📵 The Final Family Break-Up and Move On
First Draft Created: 2024-03-11 18:45
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
I remembered the old double storey 1920s house and attached bed and breakfast in, which they had sold in my absence, and less than ten years later followed by the new and expensive three-bedroom flat on the beach.
They would call me an "entitled Milennial", but I felt resentment, not at knowing that I would never afford my own house, which I had long since come to terms with, but realising that I might soon end up homeless, while she got to spend her time, our time, my limited time, talking about how cruel I had been to shut her out, and as usual I calmed her and managed her trauma.
Likely she had simply chosen to disbelieve that I might be in real danger - it did not suit her, and my real-life story was just like the tricks she had used since I was a child of pretending that she was low on money and was fearful she would not be able to pay the bills this month, while in reality they owned several cars, a house, several businesses they would not dream of selling, and an apartment they rented out.
She had realised that complaining about money was a powerful way to build reliability with the people who earned less than her, and a way to preemptively dodge any requests to lend money, (if shaming and guilting didn't work), something which she was always on the lookout for, as so many well-off people are.
She used these tactics too, while they owned part shares in two small aeroplanes with free hangar accommodation (connections) - or perhaps that was what the part-lesser or "part owner" paid, while they could afford to send two daughters to study in the UK at full price and a third child to Rhodes University for five years WITHOUT taking a loan. "It's so expensive!" they'd complain.
She said this while the house they owned in Durban was actually a Bed and Breakfast, and while one of their businesses was a small luxury Drakensberg hotel, that besides their several small businesses there was still his main financial services company which brokered medical top up insurance, and he was still actively scoping out new lands to buy for future developments, on new estates... since he had already largely developed the estate of properties. The estate he owned.
We only had this one conversation, potentially, before I blocked her again for another two years, or five years, or more.
It hurt, knowing that she was struggling sometimes to even see the text on the screen and to respond. Her eyes had not been so bad when we had last had a real relationship - six years ago, before I had come out as transgender.
Her vulnerability, her apparent struggles, made me want to reach out, to support her. Of course it did. But that was just a trap, as always.
Inside, she was manipulative.
And I could never forget the real reason I had had to block her in the first place, and keep her blocked for 95% of the six years it had been, with the future stretching not-endlessly before us.
Conflicted I had been before, but now my path was clear. Sure, a difference in "philosophy" - heavy quotes - had been our relationship's demolition.
I believed I was real, she didn't. That was all there was to it. That was all there would ever be.
Or so it had seemed at the time.
But perhaps, just perhaps, this time would be different.
That was why she was unblocked.
That, and the desperation I felt at the realisation that I could very soon end up on the street.
That desperate moment where I wanted the comfort of my mother, because despite vowing that I would rather live on the street than reach out, as the likelihood had grown closer, I realised I DID fear that possibility happening. I feared that once that happened, I would never manage to get out of that situation again. I was afraid, terrified, though I'd thought, years ago, that I would not be.
But too much had happened over those six years, wearing me down. I'd barely spoken to her, though I'd reached out briefly during the onset of lockdown in the year 2020 due to the Corona Virus, because being part of the evangelical pipeline she was likely to fall into that same anti-vaxx disinformation, being necessarily naive - though it was always hard to tell whether this too was a ploy when it suited her - despite her devastatinglly maipulative nature.
"I am so glad for Covid-19" she had typed over the phone, when I had earnestly called her after unblocking her in 2020, to ensure she understood how to properly take care of gran. "Because it brought us back together." Despicable.
It was a real source of inner conflict, where, just like at the onset of Covid-19, I found myself doing things I'd never have done, reaching out to people I never thought that I would, including her.
Desperation can do strange things to a person. And my six years since severing the relationship, four years since lockdown, and the upcoming imminent loss of my chronically ill and suffering friend - which would be to assisted suicide in a country where it was actually legal to those who could afford this expensive dignity - had been teaching me that things could always get worse, whether you were ready for it or not, whether you had people by your side for it or not.
And yet somehow, no matter how bad things had gotten, life was downright fantastic without her - simply due to not wanting to end my own life through retraumatization and active exposure to her gaslighting and abuse.
It had been better. Until now, of course.
That was the build-up, the setup, the context to our conversation, and of course, despite everything, I was still disappointed.
No matter what, I would never be worth it to her.
There was no way for her to reflect, no way to reason with her. No way for her to change. Compassion for me when it did not serve her was not an option.
When she got a chance, when she thought I was vulnerable, she once again tried to keep interjecting the same harassment, the same pressure to change, to cease to be me.
She repeated my words of warning back to me, counter-accused that I must be the one in a cult, though of course baseless and ignorant accusations, shots in the dark, as not only have I now learned to insulate myself against her gaslighting but I still do carefully keep her from knowing anything about my life and relationships.
Of course, she had also accused me of only reaching out to ask for money, and though in my desperation that had been my initial intention, to give her a chance to actually show up as a parent, as someone who might care for me, I couldn't bring myself to do that. Instead I had kept my pride, no, my sanity, and refused to do so and I reminded her of this, angrily telling her not to slander me.
I knew she was deeply suspicious of anyone asking for money, I knew how she wielded any money, power and privilege as a cudgel and an incentive for good behaviour, and so I, her offspring, could not bear to ask her for it. It was not pride in fact. No. It was trauma.
This was the woman who had bought me gifts that I had learned to fear as a child, as she bought them in order to weaponize them. The burden was always against me even then, to remind me of the eternal debt I owed them as the parents who chose to create me as, as my father had once admitted, his backup retirement plan, in case all his financial investments did not work out. He had learned that one's best plans could always go south. He had learned this from managing old people's wealth, in ways I doubted were ethical.
She was rock, and I was metal. She wanted to mould me, to turn up flames of heat herself or else leave me to the flames of life until I was malleable, as we had been taught to do in the evangelical cult towards anyone who "departed" from the faith - let them suffer, be shunned, until they return - but it would not work. I had learned immunity to her abuse, though it had taken years.
When I said my final goodbye, I felt more peaceful than I have been with any of the ones prior. Slightly invigorated at having put down the burden, rather than in pieces and scrambling to put myself back together from the shell-shock to low-key depressing day that previous conversations had been, in gradually decreasing severity matching the decrease of my expectations towards her ever changing and improving, let alone wanting to.
I had kept my boundaries entirely, this time. I had not been traumatised this time, merely low-key drained for the duration and immediately energised once I was no longer carrying the burden of those conversations and the cognitive stress of keeping her unblocked.
It was telling, that breaking up with her had given me a burst of energy to finally start exercising again - something depression and body dysphoria made difficult.
I had said what needed to be said. I had told her exactly how and where she needed to get help. I had tried my best. But when she drove that final nail of dogma, of erasing my existence yet again, making it abundantly clear that she was never going to change from her bigotry, never cease in her transphobia, gaslighting and other abuse, that was my cue to go.
Perhaps now - and I felt this, finally, as a sense of peace within my body, a physical deep sense of comfort - it really was finally time to move on for real.
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