For all the other problems dealing with my mother sometimes, she totally got the half-joking “just go sit on a rock up a mountain” urge. I may have taken it from her.
Not many other people in my life right now who would get it on the same level. Along with some other things, of course, but that one hit me this time.
Time for another episode of “I’m sick and sweaty-gross, and I really don’t want to hike up the street to the store. But, we’re essentially out of items such as wet cat food and toilet paper 😨”
Home again, with something quick to eat too.
One thing I probably should have foreseen from past experience, but just didn’t think about in advance? All the firework smoke. It looks kind of foggy out there, but it’s all Bonfire Night fireworks haze. They were going all weekend with it, but nothing compared to this evening already. (It’s not quite 8, on the holiday itself.)
Not necessarily what I needed with a pretty bad asthma flare already, from this cold/flu/whatever. And that’s a short enough trip that I didn’t think to put an inhaler back in my bag.
But, finally home and intending to stay here.
Time for another episode of “I’m sick and sweaty-gross, and I really don’t want to hike up the street to the store. But, we’re essentially out of items such as wet cat food and toilet paper 😨”
Actually, my biodad apparently got pulled over by the cops multiple times over suspiciously slow driving around in the middle of the night.
I was a colicky baby–or at least that was the explanation they settled on for the persistent fussing and crying fits. And riding in the car was one of the few things that would get me settled down and sleeping for a while.
So, plenty of crawling around in the car in the wee hours. And he was usually the chauffeur.
I saw something about the benefits of growing up QUILTBAG in a more liberal and not so religious family. I didn’t want to hijack that discussion, but it did get me thinking again when I should have been getting to sleep. 🙂
My mother was, unfortunately, one who managed some pretty raging mental health concern trolling styley bi- and transphobia without any kind of religious framework to try to hang that on. She also relied on some transphobic Second Wave thinking there. I’m sure I’ve mentioned some of this before.
It was better not to be lesbian or gay because life is inevitably harder, but they couldn’t help it so they were basically OK. She also believed that many lesbians’ orientation is a result of abuse, but they still couldn’t help that. (Somehow bi people who had also mostly been twisted by abuse could help their orientation, however. I’m still not sure how that works.) Still a very condescending kind of homophobia, but she really did have lesbian and gay friends who presumably didn’t know about her attitudes there. A couple of my friends who were acceptably queer and having problems with their (mostly ostentatiously liberal professor) families also lived with us for a while. That was fine, and their families should be ashamed of treating them so badly.
Anybody she *did* perceive as being able to help it was seriously mentally ill by definition. She actually warned me to stay away from several “crazy” out bi/pan acquaintances in high school like it was catching (she may have had suspicions about me then). And I got threatened with being committed and she *did* force me into more therapy and meds when a friend outed me as bi my first year of college. Because I only thought that because of my terrible mental health. It might be fixable craziness from horrible abuse (that never even happened).
That is a major reason I am not fond of heavy reliance on the “Born That Way, so please don’t hurt me!” arguments. Because that can also be used to abuse people, over things that are nobody else’s business in the first place. I can see where some people are coming from with that feeling comforting, but yeah. It does not always help people.
My longterm best friend at that time (a lesbian) also had two ostentatiously liberal atheist parents, and her mother acted awful and withheld funding until she changed universities to get her away from Teh Gay. That was quite a feat, considering my friend had an educational trust set up by her paternal grandparents, and it wasn’t even Mom’s money and she wasn’t involved in admistering it–but, she somehow made good on the threats and held up those funds anyway.
That’s when my friend ended up back in town, enrolled at the university where both her parents taught and where Mom could keep an eye on her. In the abstract, at least LG people were cool. When it was her kid, however… 😐 I could also tell that her mom assumed we were involved before that, though apparently I was less of a threat than her known girlfriend at First University. Even with some added classist horror there. Known GF was very threatening.
My friend also ended up getting forced/coerced into psych treatment. And they found a totally secular shrink who was willing to diagnose her with Dependant Personality Disorder. Which indicated cutting off all contact with her girlfriend, for therapeutic reasons, and basically letting her parents tell her every move to make For Her Own Good. Because unhealthy dependence on the GF. Yep.
I only wish I were kidding. She was suddenly suicidal a lot, caught in that kind of situation, which obviously justified that treatment. Her dad didn’t agree, but did nothing to intervene, probably because he was also afraid of her mother’s abusive behavior.
I haven’t talked to her in years, after she tried to make a new start in a different state. And I hope that helped her get the space to recover some.
So, yeah. Certain strains of religious involvement really encourage treating people like shit, but atheism is definitely no guarantee against finding other excuses for not so great attitudes and behavior. Some people just want to act judgmental and abusive, though it may still be good that they aren’t being directly fed as many excuses and encouragement. A lot of them will still come up with their own excuses, though, even if they have to rely on the DSM instead of often odd interpretations of religious texts.
A post old enough that I was at least still hoping (the pronounceable) QUILTBAG would catch on, which just got a note.
Only part of what I was talking about recently with having very little patience anymore for Zombie Bad ‘70s Politics, from too much exposure. But definitely part of it.
Time for another round of “Is this ‘just’ a particularly nasty allergy/asthma day, or am I also coming down with something?” 🤔
I definitely got a snootfull of mold spores I shouldn’t have yesterday and especially after I got up today, but yeah. Hopefully that source is taken care of since Mr. C got home and dealt with the likely source (*crossing fingers*), and I have the HEPA unit running in there to try and mop up the worst of the remnants. With any luck, tomorrow won’t be a repeat.
But, I’ve been frustrated at being pretty firmly on the disabled list tonight. Between that and the antihistamines, I just got up from an unplanned nap a little while ago. When I had planned to push through and get some already overdue aquarium cleaning done.
We even got Indian delivery to try to save some spoons for that, though tbf I didn’t really need to work in the kitchen when I could hardly breathe either. Still irritated at not being able to follow through.
I am the only one here, BTW, who even seems to question whether getting takeout just because I feel like crap is reasonable. The damned pushing in general.
Time for another round of “Is this ‘just’ a particularly nasty allergy/asthma day, or am I also coming down with something?” 🤔
I definitely got a snootfull of mold spores I shouldn’t have yesterday and especially after I got up today, but yeah. Hopefully that source is taken care of since Mr. C got home and dealt with the likely source (*crossing fingers*), and I have the HEPA unit running in there to try and mop up the worst of the remnants. With any luck, tomorrow won’t be a repeat.
But, I’ve been frustrated at being pretty firmly on the disabled list tonight. Between that and the antihistamines, I just got up from an unplanned nap a little while ago. When I had planned to push through and get some already overdue aquarium cleaning done.
We even got Indian delivery to try to save some spoons for that, though tbf I didn’t really need to work in the kitchen when I could hardly breathe either. Still irritated at not being able to follow through.
I know the Religious Right had been pushing hard to get more power for a while, having watched it. But, I am still kind of amazed at how relatively quickly that “if you ever have sex without a condom, you’re gonna die in gruesome ways!” message got backlash-flipped over into “condoms don’t even work!” abstinence garbage.
Both approaches leaning pretty heavily on the scare tactics, of course. But at least they were trying for some scientific accuracy before the religious nuts gained as much influence. Come back less than 10 years later, though 😵
I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.
I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.
(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)
Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.
My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.
Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.
But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)
I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?
Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.
(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)
If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.
Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.
But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.
Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.
Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.
It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.
That was a boring little rant, but I am still slightly in shock over paying about $14 for a 2/$1 size bottle of peroxide. And needing to order it at all.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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