fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2212 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2212 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some of the harm of these episodes comes from the idea that "forgiveness" means bringing someone back into your life. People sometimes forgive those who murder someone they love, not because the act was forgivable but because they want to release the pain that festers inside. But they still want the person to do the work of paying for the crime. Forgiveness is not the same as embracing someone into your home and heart. Often it just means treating someone as human and nothing more. The family forgiveness episodes treat the issue of terrible parenting (from minor to major) as an issue of returning parental rights to the offending parent and I think therein lies the problem.

I'm incredibly biased. As a kid those sorts of episodes were a beacon of hope and a way to deny the reality of being an isolated only child with abusive parents. It took me years of rejecting my parents before I could make peace with the fact that it was possible to separate who they were as parents (sometimes deeply loving, other times violent) from the fact that they had their own baggage. They were people who never should have met or married and certainly never should have had a child. My mother developed early Alzheimer's so trying to reconcile was never a possibility there, she was already very hard to talk to about serious matters and once it really started taking its toll there was no point in bringing up the past.

My father on the other hand. Well, I tried to reconcile and it worked well enough for a year. He seemed to genuinely have matured. But then his girlfriend kicked him out and he became verbally abusive (we live a continent apart). He began to throw in my face things I had foolishly confided to him. Systematically he tried to tear me down but the cherry on top was when he said that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It was a great wakeup call. The next day he denied having said anything and asked why I was so upset. After that I stopped talking to him. Six months later he had a stroke and wanted to reconcile. My final communication was to let him know that he had my sympathy but that our relationship is like volatile chemicals, best kept apart.

I still ache to reconcile with both parents despite being aware that it is only a silly fantasy. Fiction that tries to sell reconciliation bothers me because it never actually warrants more than a single episode. The fact is, it is a lifelong process when it works and when it doesn't it still consumes huge chunks of your life. I don't disbelieve that people can reconcile but only when both sides see each other as human. My father expects me to be the forgiver (in part because I'm a daughter and not a son) but he refuses to modify his view of who I am. But I'm not his only victim. He was thrilled to find out that my mother had Alzheimer's because it freed him from blame for their divorce which she initiated. She'd told me around seven that she wanted to leave him but was scared that he would take me back to his home country and she'd never see me again. He says he fell in love with her because she "couldn't take care of herself".

To be honest, it has been much more interesting to know who my parents are and why they coped with parenting so badly than it would be to forgive them and renew the cycle of abuse. The fairy tale, trope version is so poorly done but it only tends to reveal the unwillingness of a creative team to delve down the rabbit hole of what it really means to have relationships at all.

mispost, but good comment

[ SECRET POST #2212 ]

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