donate to save trans lives: a critical moment (audio editorial: why boomers hate their children)
boomers are turning their children to the street en masse: not everyone will be able to re-establish themselves as i did; make donations among your routines
Above: my dad Keith Jelinek. When I was evicted from my home after coming out as non-binary he gave me 900 dollars and told me there was nothing else he could do for me.
in the past 24 hours i have made three 100 dollar donations to the following organizations:
the grand rapids trans foundation
the grand rapids community foundation lgbtq fund
the campaign for southern equality
remember:
boomers are casting their children to the street en masse for being queer.
make donations one of your routines.
you are saving lives.
the results of the election rightfully terrify,
but do not forget about parents and the virtually unchecked power they hold over the lives of their children.
boomers have now proven that they are determined to exert control upon their children even into adulthood. as a consequence for my “behavior” after coming out, i was evicted from my home, given 900 dollars, and told by my multi-millionaire parents — owners of two homes — that there was “nothing else” they could do for me.
i was served with my eviction papers shortly after i posted this:
our anger and the images in our minds (willow rage mode aftermath)
they berated me for posting too much, for posting “too late,” and for not immediately trying to find a job after i’d been planning to be a stay-at-home parent for another several months. as a result of my poor “behavior,” my parents stood by when i was turned to the streets, and they even seemed to hope my homelessness would teach me a lesson. over and over, when i talked to them, they repeated the same words over and over, like non-player characters in a video game: “behavior,” “money,” “opportunity.”
we must reflect on the indifference of these people toward their children.
as i traveled around michigan, i met so many like me: cast to the streets over their “behavior.” adults whose boomer parents knew that they were still financially dependent on them; and then these adults used that financial dependency to make their kids literally homeless as punishment for coming out as non-binary.
this is happening everywhere.
this is happening every fucking day.
there is no hope in trying to convince these boomers to love their children:
at least not in terms of a solution to the crisis facing queer people all across america.
we know that the boomers will not magically begin to love their children:
boomers: the boxes are real to them (updated 19:13 est — audio voiceover: new recording / additional detail)
we know that the boomers value their unquestioned authority as parents above all else:
fuck your parents: 5 reasons why
we know that the boomers will not suddenly start looking at the moon:
when W makes me sad, i look at the moon (memory collage)
we know that the boomers value the role of “father” more than feeling love for their children:
i don’t mind the word dad: but i do mind the word father
even when i was evicted, had my baby taken from me!, this did not move my parents:
i miss my baby
“nothing has been the same since the night my baby son went away from me.
once my baby was gone, i lost all sense of purpose for the physical world around me in my home. it felt as though these objects had been assembled for my family, and decades of a future life vanished before my eyes: my baby, who once cuddle with me every single day as I cared for him full time for 15 months, is gone, and I am told I can care for him again after I complete a mental treatment program.
I am trying so hard to hold onto the feeling of my baby. I can still feel his skin. I can still smell his head when I kiss his hair. I can still sense the weight of his body as he sits on my lap and I read to him. I know he is out there, wondering about me: I know my face is in his mind and that he misses me. I am afraid he will be so much older when I see him again. These people tell me they’d love for me to be a part of his life: but only if I change my behavior and complete a mental health treatment program.
i can sense how my baby disappears from me. I thought I had so much longer to savor caring for him, but now I think I was wrong about that. The way our noses touched. The way he would rush in to me and hug me and squeeze me. The way he would smile when he saw me. We were together almost every day, just about all day, for 15 months: and now I do not know when I will see him again.
there is such an intense emptiness inside of me tonight.”
to them,
if i wanted to see the baby for whom i had loved and cared for over a year,
i needed to adjust my behavior to be more in line with cis-heteronormative cultural expectations.
i needed to go back to living in the simulation with my dad;
he wasn’t going to let me leave;
to stop me is written into his programming:
identity drones: doomed forever to perform
and when i tried to discuss feelings with the male friends who abandoned me,
i was quickly reminded that feelings are not the point in those friendships:
on the nothingness of male friendships
i am left with one final thought about boomer dads.
so many in the younger generations seem to have psychopathic dads:
not only me! far from it.
you know what these dads remind me of?
the paterfamilias, see extract:
i don’t mind the word dad: but i do mind the word father
“fathers,” in terms of their existence as identity drones, are thought to carry forward and enforce “good morals.” it is the responsibility of a father to ensure that his children conform to traditional expectations and beliefs.
for a father to go out dancing, or for a father to be a stripper, or for a father to put feelings and compassion before discipline and toughness is for a father to fail.
i remember learning as a kid that women are subordinate to men: the father is the head of the household, all decisions rest with him, and it is even his responsibility to ensure that his wife does not deviate from the orthodox creeds of his religion.
here “husband” and “father” seem to fuse. the bestowal of the “husband” title carries with it the implication of “father” and all the authority, moral values, and arbitrary lists of materialistic and repressive responsibilities which go along with “fatherhood.”
i think it’s the sense of being a father that led my dad to purchase the book raising a modern day knight for instructions on how to construct me into a man. fathers often believe it is their responsibility as fathers to construct their children into men.
but there actually is a word for the nightmarish fusion of husband and father when it is taken to its utmost extreme: the paterfamilias. the romans structured their whole society around the concept of the paterfamilias. under roman law, the head of the household had absolute authority over his family: he could sell his children into slavery; he could order a newborn baby to be abandoned in a field outside the city; his approval was required for the marriage of his children; he had almost complete authority to discipline his wife and total authority to discipline his children. when the emperor augustus founded the roman empire, he saw himself as the paterfamilias of the entire world: it was believed that he was the ultimate “father,” the “father” of us all, and his statue went up with children dangling from his hands.
the paterfamilias also had authority over numerous other people: clients for whom he did political or business or criminal favors and who were understood to owe him something in return, who saw him as a “father” in a way. not to mention the enslaved members of his household, whom he would ocasionally free as a demonstration of his benevolent nature.
the nightmare of the paterfamilias still exists today. the family structure was passed down in many parts of italy and spain; by virtue of the spanish conquest of south & central america, the structure also characterized colonial society in the americas. and what about the mafia? the structure of the mafia has obvious roots in rome, and the supreme authority figure in any mafia is the godfather.
the word “father” is used both to cement authority and to deploy authority.
not only to deploy authority over children, spouses, and clients, but also to deploy authority over other beings with penises who happen to have children.
these beings are called “father” and it is believed that “father” entails a whole host of things that have nothing to do with emotional connection to the being’s children.
i remember as a “36 year old man”,
my dad would see me watching buffy,
or reading about flowers,
or taking “too many” gummies,
and he would say: “i don’t like that”
and my mom would remind me, “your dad doesn’t like that.”
lol — are you FUCKING SERIOUS?
listen:
dads like this are literally paterfamiliases. that’s what they want to be.
we should assume:
they will NEVER love their kids.
what they value as “fathers” is not love;
what they value as “fathers” is authority, legacy, reputation.
as soon as their children threaten these three bullshit concepts,
they cast their children into darkness.
i told you the byzantines were back:
halloween, grand rapids, buffy, the u.k., and the nightmare of the byzantine empire
and they’re still destroying trees.
to continue the extract:
among some conservative christians there is so much agony around this made-up word, father, that they must write entire articles analyzing whether a father staying home to care for the children is scripturally acceptable.
i once read an interview with a prominent republican politician who said that not once had he ever taken his children for a walk in the park. he explained matter-of-factly that he basically spent no time with his children because his job as a father was to provide and his wife’s job was to nurture.
some fathers complain, “my children are intimidated by me! they don’t open up to me!”
well, maybe it’s because you’re performing the role of a father and not being an authentic parent. maybe it’s because you’re annihilating your own capacity for real love all in the name of forcing yourself to be a “father.”
men fear being seen nurturing.
to nurture appears in our society as the antithesis of a man, and many men believe this too. they nurture in secret.
they have no time to nurture: they must keep their emotions buried deep inside, focus on accumulating the absolute maximum quantity of material objects, and ensure that their offspring conform with cis heteronormative cultural expectations, whether as children or as adults. the father, in his purest and most nightmarish form, has no time for the feelings of his children. his concern is how his children reflect back on him, and he sees his children as extensions of himself out in the world. the idea that his child might be different from him, or from society, haunts him so powerfully that although he does feel love for his children, he finds himself unable to show it.
sometimes i wonder if “father” is another means by which men annihilate themselves and each other in the name of being men.
because in the end my real issue with the word “father” is that “father” seems to restrict me from actually being a good parent to my son.
and this is where i am so grateful:
dad, i didn’t learn your values.
dad, i didn’t become the knight you wanted me to be.
dad, you fucking failed,
and i’m such a better parent than you ever were:
i know of a man who has four children and has never changed a single diaper. even during extended family functions he snaps his fingers at his wife when there’s a poopy and summons her to the task. apparently he has absolutely no shame about this behavior and no one says a word about it. why? because he is the father.
i don’t understand this attitude toward caring for your children.
i love caring for my baby so much. i have such a deep bond with him. i love to have him in my lap and read to him for 30 minutes. i love when he picks a book off the floor, looks at the cover, smiles eagerly like he can’t even believe what he’s found, and walks toward me giggling. i pick him up into my lap and he nestles into me and i read and he is so happy.
i love changing his poopy diapers and feeling the satisfaction of knowing that i made him feel more comfortable and i am keeping his butt safe from rashes.
i love to just sit with him in the rocking chair and tickle him. tickle his toes, his chest, his shoulders. he giggles and giggles and he especially thinks it’s soooo funny when i go “zzzzzzzz” and then rub my beard into his cheek. he likes this so much that when i stop, he will lung forward laughing, trying to shove his cheek into my beard. i did briefly shave my beard but i think these moments are a part of what makes me want to keep my beard.
feeding him is also fun. honestly some people make me feel bad for still bottle feeding him. but like, i just love having him in my lap while he drinks his milk. he’s so peaceful and he just looks up into my eyes. i love to just stare into his eyes and sing to him. his favorite songs are twinkle twinkle little star, old macdonald, and the itsy bitsy spider. he especially loves the itsy bitsy spider because i always squeeze him just a little after each verse and he’s always ready for it and he just thinks it’s soooooo funny he giggles so hard. he also loves twinkle twinkle little star and if you don’t sing him that song before putting him down he gets upset: he wants twinkle twinkle! he’s also just getting into blocks now and walking around picking up what seem like enormous objects, piling them up on each other, so proud of himself. i always clap and he looks at me so happily and sometimes he claps too.
he loves my bracelets and my necklaces. sometimes he points at the charm on my necklace and makes these noises where i think he’s asking, “what is that?” then one day i forgot to wear my necklace and he noticed! he put his finger in my chest hair and looked up at me with confusion. he made these noises that felt like he was asking me where my necklace was.
i think sheepies are his favorite farm animals. (i always call them sheepies).
remember:
“father” is just a word.
i hope more parents out there can embrace the nothingness of the language which restricts them so that they can genuinely and deeply connect with their children.
the most important thing for a child is to feel loved by their parents, and emotional availability is so crucial for that. nurturing, cuddling, reading, changing poopies is so crucial for that. i hope men will stop annihilating their love in the name of being men: i believe deep down, somewhere, they are all radiant beings.
in the past 24 hours i have made three 100 dollar donations to the following organizations:
the grand rapids trans foundation
the grand rapids community foundation lgbtq fund
the campaign for southern equality
remember:
boomers are casting their children to the street en masse for being queer.
make donations one of your routines.
you are saving lives.