family – Page 2

My father is a fervent Republican. My mother was a Democrat. I once saw him put his fist through the maple cabinet an inch from my mother’s head because her vote was going to cancel his in the second Reagan election. Though he never hit her, connected anyway, he often shouted, slammed things, threw things, even at me, when he encountered resistance (reason) when espousing his conservative views.

My father doesn’t believe Global Warming is real or caused by us in any way (absolving himself of conserving resources).

My father believes all non-believers — atheists and agnostics — are dangerous fools to be converted.

My father distrusts all Muslims.

My father believes in trickle-down economics, though it’s been proven again and again it makes the rich richer while wiping out the middle class.

My father doesn’t believe in gun control. “If they come for me, I’ll stop them at the door.” He quotes the NRA with fervor! “Take away what kind of guns we get to own, and you chip away at the foundation of the 2nd Amendment,” he preaches.

I remind him he can’t stop a tank with an AK-47. I implore him to examine history, and context, that the right to bear arms our forefathers were talking about were pistols and shotguns that took three minutes to load and didn’t fire straight or would blow up in your face. Automatic assault weapons were neither considered, nor anticipated when the 2nd Amendment was written.

He scoffs. As his daughter, and a woman, I am clueless.

As a mother of two amazing, spectacular children, I am horrified, not only by mass shootings on school campuses, but everywhere else, every time an assault weapon is used against our own because the NRA wants to stay rich. And our government officials, Republican senators in particular, ostensibly “by the people, for the people,” are paid off by gun lobbyists to let them.

I grew up in L.A., on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. I went to school with writers, producers, directors’ kids, all fairly to extremely liberal. My father was the outlier in our neighborhood and among my parents’ colleagues and friends. The Great Divide between the Republicans and Democrats, fueled by Reagan pushing religion, conservatism, then ignited by Bush Jr’s Christian administration, and then concertized in lies, ignorance, and hate by Trump, didn’t exist yet. My parents lived together in relative peace, except around election times.

We have become a polarized nation, and this serves no one here. On the personal level, it has divided me from my family. My siblings, like my father, are fervent Republicans. My sister, disgusted we’re raising our kids without religion, decided she’d had enough of my liberal leanings and checked out of our lives entirely, leaving our kids deeply hurt their aunt had abandoned them. My brother used to forward me emails from his Born-Again community that Obama was a Jew-hating Muslim who believed it’s okay to kill babies. During Trump’s reign, he spoke of the evil liberals who supported abortion and insisted the rights of a fetus eclipsed those of the mother. My brother’s ignorance is only eclipsed by his blind faith in his Christian leaders’ conservative rhetoric.

The chasm in our morality and our philosophies is so diametrically opposed at this point that the rare times I talk with my father our dialog quickly sours, then invariably turns contentious. I’ve told him time and again I won’t discuss politics with him, but he insists on little digs, like, “Do you care about your kids?” He has not spoken with our children, his grandkids, in 7 years, or acknowledged them in any way, not birthdays, no calls, ever, and virtually never inquirers about them when I call him, which I always do because he doesn’t call me.

Truth is, it’s getting harder and harder to call him. Almost two decades after my mom’s death, my father is undaunted by age or illness in his quest to spread conservative lies. He’s a true believer (as are most hard-core Republicans) because believing is easier than thinking. Being told what is right and wrong, good or bad, is simpler than considering the complexities of our behavior, and our obligations to each other and the world we inhabit.

My remaining family believes women should not have the right of choice with our own bodies.

My father and siblings believe gays should not have the legal, nor moral right to marry. They believe homosexuality is a mental illness.

My family espouses they believe in “less government” — preaching the Republican’s canonical tagline — but want to govern (restrict) women’s choice and limit our birth control resources; control who gets to marry; limit medical treatment to those who can afford care; allow corporations to buy politicians that allow the mass murder of our children and citizens for corporate profit. They’d prefer to believe the GOP rhetoric that Global Warming isn’t happening and support the ‘rights’ of Big Oil to drill and frack our planet to death, instead of investing in renewable energy for our kids, and the welfare of Earth forward.

I’ve been wondering when it’s time to say goodbye to family, even before they die. I’ve been grieving my sister’s departure from our lives since her exit 15 yrs ago. The little connection I retain with my brother and father seems… over. My kids have no relationship with either. We have virtually no common ground and share little time that doesn’t quickly turn combative. So really, what’s the point of trying to stay in touch? Harsh? You bet. Ugly? Yeah. I’m profoundly saddened that we’ve come to this impasse. Hurts. A lot, knowing almost half our nation feels as my family does. And I am mystified, disgusted, and shamed by their gullibility in choosing blind faith over thought and reason.

We are again on the precipice of our survival as one nation, but this time the war isn’t with rifles that blow up in our faces when shot at the ‘enemy.’ Now, we must recognize the enemy is ourselves — choosing ignorance over reason because it’s easier to binge-watch Netflix, peruse Instagram, or stream gameplay on Twitch than it is to think.

My daughter, a recent college grad, told me most of her friends off and online — this new round of young voters — will not be voting this election. They’re taking a stand, showing how they feel about our government, they claim, neglecting to understand without voting they are essentially voting in Trump. They say they’re disheartened by their choice between a great-grandfather and a misogynist (who they don’t say is just 3 yrs younger than Biden.) They focus on our current president’s age because their feeds on Insta, Facebook, Reddit [and their like] tell them to — flooded with GOP marketing to sway young voters Biden is too old for another term. They get their information from social media and blindly believe their feeds, not knowing, or even caring that what they are scrolling through is personally targeted at them, and designed to manipulate them to buy, try, subscribe, and believe in snake oil.

The chasm between us will continue to grow with more believers buying into the derisive rhetoric of their religious leaders, politicians, Google’s search results, and ‘personalized’ marketing on social platforms and apps. More families are finding themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide that will likely tear them apart, like mine, unless we STOP believing and start thinking what is right, not only for ourselves and our family, but broader, more complex considerations that include finding and creating ways to help our neighbors, community, this country, and our planet thrive.

My sister is dead, I told the bank manager.

She isn’t dead. She lives in Washington with her husband, having recently moved from L.A., where we were both born and raised.

The bank manager expressed his condolences. He accepted the paperwork from our lawyer to remove my sister’s name from our Trust as the potential guardian of our children should my husband and I die before they’re of legal age to care for themselves.

I told him she was dead to delete her from my psyche, distance myself from loving her. Five years ago, she told my husband she didn’t want any contact with him, me, or our kids, her then 7 and 9 yr old niece and nephew, in a response to an email my husband sent her.

Much to my sister’s chagrin, we’ve raised our kids without religion. Cleaning out her Agoura Hills McMansion before moving to her custom built estate in Washington, she sent our kids Hanukkah ‘gifts’ of broken toys that used to belong to her children. She missed acknowledging our daughter’s birthday, again. Three months later, she sent her a present with the one she sent for our son’s birthday, and spelled her name wrong on the card. She’d disappointed our kids time and again, ignoring their birthdays and special events, rarely calling, and talking about her life, not theirs, when she did. Many times after jacking them up that she was coming to visit, on the day she was supposed to arrive, she left it to me to tell our kids she wasn’t coming.

Her sins were many, and mounted with the years without apology. My husband got tired of her hurting our kids, emailed her five sentences politely informing her the correct spelling of our daughter’s name, and requested if she was going to send them birthday cards or gifts to please do so on or around their respective birthdays.

My sister decided he was asking too much and emailed back that “though I am deeply in love with your kids, and it breaks my heart to do so,” she was withdrawing from their lives entirely. She stopped calling every few months. For a couple of years she sent the kids birthday cards when it struck her fancy—weeks late to our daughter, if at all, but managed to get cards to our son within days of his, professing her deep affection and love for him. It took all my will not to shed the cards in a million tiny pieces. Her sentiments to him were totally self-serving, for her ego, her ‘loving’ words meaningless, meant to pump up her self-image alone.

“Love is an ACTION, what we do, not some abstract in our heads,” my husband and I teach our kids. “Don’t profess love in words without taking actions to show it,” we preach. “And don’t accept words of love as truth without seeing the actions that actualize their sentiment.”

Over the years my sister had been so disrespectful to our youngest that our daughter never really formed a bond, but her choice to terminate her relationship with our kids deeply hurt our son. She was important to him because the few extended family members we have left, namely my brother and father, didn’t call or acknowledge our children in any way.

My mom died when our daughter was just 2, and our son only 4 yrs old, so she never really got to know our kids. She did love them though. Deeply. Profoundly. And they got that. How did they know?

She came to visit often.
She called them on the phone every couple of days.
She mailed them presents on time, and called to sing Happy Birthday on their special days.
She spelled their names right.
She stayed abreast of their lives through me, my husband, and through the kids, consistently showed interest in their interests and feelings, and shared her world with them.

My mother often extolled how much she loved our kids, to me, to them, to anyone who’d listen, but she also showed it, so my children knew it was real.

The day my dad called to tell me of my mom’s cancer diagnosis, after I hung up the phone I said to my husband, “Well, that’s the end of my family.” She was the conduit that kept us together, in contact, a feature in each other’s lives. She fervently believed people come and go, but family is forever, the folks with which your love and loyalty should reside. Within a year of my mother’s passing, my sister and father checked out of my life, and the lives of our kids, too busy with their own to bother with me or mine.

My father, like my sister, practices love in the abstract. He never talks to his grandkids, never calls [even me], never asks to talk to them when I call him, and rarely even asks about them. He doesn’t acknowledge their birthdays anymore. I got tired of reminding him with multiple calls and emails weekly the month before their special days, then daily reminders the week before. The rare occasions I call my dad, he always professes how much he loves my kids, how important they are to him, though he does nothing to actually show them this. He never did, I just didn’t notice, as my mother’s effusive love overshadowed his self-love. When I mention his grandkids, he reminds me to tell them that grandpa loves them, and misses them. But I don’t. I tell them, “Popi says hi.” I don’t want our children to ever get the impression it’s acceptable to say you love someone when you take virtually no action to show it.

Her body ravaged by cancer and near death, my mother insisted my father take her to Toys R Us. She bought each of our kids their next birthday gift, and made him swear to mail them on time. She was hoping to establish a tradition (an action) for my father to adopt for his grandchildren after she was gone. He delivered her dying gifts to our kids two years later, on his way to visit my sister in Washington.

In a thousand lifetimes I cannot repay my mom for her precious gift of LOVE I now model to our children. But I cannot buy into her belief [and society’s rhetoric] that family and love are synonymous anymore.

LOVE, like potential, is meaningless unless put into ACTION.

Tag: family

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