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The Warrior Son

There are people who believe that one's family members necessarily deserve special standing in one's life. I am not among them. I accept no debt to my family. To me, family is just other people.

Love is not inherited. What could I have loved even before I developed cause - effect reasoning or an understanding of object permanence? What could I have valued about relationships before I was capable of forming enduring mental representations? Mutual, giving love doesn't arise from nothing. It requires mature understanding. An adult who expects their child to have the same capacity for love that they do is, in my opinion, unprepared to parent.

Parent - child love is unequal. It's not a good model for how adults should relate to each other. When I was a child, my parents and guardians wanted me to act like an adult so that I wouldn't trouble them. But they didn't want to treat me like an adult because that would mean acknowledging my autonomy. They wanted me to be non-existent until they needed someone to do housework for them.  That is, they wanted me to be a servant. That was how they understood our relationship. The fact that I had to grow and develop and that I needed help and protection was a major inconvenience to them. All told, they just didn't want to deal with an undeveloped person. That task was thankless and they got tired of it. They were immature adults.  But what do they want of me now that I'm grown? I don't know. It may be safe to assume that they want what so many others want from their families: a healthy, happy relationship into which they have put nothing for most of their lives.

I don't fit in among my family. There's no refuge for me there. They were never any refuge, even when I was a child who was bullied and rejected. I grew up baffled. What did I have to do to get them on my side? Who did I have to be? They seemed determined to raise me into a hardened savage that would never burden them with need. They wanted a warrior son, austere toward outsiders and warm toward them. A pure tribalist. It was a bad upbringing.

Even now, my family infantilizes me. They can only reminisce to me about when I was young. My life as an adult isn't interesting to them. Maybe they wish that I were a child again so that they could make me disappear.

I don't relate to people. Family is just as far away from me as any other kind of relationship. I don't know exactly what my family experienced in raising me. I do know there was fear. Some of them were afraid of me. I was different, and people outside my family could certainly tell. Those people responded by recoiling. Maybe the people who should have protected me felt the same horror of me that others felt.  I was an Other among them. Rejection of the Other is a human response, and I don't blame anyone for it. Not even my family, because they aren't above anyone else. They aren't better than anyone who doesn't share my DNA. They're reflexive rejection of me, in that it mirrors the rejection I have seen from everyone else, is proof of that.

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