Are we still doing the whole “trigger warning” thing? It occurred to me that I’ve totally stopped worrying about doing that. Probably for the best. Trigger warnings, and the overall mentality that we need to be protected from ideas and stories is really counter productive to the long term mental health and stability of our whole society.
But maybe I should give a trigger warning for my aunts and mom and others in my family.
I’ve held a lot of bitterness for a lot of years and it’s time to talk it out. I feel like I don’t have any other options these days.
So for me the family drama started one night I was too young to stay by myself so my mom dropped me off at my aunt Dee’s when she went to work or something. I knew that Dee was making hamburger pizza that night, which her kids apparently really loved so she assumed I loved it too. She was real proud of that pizza so I did not want to hurt her feelings by telling her that I really did not like it. To be fair, I did not like anything involving hamburger at that time. So I talked to my mom about it and my mom said that was fine, so before dropping me off, we stopped at Taco Time and ate dinner.
But my mom never mentioned that we’d already ate.
So when Dee brought out the pizza, I said sorry I’m not hungry I already ate. Well Dee got real mad, called me a liar, started yelling at me.
I was just so confused. I told her to call my mom to confirm my story, but she refused though I don’t remember her excuse for why. She just kept yelling at me but I stuck to my story so she finally sent me back to Brad’s room. So I went to Brad’s room and started playing with his toys. A while later Dee came in to ask if I was ready to admit I had lied and started yelling at me about playing with toys. I was supposed to be on punishment and she thought I knew that you can’t play with toys while on punishment but I didn’t even really understand what a punishment was. My parents didn’t really use them except on terribly rare circumstances. I thought Dee had just sent me away to work through her own emotions or something.
So Dee forced me out and made me eat a slice of pizza. I forced it down, all that grease and empty carbs nearly making me sick.
So then the next time I had to go to Dee’s, well I told my mom about what had happened. So my mom, being the reasonable one, after we get there, talks to Dee about it like an adult, and tells her that I had been telling the truth and it was really because I just didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and explained to Dee that what she’d done had actually really upset and confused me. My mom asked her to if in the future she doesn’t believe me then just call her and ask.
So Dee just nodded and said “Oh okay, that’s fine” or something like that, just accepting the facts of the situation without any real emotion or guilt or apology.
Then she watched my mom through the window pull out of the driveway. She waited until my mom was out of sight, then turned to me and started yelling, saying something like “How dare you go to her when your issue is with me! If you have a problem here you have no right to talk to your mother about it. You come to me! Is that clear?”
So I tried to tell her that I’d tried to talk to her, and even offer proof that I was telling the truth.
But she was like “I am the adult! This is my house and in my house, what I say goes. If I say that you did not eat dinner before you came here then you did not eat dinner.”
It was one of the more terrifying moments of my childhood, my aunt was telling me to my face that she could invent her own reality and then punish me for that reality and there was nothing I could do about it.
And now, part of me wonders if it wasn’t my mom that she was actually mad at.
I know my mom had been criticizing Dee’s parenting. She told me they had gotten in a couple fights about it. I’m guessing my mom may have said some condescending things about her or her kids behavior. I never heard Dee’s side of the story when it came to that but based on how my mom is, I’m guessing that’s what happened. My mom is usually right, but sometimes, especially back then, she wasn’t the best about communicating it compassionately.
But my mom had a minor in child psychology and was really hurt that Dee wouldn’t listen to her on parenting and I wonder if Dee was a little bitter about the fact that I was so well behaved and seemed to cause my mom so few problems but Dee’s kids were terrors.
Part of me thinks Dee deliberately tried to sabotage my emotional development. That sounds so fucked up and horrible to say, but now that people’s true selves are coming out thanks to Trump, well now I’m thinking it really is possible, at least on a subconscious level. There’s no better way to turn a well behaved kid into a discipline problem than to punish them for something they didn’t do, never once apologize for it, then deliberately prevent them from talking about their feelings with their parents. My parents were very different in their parenting. I had almost no rules and even fewer punishments, but I was still dedicated, at least at this time, to being perfectly well behaved. That was my goal as a child was to be the perfect kid who never broke any rules.
Dee and Marolyn have far more conservative parenting styles, based on control and punishments.
I’m starting to think Dee was bitter toward my mom and her parenting and took it out on me.
So then a year or two or three later, Brad violently assaulted me, made me beg for my life and threatened to kill me if I ever talked about it. Well, part of the reason I was so terrified to talk about that incident was because of how Dee had treated me over the pizza incident. He had simply invented this idea that I was lying, just as she had. He learned his behavior from her, exactly as my mom had predicted when she kept saying “Dee’s parenting is going to drive Brad toward violence”. My previous entry goes into more detail.
So then a couple years after that, I was having dinner with my mom, Dee, and Brad. Dee starts telling this story of Brad having to go to a doctor, like every week on Friday. Immediately Brad starts jumping up and down in his seat in pure excitement and joy.
Dee tells a story where Brad is required to go to a doctor every week but instead he just goes home and watches TV and lies to his mom about going to the doctor. A year and a half goes by of this until she finds out.
So Brad is jumping up and down in his seat saying “That was the greatest accomplishment of my life!” He says it over and over. “The greatest accomplishment of my life.”
And it was surreal for me. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening. His greatest accomplishment was telling a lie to his mother and she was just laughing it off like it didn’t matter.
To be fair I’m still pretty unclear on the specifics.
I think I jumped to the conclusion that this doctor was a therapist meant to deal with his anger issues.
So I was fucking pissed for a number of years I was so pissed that she just didn’t care that he’d skipped his therapy and I’d payed the consequences.
But then years later, if I remember correctly, my mom explained that no, it was actually some physical ailment that the doctors claimed Brad had, so Dee believed them. Brad insisted it wasn’t actually a problem but she forced him to go anyway. So turned out Brad was right, and it’s possible the treatments actually would have done more harm than good. I don’t know what it actually was.
This part of the story of course I’m likely to screw up so take this with a grain of salt.
But I wonder if being right in this case, like really reinforced in Brad that this behavior was acceptable.
But it was like, that dinner at Red Robin in Burlington Washington, was just kind of surreal for me to see the type of disrespect and dishonesty that was normalized in Dee’s house but unacceptable in mine.
It’s hard to wrap your brain around how differently people see the world sometimes.
So for most of my life I just felt deeply unsafe around Dee and her kids, even though the older two, Troy and Randy, never did anything to hurt me, or really anything that ever bothered me, because of Brad’s behavior, I became scared of them too.
So for most of my life I just tried to avoid them and only interacted with them when I felt obligated for my mom’s sake.
Then in my teenage years, I remember my mom complaining about my aunt Marolyn and a fight they’d gotten into and I asked what it was about and she explained that the fight was about whether or not my mom was allowed to talk to me about family drama. I guess there was some old family drama, and Marolyn basically threatened to disown my mom if I ever found out about it.
But then Marolyn basically did stop speaking to my mom over this anyway, for like years, simply because my mom had asked her permission to talk to me about it and had expressed the opinion that openness and honest was the best policy.
Then when I was a teenager I got really into writing and was spending a lot of time on the computer in my mom’s office. I started snooping through her files and found an unsent letter to Marolyn that told the whole thing.
I don’t know, I wonder if my mom wanted me to find that letter. I’m not sure, though I don’t know why she’d think I’d be going through her financial documents or that I’d be so rude as to read personal stuff like that. (I was pretty rude back then though.)
But turns out my aunt Marolyn had a baby in the seventies. It was unplanned. She wanted an abortion but abortions were illegal. She could have gone to another state and I guess my mom offered to take her and support her if that was her decision, but instead she gave the kid up for adoption, which destroyed her mental health. So Marolyn since then has been very very pro-choice her whole life, but she doesn’t often admit it because otherwise she’s such a hard-line conservative.
And I guess her daughter Danya still doesn’t know about it–Maybe she does. I have no idea.
So I wrote a letter to Marolyn, with an actual stamp and envelope and shit cuz this was still the nineties. I didn’t mention the kid at all, and I think it was just fluff about family and talking things out–I’m kind of curious what I actually put in that letter now, but it convinced Marolyn to reconnect with my mom.
I did tell my mom that I’d found the letter and I think it relieved her that she could talk to me now but she technically hadn’t broken her vow of silence.
But it reminded me of how Dee had told me I couldn’t talk to my mom about my emotional issues if they related to her, Marolyn had demanded that my mom could not talk to me about her emotional issues with Marolyn. They both kind of tried to build up walls between me and my mom.
For so many years I believed in this “don’t air our dirty laundry” — well no, I followed it, but I never believed in that rule. I always saw it as problematic, just like my mom, but I went along with it, I guess out of respect for family, not wanting to have an emotional breakdown.
But that’s not the right strategy and I won’t do it anymore. “Don’t air our dirty laundry”, when you hear that, you know the person is trying to hide something and is more concerned about what’s best for themselves than they are about their family or community.
I do hope they all read this someday. I hope Danya sees this and talks to her mom about the older brother she never knew about. I hope it brings them closer together and I hope it helps to relieve the pain Marolyn may be feeling over the issue.
I don’t want any vengeance over any of the things I talk about here. I despise cancel-culture, this whole idea of condemning people or getting them fired for things they’ve done in the past, that’s a terrible way to handle these things. I want to talk them out and come to an understanding.
I’ve been bitter for far too long and this writing is about trying to find a way to forgive. But first it all has to come out. That’s the only way it can work and we can heal, is if it all comes out into the open.
So then I got arrested for marijuana, and became a police brutality survivor–watched a police officer beat a man to death (I think he died. I dunno.) And the police kinda half-assed tried to get me killed. I realized I had to talk about what my cousin had done. I needed so bad to start a family dialogue about police brutality, but I was too scared to actually talk about the actual incidents because I was scared of being murdered. So I made a marijuana legalization website and decided to fight my marijuana charge instead of plea bargaining. I guess it was part of me working up to actually talking about my police brutality trauma.
So my mom had a meltdown over this. She was convinced marijuana destroys lives. She came over to my apartment once with Dee and once with Marolyn and when they said they were coming over, I said to myself, “Okay, I’m finally gonna tell them about what happened with Brad.”
But they were so unreceptive. They just kept screaming that marijuana is evil, police are always the good guys no matter what. I tried to talk about police brutality. I’ve seen horrible things but they said they just didn’t care. I asked both aunts in separate conversations, “If the police brutally murdered me to keep me quiet, would you still see them as heroes?” And they both said, yes, absolutely without any doubt.
Granted, my mom was there too. Her behavior during those conversations was deeply hurtful to me too, but over the years she came around and started to donate money to marijuana legalization causes and started to really show compassion for police brutality survivors.
My aunts never did. I would sometimes see Dee and Marolyn, and it seemed like so often, Marolyn would try to slip in some comment about how great police were, and how much she supports them. Almost as though she was deliberately trying to poke at me and my trauma.
So I never got up the courage to talk about it until twenty years later when I was in a much safer place in life and Black Lives Matter came around.
So then in the early 2000’s, my mom’s relationship with Dee and Marolyn became more strained. My mom would complain about how they would go on and on about their problems, then basically refuse to listen to hers. She would complain about how mean their jokes were. Everyone over there was constantly making fun of each other and my mom hated it.
There was a period where she would go to Dee’s house and all they’d care about was how cute their grand kids were. My mom would try to talk to them about child development and how to build better lives for those kids, but they would shut her down and go back to exclaiming about how cute they were.
Apparently there was once they baked this big cake and took a child and sat this kid in the cake so they could take pictures. The kid was supposed to go crazy cuz kids love cake, but apparently he just didn’t seem comfortable with it, and clearly didn’t want to be covered in frosting with people taking pictures.
And I guess my mom was frustrated that they seemed to see children as little bundles of cute, like they’re objects instead of as human beings whose emotional development is deeply important.
Gosh this is so judgemental.
I know I’m judgy.
I think about that line from like the bible or somewhere, “don’t judge lest ye be judged” or something, and yeah that makes absolute sense, so that’s why I pass judgement with a desire for compassion and understanding. I don’t want any sort of vengeance. I don’t even want people to feel a bunch of guilt.
No one deserves to suffer more over this. There’s been enough of that.
If you pass judgement with an air of vengeance then people will pass judgement toward you with vengeance, but if you judge with a desire to fix problems and forgive, then hopefully they should do the same for me.
I know I’ve fucked up in my life. I’m passing judgement on these people when I’m far from perfect, so I’m more than fine with people writing these kinds of things about me. If I’ve really hurt people then I want to know about it, and if they need to reveal my secrets then I’m okay with that. I’m not gonna dish what I can’t take.
And I should say that Dee, Marolyn and Brad are actually really kind and compassionate people. I mean, Brad I know has saved a number of lives with his search and rescue stuff. He deserves to be praised for that and none of my complaints about him should take away from that.
All of them, if I showed up on their door asking for a favor, I’m sure they’d drop everything to help me.
But given all these issues, it feels like it’s mostly surface level kindness and compassion.
Once I was at Dee’s house and my mom and I got in a discussion versus Dee and Marolyn over Obamacare and socialized medicine in general. I think my mom may have been wearing her big black shirt that just said “liberal”.
Both Dee and Marolyn were adamantly against Obamacare of course.
I talked about a homeless man who slept in a doorway across the street from my apartment in Seattle. I saw him every night from my living room window and I could hear him coughing a nasty horrible cough that made me fear for his health, and I talked to Dee and Marolyn about how upsetting it was for me to see that suffering every day from my living room window.
I thought they were going to talk about how it’s for the best in the long run and how his suffering is necessary for stability or something or will alleviate more suffering in others.
But no.
They just shrugged and basically said it doesn’t matter. His coughing isn’t any louder than the trucks that go by, so just ignore it, or move to a nicer part of town.
It was one of the most surreal moments of just plain cold-heartedness that I’d ever been a part of.
My mom and I talked about that conversation later and she had the same reaction as me. Could not wrap her brain around how her own family could lack basic human compassion when they seem like such kind and caring people on the surface.
Over the years they’ve offered me things out of kindness, and I usually refuse.
It’s like, with people like that, every act of kindness puts you on edge, like I worry about how they might be manipulating me, even though I know it’s not true.
I know they really are kind people in many ways. Just because they are cold hearted in some ways, does not mean their kindness in other ways does not count.
But when you’re trying to deal with all this trauma, it’s not easy.
So I always felt deeply uncomfortable around Dee and especially Brad and also Marolyn and just kind of avoided them for most of my life.
One time Bob, Marolyn’s husband, posted some nasty stuff on Facebook about Jane Fonda, basically saying she deserves to die for some anti-war protesting stuff she did back in like the seventies, like he’s holding a grudge about stuff before I was born. I made a comment that I felt was pretty respectful saying something about the first amendment is an important aspect of our country and maybe also that Vietnamese people are human beings, and many of us see them as more than just enemies. I’m not sure what I said, but his friends responded with some nastiness and veiled threats, and I don’t think Bob replied at all if I remember correctly.
Then a month or two later, Marolyn was at Dee’s and I came to visit and Marolyn just casually mentioned to me “Oh, Bob hates you now.” I guess he’d literally said to her “I hate Kalin now” after that interaction. And Bob is someone who owns guns and is in a literal biker gang of retired military and police and it just reminded me of another time I respectfully criticized the military to a vet and he took me hostage and terrorized me for hours.
But Marolyn just kind of thought it was funny and didn’t seem to see any problem with this kind of literally stated hate toward family members. She even admitted I was respectful and had made a valid point in my Facebook comment.
And it’s like, I can’t remember any other time in my entire adult life that anyone has just straight up said that they hate me. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen with the kinds of people that I hang out with. For my only experience with this kind of hate to come from a family member is just… I don’t know. It’s a trip.
But I thought conservatives were supposed to put family first.
So now I have another family member to worry about murdering me. It’s obvious that when you talk about murdering Jane Fonda for anti-war protesting, it’s really a threat toward everyone like me who might speak out against war.
Marolyn’s attitude seemed to be that if I don’t want to fear my family members murdering me, I should just keep my opinions to myself.
And that’s how Trump style conservatives and other abusive people keep us in line: veiled threats and constant streams of hate that are kept just below the surface so we all know they are there, but they can still deny them.
And we fail to call them out on it or to communicate how deeply hurtful it is.
He died in a motorcycle accident a couple years later and I guess it just made me real sad that he went to his grave hating me and wishing me dead simply because I believe in peace and freedom..
Then 2016 happened, and that whole side of the family obviously voted for Trump.
But my mom at that time was volunteering with local farm workers in Skagit county and was seeing a lot of how horribly migrant farmers were treated. She had retired and so that was most of her connection with the outside world as my mom has never had a lot of friends. But many of the people in her life at that time were terrified of being deported because of Trump and many of the kids stopped going to school because of the terror that their parents wouldn’t be there when they got home, even though most of them were there perfectly legally.
I remember this as one of the most sad and upset my mom has ever been. She’s not the type of person who gets upset about her own problems. She really only gets genuinely upset about other people suffering.
Dee and Marolyn don’t have any understanding of that.
She said that with both of them she tried to talk to them about it and both of them separately told her they didn’t care. Didn’t care about the suffering of her friends or of her.
Then I guess many of them did actually get deported and had their families torn apart by Trump’s policies and it kind of destroyed my mom emotionally.
She stopped speaking to Dee and Marolyn and told me that she’d basically disowned them over this and a long list of other things. She just couldn’t deal with their heartlessness any longer.
And I felt this huge relief. I’d felt unsafe around them nearly my entire life and my mom and I were now finally on the same page about it.
I felt so much safer.
I shouldn’t have to put up with people who act on the surface like we’re family but underneath threaten to murder me or tell me that they would see my murderers as heroes.
I should have put my foot down in the early 2000’s and explained that their behavior was unacceptable to me but I didn’t have the self confidence.
So now Marolyn has come back around and has for the last couple years, been showing up at my mom’s house, but only on Marolyn’s terms, when Marolyn needs to get something off her chest, but then ignores or blows off the things that my mom want’s to talk about–or so my mom says.
I think my mom also suffers from lack of self confidence and probably should have been far more assertive about her emotional needs and put her foot down decades ago.
So now Trump will be president again and most of my friends are queer or trans and I keep seeing all these posts about how they don’t know how they’re going to live their lives going forward. Like, will they even be able to use public restrooms going forward? Half of them are scared to use public restrooms already because of Trump supporters.
I’m scared if I put up a rainbow flag, someone will burn my house down.
It just doesn’t make sense how people could be this horrible to each other.
I just don’t understand how my own cousin could assault me like that and never care about how it affected me or how my aunts could just not care when they see their sister descending into despair because of the things they support.
I can’t understand how my aunts could basically tell me that they’re okay with me being killed by the police over marijuana because criminals are evil, and then vote for someone like Trump knowing how many crimes he’s committed.
I just can’t wrap my brain around it.
But in the end, I know things will get better one way or the other.
A few years ago I had no hope that we would ever reconcile things in my family. I’d given up.
But now that I’ve written this I’m starting to think again.
I mean, it’s all about them and how they respond to all this of course. Maybe they’ll read all this and try to reach out and reach some sort of understanding. I guess I’m gonna post this and see how fate decides to handle the situation.
But maybe there’s still some kind of chance to make this feel like a family again.
But I also didn’t write this just for us or for me.
Because every Trump supporting family, or at least the vast majority of them, have histories of violence and nastiness like this. I read JD Vance’s book a few years ago and his family is far more cruel. Dee and Marolyn and Brad are the normal ones. It’s me and my mom and dad who are weird for how we interact and think and feel.
This I believe, is the exact kind of thing that’s going on in families all over the United States. That’s another reason I needed to write this all out, that I felt like I would not be right with Jesus if I did not get all of this out in some tangible form.
But this family divide is just a small version of the massive divide in our country. Of two different ways of looking at the world and two different types of people who can’t see eye to eye on basic issues of how to treat each other.
The solution that I see is what I’m doing here, trying everything I can to get everything out and be as open and honest about all of it as I can but at the same time try as hard as I can to avoid any push toward vengeance, because that’s what me-too movement really got wrong. They started seeking revenge, getting people fired or cancelled. That’s the part of me-too that created the Trump backlash against us.
There’s so many people who behave badly. They’re everywhere. I’ve been one of them from time to time myself. And when you find one and try to punish them, then the others you don’t know about will come together to undermine you.
Instead we must be open and honest about all this abuse but reject any notion of vengeance or even of trying to force guilty feelings on them.
We need to understand what’s really going on, which is that everyone is struggling with their own trauma. Dee, Brad and Marolyn no doubt have their own.
Call people out on what they’ve done, but work toward forgiveness and understanding.