Shitty Parents Deserve To Lose Contact With Their Adult Children When They Are Shitty To Them
"These people cut off contact with their own adult-child because they disapproved of them. They DIED never reconciling! Would you really ask someone to make their own parents give them up?!"
Well, since the parents CHOSE to die never having reconciled with their adult-child, then I'd say they deserved what they got. The parents are not the ones deserving of sympathy in this story, and their feelings are not the ones I'm interested in protecting.
The adult-child, on the other hand, did not deserve to have such shitty parents, but it's also not their fault that the parents disowned them (also, can I point out the inherent issue with the phrase "disowned" involving familial relationships? Parents are not the "owners" of children, they have their own autonomy, especially once they reach the age of majority and become legally autonomous).
There is no asking of a person to *make their parents* be shitty parents. The parents are already shitty parents. That the adult-child does something to trigger a really shitty response doesn't change the fact that the parents were shitty to begin with. The adult-child's behaviour is the *trigger*, not the cause of the shittiness.
So this is a faulty question to begin with. Nobody can ask or tell anyone else to *make* their parents do something that their parents are going to do.
For example, my grandfather refused to come to my parents' wedding because my mother is Mexican. He was racist. My mother could have asked my father not to marry her, to avoid pushing his father into boycotting the wedding. Or my mother could have insisted that he marry her anyway, knowing that this would result in a rift between my father and his father.
But in reality, my parents loved each other and my grandfather was a shitty, racist parent. If they had not gotten married, my grandfather would still have been a shitty, racist parent. My parents getting married or not getting married didn't change that. My mom wanting to marry my dad in spite of my grandfather not being there for him didn't MAKE my grandfather not be there for him. My grandfather did that all by himself. Because he was a shitty, racist parent.
And while no child deserves shitty parents, anyone who chooses to cut off contact with a relative deserves to not have that relative in their life anymore.
Sometimes that's a good thing - someone cutting off contact with an abusive relative deserves to have a life free of their abuse. Sometimes it's a bad thing, but cutting off contact with a decent human being because you feel entitled to how they live their lives means that you fucking deserve to not have them in your life anymore.
So, yeah, if a parent is willing to cut off contact with an adult-child in the first place, particularly for something like the adult-child having the audacity of being their own person, then I am absolutely in favor of whatever anguish they feel at not having their adult-children in their lives anymore because they choose to do it.
There's a really simple way to avoid the pain of losing an adult-child in this particular way - don't be a shitty parent and cut off contact with your adult-children for being their own person or loving people you don't love. That's not the fault of the adult-child, that's entirely the fault of the shitty parent.
This post was originally posted at https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/377860.html.
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