"Blast" from the Past...
I've been weeding through stacks of paper from what now seems like lifetimes ago, and I came across a letter from my mother from near the end of our "Gay Wars", which I publically wrote about this past National Coming Out Day. The goal of that post, and also of this one, is to try to give the younger generations an idea of what that they do *not*
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while reading your Mother's words, most of the way through the letter, I had three thoughts in mind. The first was that she really does love you. The second was that I could understand why she felt the way she did (as I've experienced some of that with my own family). Thirdly, I had the thought: "I may not agree with some of what you are saying, but I can nevertheless accept it, and agree that you have the right to feel it/say it, again, from some of my own personal experiences.
However, the moment she played the: 'at least I didn't abort you' trump card, she completely and irrevocably lost my sympathy. With the heavy caveat that I don't know your mother, and I may be overreacting and/or projecting my own feelings and memories onto this situation, so you should very much take what I say next with a very large grain of salt: I simply can't abide that level of toxic passive-aggressiveness, and especially the heavy implications it carries with it, such as: "need I remind you, you OWE me your very life!!!" and "getting pregnant with YOU destroyed my reputation and my social life, and now YOU are once again threatening to yank me back out of the comfort and social acceptance zone that I have spent nearly thirty years trying to construct!"
I had similar discussions with my mother with regards to her telling me that my father never wanted children, and had pressured her to abort me, and I finally told her: while I am obviously glad to be here, I am not going to accept the notion that I somehow owe you any more than any other child owes its mother for their birth and upbringing. Although you may indeed have decided not to abort me, I never asked to be born, much less conceived. That was a choice that YOU made. My spirit did not reach out through the ether and compel you to create a body to house it...
/jmo and all of that.
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