of person she has molded me into. Unrestrained and unrepentant, I'm a monster. We all would be. I struggle to believe as many people straddle that line as precariously as I do, but who knows.

But let's extrapolate further and pull back for a broader view. What is fascism?

MW: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy...[].

Kids have a fascist reflex. It's mine! No! Their way or the highway. The more you give in, the more tyrannical and entitled they become. Adults? They get to play dress-up and regarded with due respects for their “republican values” or “free market ideals.” You see, it's merely “conservative” to endorse racism, xenophobia, and deny the implications of math and science. You're not an ignorant child, mentally unwell, or as dangerous and ambivalent to what you're burning down as fire.

If you're lucky enough to be someone who isn't walking around with a gaping wound, congratulations. Mine is my mother. I have a solid-enough situation, plans, generally good days, and increasing degrees of comfort if not license to start nipping at the larger battles I wish to fight. Bring her into the mix? I'm tempted to threaten all of that. It's not that I don't understand her, what I've become as a result, or how to take responsibility for who I am going forward. It's that I understand too much. I know just how bottomless the hole for destruction and consumption goes.

What do I want someone to take away from my experience? What's the wisdom here? The same shit I echo in nearly everything I write. Tell the truth, horrifying as it may be. React with actual violence if necessary when the lies used to build the environment we're raising ourselves in is suicidal and insatiable. Know the enemy. Is it my mom? Or is it the pathetic excuses and desperation offered by my brother? Is it the ignorant advocate for reconciling what never could or should be attempted?

It's theoretically easy enough for me to make an argument for self-preservation and hype up a kind of lie about how I just couldn't control myself nor ever concede I had a single good day while in her care. I could borrow from some “it's just about how you orient yourself!” self-help book and focus on the positives. I could use all of my training and perspective regarding trauma to put up the facade that we're actually all in this together, and things can be okay, and we're all “adults,” and I could stop typing with one hand as the other goes to ensure I really sell the gagging. I'm not going to dress up for my day at the gallows, especially when it will lend itself to you never facing nor dealing with how fucked and complex of a monster it is you have to navigate.

When my worst instincts start kicking in, I work to fit them in with the rest of me. When I'm my most violent or dejected or confused, I write. Maybe I screamed at an asshole on the highway before I got to writing, but they couldn't hear me. I choose to do better than the malignant programming. I choose to look closer, contextualize, and expound. I recognize the bold, ignorant, angry, and violent fascist in me. I work and advocate and create what I need to see to keep him at bay. If you're not doing the same with yourself, you're at the mercy of people like my mom. You're riding the whims of 74 million people willing to lick the naked ass of their demons and insist it tastes like candy.

At least, now, I can write a calm blog about it. I can conjure a few choice insults on my mind-wandering drives, but I'm not experiencing month-long headaches and misting over lost stuffed comrades. You shouldn't lazily throw around “violence” as a catch-all for your hurt feelings or society's annoyance or indifference. I know violence. I crave violence. I even think we desperately need a large dose of genuinely righteous violence against the forces in power. But we're still apologizing on the perpetrator's behalf. We're still shivering and afraid, too ideologically possessed by our victimhood to see ourselves in our punishers.

Maybe the worst of us aren't making the choice and can't control themselves. You shouldn't be saying the same thing about yourself. I certainly can't. How much power do you think that affords me? Should we test my capacity for violence? No, so don't play with fire, and don't talk to my mother.