Last Sunday morning around 4am, I was sitting on the tile across the girls’ bathroom sink at my partner’s family’s home, pondering how I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that my parents haven’t come around to accepting my queerness or celebrating the really lovely relationship E and I have or anything like that. More than once, I’ve noted that I’m in a really good place about it, and then a few weeks (or days) later, wham, punch in the gut, I’m crying in the bathroom.
Part of the problem, I think, is I haven’t actually noticed all the places I’ve always assumed my parents would be for me in my life, which means in my head, I’m still expecting them to be there. Then, a stressful or happy or just plain normal situation arises, and I’m realize I’m upset looking at this reality when they’re not in it (at least, not in the way I wanted them to be). That middle school trick where you take your friend’s chair and pull it back a couple feet so when she sits back down, she falls right on her butt? I’m the friend.
My artificial intelligence therapy app (perks of only having catastrophic health insurance) likes to remind me that that making “should statements” and “not accepting” the situation fuels anxiety and depression. So I’ve been trying this new trick where I transmorgify negative thoughts like “I’m upset that my parents aren’t around when I need to talk to them about something serious” and “It’s not fair that mentioning my partner makes them upset and uncomfortable” into more realistic, positive ideas, like, “The reality is, my parents are a little homophobic, but it’s great that I can still talk to them about some aspects of my life, and if I need more forms of support, I’m super capable of finding it elsewhere.”
Apparently the Power of Positive Thinking™ is real, and this strategy is actually helpful. I’ve been choosing to reach out to friends when I need them, and when I do talk to my parents, I’ve been trying to test the waters without hoping for a certain kind of response. I’ve been reminding myself I shouldn’t expect a certain kind of response. And I have been happier about my parents. I’ve been happier applying this blueprint of reformulating unhelpful thoughts into helpful ones to lots other situations where I’m sad or anxious or overwhelmed. But also, in this one particular situation with Mom and Dad, I feel like it’s giving up in a way that I don’t really want to. Like, in a movie, if you love someone, you’re not supposed to lose hope.
Even when it makes me unhappy, I still want to think they’ll come around. I want to imagine they’ll come to my wedding and they’ll babysit my kids; I want to imagine one day I won’t have to choose between seeing my parents and my partner for holidays. But it feels like the line between wanting and expecting traverses a narrow, rickety footbridge (like the one to the castle in Shrek) and it’s hard to stay to one side or the other without slipping off the edge.
I know my parents are trying to do the right thing, and that’s what’s so hard to explain or make sense of sometimes. There’s a deep gulf between the liberal narrative where people like my parents are just bigoted, mean-sprinted Bible-thumpers, and the reality where I know they’re compassionate, loving people who have different–but highly morals-based and thoughtful–views on the universe. Sometimes I run into people who can’t understand my inability to totally dismiss people with “abhorrent” political views, to cut my losses and care less what these people say because in the end, they’re wrong and mean and they only care about themselves. I stereotype people who say things like this as “friends with nice liberal/secular parents,” though I know that’s often not even true. But when I hear statements like “conservatives are ruining the country out of spite and fear,” I really, really wish they were. I find it orders of magnitude more difficult to engage with them when they’re doing it out of love.
The app I use is called Youper, and it’s so far the best (!!) method I’ve tried for journaling these kinds of things, and I would highly recommend it.
I don't know the word for this. 