cw: unfiltered discussion of disowning my family of origin
I still have memories of my family of origin, a lot of them bad, some of them good. There are memories I have wanted to hold in my heart and keep forever, but as time passes and fascism rises, I realize that I saw what I hoped was true, and I heard what I wanted to hear but not always what was said.
My parents’ generation doesn’t have the same habit of recording marriages and births and deaths in the frontispiece of a heavy leather gilt-edged family bible, but the generation that raised them did, and many before that.
Even the concept of keeping your genealogy recorded in a very specifically Christian relic seems less of an innocent throwback and more of a cultural statement soaked in blood. You believed or you didn’t. You went to church or you were whispered about. You got married and had kids or people suspected you of being wrong somehow. You stayed in the same religion and denomination you were raised in or you were scratched out of the family bible. You toed the line or you were disowned.
there are already people I won’t ever see again, people that probably pretend I no longer exist.
I want to take this chance to disown those I have hoped could change. I don’t think they care, so it’s not for them that I’m writing this. It’s for me, to help me continue to let go of the anger, shame, betrayal, injustice, and grief. I am letting go of whatever hope I still hold.
to the woman who carried me to term and gave birth to me:
I disown you. Take me out of your family bible.
I visited your Facebook page to see if there was any news I needed to see, if your dad is still alive, if anything has happened that I might want to know. Your profile avatar says that you ‘stand with Israel’. Your public posts make no goddamn sense. You posted a meme of that un-elected South African racist billionaire who keeps buying and ruining things. I hope he goes to Mars and burns to a crisp as he passes through what little atmosphere that planet has. You learned no lessons from your parents about what fascism did to the world the last time it reared its poisonous head like it is now. You are foolish and your choices will be your undoing.
You are not my mother. I am not your child. When it is your time to die, I will not be there. When you are buried or your ashes are scattered, I will not be there. I will read no poems, I will write no eulogy. I will not cry for my mother when you are dead. I will not mourn you. What I grieve is who I thought you were.
I am ashamed of you, and so I disown you. You have no right to be called my mother, and if I still refer to you that way, it’s out of habit — not because I believe that you actually are.
Do not speak my name.
to my sister, who I protected from dad’s anger with my own well-being:
I disown you. Take me out of your family bible.
You know better. You will be 42 years old this summer. If you could ever have changed who and how you are, or understood the world better so that you could act with compassion and an awareness of how you have been complicit in harm, you would have already done it. You are not my baby sister any more. You’re a grown-ass woman who has chosen to be who she is.
I have waited decades for you to understand that you cannot be neutral in the face of injustice, no matter what shape the injustice takes. I have waited for you to realize that refusing to make a choice is itself a choice. I told you years ago that if you weren’t for me, you were against me, and I know you hated that because you told me so. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it any less true.
Your place in history is the worst side. You are passive, you compromise your values, you do not show your sons how to be their best selves in this broken world. You wait for your god to save you and you don’t realize that you are already damned, because you have damned yourself. You are foolish and your choices will be your undoing.
You are no longer my sister. I have sisters. I have siblings. You are not on that list of people and you never will be again. There is such a thing as too late, and that time arrived a while ago.
I am ashamed of you. Of all the people in my family of origin, I had the most hope that you could be better, but you have disappointed me until the taste of hope on your behalf turns sour in my stomach. I used to be your big sister, but no more. If I still refer to you as my sister in the future, it is out of habit, not out of connection or relationship.
We are not family. Do not beg me for help when they come for you in the night. Do not cry over the choices you have made. Go back and try again, and do not speak my name.
I’ve already said so many things, online and in person, that it shouldn’t be confusing to anyone now or in the future that I am and will continue to be on the right side of history.
There’s not really a need for me to publicly call out the people in this post, but I feel like there is so little that I can do; and I need to reserve my energy for the things that matter, the things that I do for my family, and if there is enough left — the things I do for my other loved ones. My resources are finite and I must spend them wisely.
Even if it means I need to write something like this in order to remind myself over and over and over again to stop checking to see if they’ve changed. Nothing ever comes of chasing hope for people like that except disappointment. And I don’t have enough fucks to go around, and if I did, they still don’t deserve to have them.
I will miss what I thought was real, and I will heal, and I will be a good example to my children and all the ones I love.
And for anyone who’s not with me, you’re against me — write me out of your fucking family bible.
I know this was a rough one. But I read The Diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid, and I was raised to be a good little Christian Nationalist, and I lived decades unaware of the contradictions in my life and the harm I was party to; and when it hit me like a wave (the first of many waves to come), I began to change.
I would rather die in a concentration camp, denied the right to flee to another country, than be connected to the people who would send me there.
I have no family but the one I choose. And I will choose them over and over and over again because I know what it’s like to choose the wrong thing and suffer because of it.
May we all be brave as we hope for the things that deserve our hope. May we all find the light.
xox,
Nix
epilogue —
there were song lyrics here, but it was the wrong way to end this piece. I’m glad that I was able to write something encouraging at the end — for myself and maybe for you — but the music was wrong and it bothered me enough that I needed to take it out. I’ll do better next time.
featured image is a photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash
