fuck your parents: 5 reasons why
false narratives, reality denial, false shame, and more
tw: childhood trauma (physical/verbal but non-sexual abuse)
certain cohorts of boomers yearn for the return of the ten commandments into schools, and one of those commandments is to “honor thy father and thy mother.”
this is the commandment that baby boomers have followed even after many of them were so abused by their parents that by today’s standards they could have been taken out of their homes. child abuse was not taken seriously as a phenomenon until the 1960s, and growing up i was often reminded that i should feel lucky: my mom might sit on my back and smother my face into the bed while whooping my ass, but at least she wasn’t spanking me until i bled like her parents did.
my grandpa caught my uncle smoking cigarettes. in response my grandpa took his son to the garage and forced him to smoke pack after pack of cigarettes until he puked.
“spare the rod, spoil the child” - another verse cherry-picked from the old testament to suit the boomer’s need to replicate what was done to them.
i deploy these examples only to illustrate a central point: on the level of society, we spend much time anxiously contemplating the powers of the government, and this is valid because the government often abuses its powers and even murders people while doing so, but parents are the most primal authority, and their power over your life is virtually unchecked. there are laws now restraining the parent from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse: but because our culture still places such high value on the independent authority of parents over their children, the parent is left with virtually unchecked power to shape the entire psyche and emotional experience of the child.
marisa dabice of mannequin pussy, who screamed “fuck your parents” at a show in detroit and got me all warm and fuzzy
(photo source)
my main memories of childhood: being in my room crying because i was so afraid of hell; running away from my mom while she chased me to pin me down beneath her butt and whoop my ass even as i screamed that i couldn’t breath (no memory of the offenses giving rise to these punishments); my dad taking me to mcdonald’s and telling me, “you like those fries? you’ll be making them for people for the rest of your life” (to this day he is very proud of this story and tells it often); my dad looking at me in the car and me telling him i wanted to be in the nba and him saying, “well all your teammates are going to think you’re an idiot.”
i quit basketball and never played again.
many parents do not even reflect on the fact they hold this kind of power over another being in their hands. parents plant the seeds of their child’s sense of self-worth, their child’s sense of confidence, even their child’s general emotional patterns. and yet despite all the power the parent holds in his hands, despite all the awesome responsibility that binds him to love and care for his child, he may not even see his child as another being at all. he may understand his child to be an extension of himself. and in the name of constructing his child into something else, the parent may understand himself as having a duty to:
terrorize his child with hell fire;
physically harm his child in order to teach them “disicipline”;
say cruel things to his child at a young age to give him a “dose of reality”;
tell a child his dreams are hopeless and his teammates will think he’s an “idiot.”
the boomers who treat their children this way were usually, i think, treated much worse by their own parents, but they never talk about it. why?
“honor thy father and thy mother,” the ultimate unquestioned authority figures, whom the abusive boomer sees as being entitled to treat their children virtually however they want: but the child, the abusive boomer says, has no right to share these stories later. “i didn’t share my stories! and my parents got to enjoy their lives!”
well that’s changed now. we have a new generation now: we don’t grab verses from the old testament and use them to justify covering for abused authority. no, now there is accountability for parental authority: the accountability comes from us, sharing our stories, ignoring implications for the honor of our fathers and our mothers. now the parents who fucked with their children won’t be able to sleep so easy. the parents who spent their lives honoring their abusers won’t be able to stop us, and now their own parents are often dead, so there is nothing they can really do to have justice.
we will not join the boomers on that sad road.
even if we love our parents, we will remember that our parents were given ultimate and almost unchecked authority over our lives, and because of this they owe us everything and we owe them nothing. if we owe them something, it is something they earned; but by default, the child owes the parent nothing.
so we will join the mannequin pussy frontwoman marisa dabice and say: fuck your parents. here’s 5 reasons why.
1. false narratives
parents have enormous power to shape entire narratives about our lives. when we enter the world, we have no vocabulary: our parents deploy words and sentences to define us, give us a sense of what we should expect from life, and shape our own internal sense of whether we are good or bad, worthy or unworthy.
as children, and as adults, we feel an enormous desire to love and be loved by our parents. we might even feel ashamed if our parents have spoken poorly about us: we may think their words are something to hide.
for years i believed the narratives my parents spun about me. i guess when i was really, really small, i killed and gutted one of my fish. for years, even into my adulthood, my mom would bing this story up and tell me, “i thought you were a serial killer,” and the story would be told not in isolation but in combination with other details of my misbehavior. and in the midst of that same kind of behavior, i recall trying to comfort my mom while she cried, “why god? why did you give me this child?”
“we thought about tying you up on a porch and leaving you there,” my dad sometimes still says, a grin on his face.
the thing is: whatever our parents are saying is more about them than it is about us. we can still love our parents and recognize that they are humans who in many cases were raised by extremely incompetent and extremely abusive parents, and that is truly, in some cases, the only model of parenting they even know.
but this ignorance does not excuse them from the narratives they weave about their children. those narratives follow the child for years and years down the road.
most importantly, though, if we allow our parents to continue spinning narratives about us when we are adults, we sacrifice our own autonomy.
as adults, we get to create our own narratives about our own lives.
2. reality denial
i can confidently say that almost every single millennial i have ever spoken with about parents has had a form of this interaction with their boomer mom: the adult child brings up something the mom did that was bad; the mom says, often with tears in her eyes or her hands thrown into the air, “well fine then! i guess i was a terrible mother!”
it hardly seems to matter whether the adult child actually said the words “you were a terrible mother.” the boomer parent is unwilling to examine the specific details of all the terrible shit they did, and so the boomer parent deflects details with a retreat into abstraction: “i guess i was a terrible mother!”
by shifting the conversation away from the specific and toward this abstract concept - “i guess i was just a terrible mother!” (and also by crying) - the boomer parent can guilt trip the child into reassuring them: “no, no, you were a wonderful parent.”
according to many reports from many millennials, at least in my world, speaking maturely with a parent about that parent’s past behavior is a lost cause.
and since so many boomers refuse to go to therapy, so will the cause remain: lost.
photo my own
3. false shame
mentions this concept of “false shame” in her post “you’re not demure, you’re a mess.” the concept comes from sandra lee bartky in the book femininity and domination and bartky, whom valerie cites with the same quote, defines it this way: “false shame is felt when a person evaluates her behavior in line with commitments which are not really her own, commitments which disturb a moral equilibrium to which she will shortly return.”
who is the ultimate source, or at the very least our first source, of false shame?
for literally years i have felt ashamed for having oral sex with a boy in his basement when we were in eighth grade. i have felt shame for being spanked by my mom while she sat on me: it’s something i never said out loud until therapy. i have felt shame for the signs my mom gave me that i was demonic.
false shame with regard to our parents goes so far beyond these examples. our parents teach us all kinds of moral values about: sex, gender, race, religion, music, television, books, how to treat others, how we should expect to be treated, whether we should feel ashamed/neutral/proud of our feelings and desires.
but false shame, i think, can also take another form: the shame we feel for the abuse we received, and which our parents who abused us do not need to feel because we keep the abuse secret for them.
for so long i felt so ashamed about the story i told in stop masturbating or burn in hell. i believed my mom when she told me that my extreme behavior came from nowhere and she couldn’t find any explanation for how i ended all my friendships. i thought: i am some kind of psycho person and that’s why i was so scared of hell. and everyone in my family — my dad, my mom, my sisters — agreed with this narrative: that my extremism and my ptsd symptoms came from me. i had to be ashamed of me.
but now i’ve read that story, all in writing, a few times, and i don’t feel any shame. the shame has been transferred.
the shame can never be erased: but we don’t have to carry it.
4. it’s your life
at some point, if you want to have a fulfilling life, you simply must stop caring what your parents think. parents approach their children from so many angles that have nothing to do with how their children actually feel. the parent might be jealous of other parents whose children turned out “better”; the parent may have no independent life or hobbies of their own and uses your life as the basis for their whole identity; the parent may be struggling with jealousy over the freedoms you claim in your own life, freedoms which they themselves would never have dared to touch.
your parent might want you to be a doctor, a lawyer, a leader of some kind. your parent might want you to make huge amounts of money. your parent might want you to live in a certain kind of house with a certain kind of yard and a certain vibe to the furniture and a certain bible verse in a frame up on the wall.
well guess what? it’s your life and fuck them.
one day, our parents will be gone, and we will be left with our own lives, without them.
i was not able to figure out how to live my life authentically until i was (am) 36 years old. and so much of what held me back was wondering: “will my parents approve?”
5. your own children
obviously plenty of people reading this are thinking, “i’m never having kids!” and i 100% respect that. however, for those of us who do have kids, there is a fifth reason (among i’m sure many other reasons lol) to say fuck your parents.
that reason is your own children.
when my son was born, i could feel how extended family quickly closed in. these people expected me to behave like a “father.”
i quickly discovered that if i did not embrace my true authentic queer self, i would by default be incorporated into a scheme to construct my son into a man.
and that i fucking refuse to participate in.
i will always strive to see my son as his own independent being: who owes me nothing and to whom i owe everything. i don’t want to look at my son and see a soul in danger of burning forever or a little boy who needs to be taught to be a man: i want to see this precious being for whoever they are, and help them develop into themselves.
the being in my care will become whoever and whatever they want to be.
no comments about my parents
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This is so so powerful <3
i'm so sorry for what you went through! 🥹
Thank you so much for sharing such a vulnerable but thought-provoking piece <3