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dustydahlin · 4 years

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What is a Disciple - Your New Identity in Christ!

John 13:35, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Subject: A look at our Identity as a Disciple of Jesus Christ. What being called a disciple reveals about God and what expectation it holds for us.

“Once upon a time there was a fire in a small town. The fire brigade rushed to the scene, but the firemen were unable to get through to the burning building. The problem was the crowd of people who had gathered not to watch but to help put out the fire. They all knew the fire chief well – their children had climbed over his fire engines during excursions to the fire station, and the friendliness of the fire chief was legendary. So, when a fire broke out, the people rushed out to help their beloved fire chief.

Unfortunately, the townsfolk were seeking to extinguish this raging inferno with water pistols! They’d all stand there, from time to time squirting their pistol into the fire while making casual conversation.

The fire chief couldn’t contain himself. He started screaming at the townsfolk. ‘What do you think you’re doing? What on earth do you think you’re going to achieve with those water pistols?!’

The people realized the urgency of the situation. How they wanted to help the fire chief. So, they started squirting more. ‘Come on,’ they encouraged each other, ‘We can all do better, can’t we?’ Squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt.

Exasperated the fire chief yells again. ‘Get out of here. You're achieving nothing except hindering us from doing what needs to be done. We need firemen who are ready to give everything they’ve got to put out this fire, people willing even to lay their lives on the line. This is not the place for token contributions’”

(This story was originally told by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He was urging us to realize that discipleship to Christ means much more than token levels of support to the church and God’s mission in the world. It calls for wholehearted and total life commitment).

Being a disciple of Jesus is much more, perhaps, than what we have considered in the western world. We have new-believer and discipleship classes where Christians can learn the essential doctrines of the Bible. We have entire courses (which can be purchased at discount rates) to help us learn what is in Scripture, how to read and interpret our Holy Text, and how to intellectually process what is “most important” to our lives. Discipleship, today, has almost exclusively become an intellectual exercise. This cerebral pursuit is how most healthy churches view the concept of discipleship.

In some unhealthy circles, like the shepherding movement, discipleship has become an excuse for “leaders” to demand obedience to any and all their demands. This has been grotesquely considered where a “pastor/preacher” has ALL authority to require submission to their words and their will. Here, discipleship is used to manipulate people. It can be easy to see how this is not discipleship. But the reality is neither of the above examples fits with the historical/cultural understanding of discipleship. By the time Jesus had called his disciples, discipleship looked very different.

During Jesus’ day, discipleship included a rigorous, three-phase process. This is what it looked like:

Phase 1: Starting at 6 years of age (until they were about 12), Jewish children underwent a process called “Bet Sefer.” This was the beginning of formal education within the Jewish Community. In this phase, six-year-old boys and girls “would go to the synagogue and... [teachers] would greet you with a slate and he would put a dollop of honey on the slate and then he would remove the ancient scroll of the Torah. As you sat speechless and in awe, the rabbi would have you taste the honey on your slate and tell you that the Torah is sweeter than the honeycomb” (Koinonia Institute). Being simultaneously introduced to the Torah and the sweet taste of honey is said to leave a lasting impression on these children. From that moment forward, they would not only learn to read the Torah, but they would be required to memorize it.

Phase 2 was called “Bet Midrash.” From the ages of 13-15, those “who were deemed worthy to continue their educational pursuits went on to study (and memorize) the entire Tanach, as well as learn the family trade.” This was just as strict and rigorous as the first phase. These children would be placed under a lot of pressure to perform and achieve to the best of their abilities. If, and only if, a child had proved himself worthy, the teacher would select him for the next phase of discipleship.

Phase 3 was called “Bet Talmud.” After the most elite and gifted boys had been deemed to pass Bet Midrash, they then had to stand out enough to be invited by a rabbi to be his “talmidim” (or disciple). In this phase, from ages 15-30, “They would literally follow in the dust of their rabbi - desiring to emulate him in ALL of his mannerisms. They would eat the same food in exactly the same way as their rabbi. They would go to sleep and awake the same way as their rabbi and... they would learn to study Torah and understand God the exact same way as their rabbi.” This phase of Jewish discipleship moved the individual from just learning to being and doing. Being a talmidim was a HUGE honor and privilege that only the best could hope for. After much learning, a 15-year-old boy would finally learn to “walk the walk.” The disciple would live with their rabbi, dine with their rabbi, talk like their rabbi, and do everything their rabbi would do. Their goal, essentially, was to think and talk and be just like their rabbi.

A lot can be said about this. Especially because Jesus broke the mold. Jesus’s Talmidim were different. Instead of picking the honor-roll students, He chose the drop-outs. Except for Paul, NONE of Jesus’s disciples were qualified to be his talmidim. Most believe that all of Jesus’ 12 disciples were not good enough to have passed either Bet Safar or Bet Midrash. They failed. They had no hope of attaining to anything other than working the rest of their lives in their family’s trade.

Theological Implications

As we have been asking throughout this Identity Series, we still must ask, “what does this say about God?” Well... It is important to highlight that no works, merit, accomplishments, or vetting is required by our Rabbi! Unlike the strict system of discipleship of Jesus’ time, God’s system is one of grace and mercy. You do not have to be vetted. You do not have to be the best in the class. You do not need to have the most Instagram followers. You do not have to memorize the entire Old Testament. You do not need to have all the right answers. You do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You do not need to dazzle anyone. God’s system for selecting His disciples is by “grace through faith...”

Your past does not disqualify you from being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Your failures do not disqualify you. Your indiscretions, sins, race, gender, and shortcomings do not disqualify you from the love of God. You could have been a prostitute, a drug addict, a murderer, a homosexual, a gangster, or a preppy A+ student. In God’s economy, He chooses people to be His disciples based on his love and grace...

Eph. 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

John 8:31, “So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.’”

This reveals God as a Rabbi – a teacher of people. When we bring the historical and cultural understanding of a disciple into view, this highlights a God that is personally involved in the holistic development of His people! This reveals relationship – a Rabbi with His talmidim relationship. Of our God, it illustrates His commitment to train, equip, help, instruct, and walk with His disciples...

It reveals a God who is present and personal! This is much deeper than a relationship between a teacher and his pupil. This is a relationship where our Holy Instructor lives every moment of the day with us!

A disciple would rarely be separated from his Rabbi. It may even be said that a Rabbi was the ever-present help to the disciple. The Rabbi would live with their disciples. He would do life with his disciples. He would dine with, walk with, talk with, and exist with His disciples. Jesus modeled this with His Talmidim. For about 3 years, Jesus rarely separated Himself from His disciples...

And this is how it is even today. John 16:7 states, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send Him to you.”

John 14: 25-26, “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

Behind every Disciple of Christ, there is a gracious and merciful Teacher that is ever-present!

Practical Expectations

The second thing we should discuss is the practical expectations for a disciple of Christ. The first highlight of this particular designation is that of need. It should become apparent that being a disciple demonstrates the need for development. This identity statement is a revelation of the Believer’s very real and insurmountable need for instruction, coaching, counsel, and learning. Being a disciple is being wholly dependent upon our Heavenly Rabbi.

Unlike popular belief in the Western World, we are not self-sufficient. We are not independent. We are not islands to ourselves! Just because we live in an age of information - where we have access to libraries of good theology, incredible Pastors and Bible Teachers, a plethora of wonderful role models, and heads full of information – we are still disciples. We are still to consider ourselves desperately reliant upon God. We are to position ourselves, regularly, before God so that we may hear and obey His instruction.

Matt. 11:29, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

John 14:25-26, “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

I stated above that being a disciple reveals an ever-present Teacher. It also means we need to make every effort to be present for our Counselor. We are living life in the presence of our Rabbi. Are we aware of it? Do we regularly stop and reflect upon the Word of God? Do we pray answer-conscience prayers? Have we trained ourselves to attentively listen and expect help from our God?

Finally, this identity statement requires us to “follow in the dust” of our Rabbi. Historically, being a talmidim requires much more than just knowledge. It demands the disciple to follow and imitate our Rabbi – Jesus. We are to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. We are to emulate the life, actions, and mission of our Messiah! We are to eat the way He ate. We are to walk the way He walked. We are love to the way he Loved.

Eph. 5:1-2, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

John 13:35, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus, here, is saying that if a disciple is known for imitating the life of his Rabbi, then we will be known as Christ’s disciples by emulating the radicle love of our Teacher. Jesus’ life and mission is radically characterized by love. We CANNOT claim to be His disciples if we do not follow His example.

Additional Resources:

The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament

Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible

Evangelical Dictionary of Theology

Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words

Militant Thankfulness: An Essential Practice to Experiencing a Full Spiritual Life

#disciple #disciple of jesus #new identity in christ #new identity #biblical identity #what is a disciple #who is a disciple

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tanadrin · 5 years

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Olly Thorn, the guy who does Philosophy Tube, argues in his video on liberalism that, as an ideology, it’s characterized primarily by its tendency to carve out exceptions: politicians of classical liberal bent like moderate Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK promulgate a general political perspective of to-each-their-own, but place those principles in abeyance for pragmatic or situational reasons--and, of course, classically liberal documents like the U.S. Constitution talk a big game of being about freedom and self-determination generally, while having implicit and explicit glaring exceptions, like women and black slaves.

I disagree. Not because I’m a diehard classical liberal; I think liberalism is a useful starting point through which many much more incisive and useful political and social analyses have passed. It is at best the Newtonian physics of human rights, though sometimes it reeks of epicycles. But: I think liberalism is best understood as the practical application of philosophical principles discovered during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but only fully explored and coherently grappled with much later. Nonetheless, as a tendency, it does have its own internal logic, and the apparent suspension of liberal principles by self-professed liberals is less an inherent property of a liberal worldview than an inherent property of humans being shitty and clinging to, or adopting, prejudice when it’s expedient or provides some measure of personal comfort.

This is important because I think that ultimately the contradiction between the liberal perspective and the mental jiu-jitsu required to maintain those prejudices from a liberal perspective can open the floodgates to progress. Let us take the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s in the US as an example. Many different factors contributed to the successes of the CRM in the 20th century. Previous attempts to win something like civil equality for black people in the US had failed: Reconstruction was abandoned, struggles against segregation in the early 20th century came to little, and the appetite for racial discrimination on the part of the white majority, especially in the South, was not at all diminished after the end of World War 2.

What changed? Mostly, I think, the right leaders and the right strategies at the right time. But a strong contributing factor was the fact that the U.S. saw itself as an essentially liberal construct, based on rights and freedoms and equality, and no matter what racist justifications were trotted out to narrow the scope of those rights, it was increasingly apparent both in internal and external terms that something was hilariously out of kilter. Women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the relentless drive of black Americans to increase their own economic prosperity made it clear that there were brutal archaisms within the systems of American life that could no longer be sustained. On the world stage, two massive wars were fought in which the U.S. positioned itself as a defender of freedom and democracy, alongside allies that emphatically did *not* have explicit regimes of racial segregation enshrined in their laws, or the same thoroughgoing ideology of white supremacy, and one of which indeed argued (at least on paper) for a kind of radical social equality that would have had the so-called freedom-loving founders of the U.S. begging and screaming for a king to come back and rule over them again.

Like all great attempts at reform, the CRM achieved less than it set out to do. But, in a way that the labor movement and women’s suffrage had not, it did leave a powerful lasting model within American culture and within the American civil religion for What Rights-Seeking Is Supposed To Look Like. I don’t know why the CRM was unique in this respect. (I suspect that it’s because the CRM occurred when the contradictions it sought to undo were at their height, relatively-speaking: even in the 50s and 60s, the philosophical justification for racism and segregation was basically incoherent screeching, which meant that extremely uncontroversial tactics could prove highly persuasive.) It also established that *this was a process that was supposed to occur.* By giving such a process a formal presence within civil society, it directly laid the groundwork for other movements rebelling against much older, and much more deeply ingrained prejudices, against which liberalism had, heretofore, been mostly powerless. This was extremely important.

Gay and lesbian culture, and the idea that gay and lesbian people might not be demon-possessed desecrators of all that was good and decent in life, did not appear suddenly in the second half of the 20th century. But the CRM provided a new framework in which to cast the concept of gay rights, and, indirectly, language for a gay identity that wasn’t one entirely of rebellion. Let us cast ourselves back to a much earlier era, the long 18th century. In this era, before even the milquetoast concession to the humanity of homosexuals that was the reclassifying homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder instead of an immolation-worthy offense, the dominant language to talk about good and bad, ethical and unethical, right and wrong, was monopolized by religion and the religion-adjacent concept of natural law. Lacking the natural empiricism that was the legacy of scientists like Darwin, natural law was conceived of in narrow terms that were not, in fact, based on any close or careful observations of nature, but human biases projected on to the natural sphere. Therefore, for many people who found themselves inherently opposed to the dominant ethical framework, like those who fell in love with and were attracted to people of the same sex, the choice they had must have felt from the inside a lot like Huck Finn’s: to be “good,” even though it was personally and spiritually intolerable to you, or to say, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”

If society refuses to make a distinction between real evils and real suffering we visit upon each other and the moralizing “evils” we conceive of only to police the behavior and opinions of our neighbors, it must not pretend to be astonished when those who, out of no actual malicious inclination, must be themselves or perish reject that general framework entirely. And you know what? I sympathize. If somebody told me that who I was, inherently, was evil, even though I desire no harm and no suffering to anyone around me, and that expressing that identity even in private was equivalent to--or worse than!--inflicting grievous harm on another human being out of pure hatred, I would be extremely suspicious of their overarching moral framework.

Out of, I suspect, an inclination to rebelliousness and an imperfect analysis of the insufficiencies those antiquated frameworks, people like Marquis de Sade embraced or appeared to embrace monstrous ethics, because these were the only other ethics available to them. Christian, and especially Catholic teachings on sexual ethics require not only a denial of truths of human nature available to casual, empirical inspection (if one is willing to conduct such an inspection dispassionately, attendant to discovery of novel goods as well as novel ills), but a monstrous indifference to the suffering such teaching inflict on those who are simply unable to conform. Then, Pikachu-like, the Catholic church looks at gays and lesbians and gender-nonconforming people and says to itself, “Why on earth did these people reject the simple truth of the teachings of Christ??”

Thankfully, the gay rights movement has a superpower that the African-American civil rights movement, and the feminist movement, and many other such movements throughout history, did not. That superpower was the closet, or, more specifically, in the act of coming out. Women, the working class, and racial minorities are not randomly distributed throughout the population. Working class children are not born at random to middle-class and wealthy families; you do not need to come out as black to your shocked segregationist parents at sixteen. There is not a pre-scripted social role for gays and lesbians to slot into, a set of norms that are foisted on one as totally and completely as gender roles with a provenance that stretches back into the misty depths of Mesopotamian time. (There could have been. In some societies there is something quite like that--just not in ours.)

Because literally anyone could be gay, and because creating social bubbles of like racial or political or socioeconomic attributes does not insulate one from knowing someone who has the experience of being gay, even though gay people are not a large proportion of the population (2-5%, maybe), it becomes much harder to maintain “gay” as a firmly isolated category of other. When just enough gay people have come out in a society that is just liberal enough to tolerate their existence, it rapidly incentivizes more gay people to come out, both to be able to live as themselves, and to say to their acquaintances and family, even if in the most nominal way, “yes, you too know a gay person. You must integrate your knowledge of me as a person into your understanding of the category ‘homosexual.’” And, of course, also incentivizes closer analysis of sexual identities; of the coming out of bisexual people, who otherwise might live tolerably-but-unhappily in the closet, or who simply might not understand that bisexuality is a thing and they share it; and, as we have now, the beginning of a glorious blossoming of a diverse and nuanced understanding of sexuality and sexual identity. To the reactionary mind, this looks like the gays are recruiting, and lobbying, and overturning the order of society. In fact, what is happening is that even those conservative by inclination (among them, famously, Dick Cheney) cannot maintain both their avowed liberalism and their opposition to gay rights when confronted with members of their own family who are gay. It may not lead them to a comprehensive application of the ruthless logic of liberal democracy, but it does destroy one specific contradiction. This is why, even though the U.S. as a whole is not much more socially liberal, the popular opposition to gay marriage absolutely fucking *cratered* between the end of the 90s, when the idea was first conceived of in an extremely-distant extremely-theoretical way, and Obergefell. For institutional reasons peculiar to American conservatism, there’s still a nominal opposition, but let’s be clear: the war is over. Gay marriage (which I’m using here as a proxy for ‘basic acceptability of homosexuality as a personal attribute’) won.

This not to say that all discourse over gay rights is finished, any more than racism in the US ended with the VRA in 1964, or the need for feminism ended when women got the vote. Political rights aren’t the equivalent of social equality. But how we organize ourselves politically is integral to the mythology of our society--there’s a reason that, say, in the US electing your high school student council uses first past the post voting, while in Ireland it uses IRV. Political rights are a baseline and a pivot point. If your right to marry someone of the same sex is protected by law, it is a powerful social signal that being gay is OK--just as the VRA is a powerful social signal that racism is not, and women’s suffrage that women’s role as political beings is not to be ignored.

So there’s an ongoing social struggle to dismantle illiberal-undemocratic incoherencies within smaller bubbles of society, using the overarching consensus, and to dismantle biases and prejudices which are predicated on the illegitimacy of homosexuality, because the actual implications of the legitimacy of a gay identity haven’t been fully worked out generally. Same as with race. Same as with gender equality. And because the L, the G, the B, and the T (and all the other letters in the increasingly-expanding initialism) are related, because gender and sex and sexuality are part of a huge and messy complex of human identity, transness and trans identities specifically, while constituting a distinct concept on their own, are bound up in other ongoing struggles, while also having issues all their own. If, as Dan Savage says, misogyny is homophobia’s snot-nosed sibling (and it absolutely is), so is transphobia. You cannot be a transphobe and not, at some level, be supporting the same set of memes that has for thousands of years legitimized sexism, sexual exploitation, the brutalization of gay people, etc., etc.

What are some of those unique issues? Well, for one, transness is more bound up with medicalization and looks more to medicine to legitimize itself as an identity than any other GSM. There are historical and practical reasons for that. Historical, in that sex researchers and psychiatrists newly interested in the empirical exploration of human identities were among the first people to take the experiences of trans people seriously. While we had preexisting and strong social stigmas around the idea of homosexuality, we had a society so transphobic by default that it didn’t even really understand trans people could exist, much less come up with invective against them. This didn’t mean early trans pioneers like Lili Elbe were accepted by society, really; but the cruel incomprehension of society was more like the attitude to circus freaks than to serial killers. With gay people, on the other hand, “sympathetic” psychiatrists reclassified homosexuality as a disease, then started work on various kinds of fucked-up conversion therapy. Psychiatry may be a science, but let it never be said that science is immune to human prejudice.

But the practical reason for that association is that modern medical technology offers a powerful tool for relieving the suffering of trans people. To be sure, there are specific concerns of medical care among gay, lesbian, and bi people, too, especially since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. But such is a) the complex and interlocking aspects of gender and presentation and embodiment of both in our society and b) the nature in which dysphoria is felt by trans people, that medical intervention is, purely on a pragmatic level, a powerful tool to both relieve suffering specific to the experience of being trans. That’s not really the case with gay or bi identities.

Where we run into trouble is where we rely on the interface between trans identities and medical institutions to legitimate trans identities. What this huge long screed has all been a preface to is this assertion: that it is, above all, entirely unnecessary. You do not need a comprehensive medical theory of blackness to recognize black people deserve rights. You do not need a medical theory of gayness to recognize gay people deserve rights. Ditto womanhood. Indeed, in *every one* of those cases, medical theorizing on paradigms of homosexuality, womanhood, and race have been used to prop up, rather than to dismantle prejudices, and it is only the relentless logic of liberal values, either on their own terms, or in the more sophisticated form under which they’re incorporated into other critiques of society (as leftists sometimes manage), that have ultimately pushed through the “eww, I don’t like these people” reaction to a consistently tolerant treatment of these categories as fully realized human beings--or, at least, the beginnings of that treatment.

(Irrelevant aside: I actually entirely expect that the close relationship between medical and experiential aspects of transess will be the vehicle to greater acceptability of a transhuman ethos around how we interact with our bodies. Because the morphological self-determination aspect of transhumanism is fundamentally liberal, i.e., it’s about personal autonomy and personal flourishing, and because the technologies available to facilitate that are medical, they’re bound up with the cultural aspects of medicine. Right now, that’s a disease model, based both on the inheritance of medicine as “thing which exists to make people healthy again,” and the practical limits of scarcity and wanting people to pay out of pocket for anything that is classified as purely cosmetic. But in my heart of Utopian hearts, even purely cosmetic procedures belong to the same category, mutatis mutandis 1) whether they can be shorn from the (IMO mostly unfair) presumption they’re about conforming to oppressive social norms, and 2) the fact they’re usually used to enact a preference much less acute and involving much less personal difficulty than GID. But big, big emphasis on “usually.” To put it another way, unbinding medicalization from transness wouldn’t be an argument against providing specialized medical care for trans people. It would be an argument for providing a similar set of services to everyone.)

I’m actually deeply uninterested in theorizing about what transness is or how it’s constituted. For one, I think a lot of the questions around it are simplistic and ill-defined, such as the utterly moronic search for “a gay gene.” Human identity and sexuality and sex, and cultural complexes built around those things which have their roots in, but really aren’t tied to biology in any kind of philosophically consistent way, are too multifactorial, and too fuzzy to be clearly or cleanly captured by psychiatry and neuroscience and biology as they currently stand. Maybe one day, when we have Culture-level AI able to image us down to the subatomic level and run sophisticated simulations of every metabolic pathway and every cognitive tic simultaneously we can create a sufficiently detailed model of the human being to speak on these things with some certainty. But that’s actually irrelevant to the messy business of lived experience, and to the practical business of “how do we get people to stop deliberately inflicting massive amounts of suffering on each other.”

The answer to the latter question is essentially the same as has been for homosexuality. Like gay people, trans people have the superpower of being able to come out. Unlike gay people, trans people make up an even smaller proportion of the population. And the conversation around the diversity of gender identity is even more in its infancy than the conversation around sexual identities. But as we have seen time and time again, the exact constitution of the identity is irrelevant to the identity’s legitimacy. Those hostile to that identity will always find a basis on which to rest their hostility: using medical legitimacy, or failure to conform to the gender binary, or failure to meet some arbitrary definition of dysphoria, will make it no easier to gain acceptance. Minorities under siege have been willing to throw less-mainstream members of the group under the bus to defend themselves since time immemorial: it never works. You will be accepted for precisely as long as you are useful to attack other members of the group, and then they will turn on you. Racists will use black people who look down on AAVE to say, “see! I’m not racist!” and then still refuse to hire the well-dressed black person who speaks perfectly standard GenAm, over a less qualified white person. There is no “balancing act” between a “reasonable” set of trans identities and an “unreasonable” set, because what the philosophical battle is over is not where, exactly, the line will be drawn for a minority identity, but the validity of that fundamental identity in the first place.

So I tire of people who want to endlessly split and compare forms of transness that they feel are well beyond the set of central examples of trans identity. I tire of people who want to treat some forms of gender self-identity as invalid, or of too little value to the person making them to be worth caring about. This is not just dumb, and it’s not just bad strategy (solidarity! it works, bitches). It’s actually completely missing the point. If you can convince society that “trans” is a legitimate identity, the supposed edge cases don’t matter. If you can’t, abandoning people “without” “real” “dysphoria” or w/e won’t make a difference. It’s not as if they’re the one thing standing in the way of every transphobe going “welp, guess we were wrong!” The thing standing in the way is that they refuse to accept trans identities at all. They will point to whatever they can to buttress that lack of acceptance, and if it isn’t that it will be something else. The thing that works against that, the thing that dismantles that, is the same thing that always dismantles prejudice: you be who you are. You don’t let anyone take that away from you. And if someone asks you to philosophically justify your experiences, your life, your existence, you tell them to get fucked, and you keep right on living.

#ramblings and doggerel #please excuse the long ass maddowesque meandering #i swear there's a point at the bottom of all this

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pointsofpride · 6 years

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I’m blurring this person’s name and icon, because I am not inviting a “””debate””” with them. I’ve encountered this person’s exclusionism before, and pointed out how fucked up it is, but I’m going to go off on it again, because here it’s cropped up again, and it’s still just... so fucked up. First off, fuck you for thinking that dressing up exclusionism in “civility” actually makes it any amount of civil, because a dagger in the back isn’t any more okay, just because you didn’t stab with aggression. I’m really tired of seeing people who absolutely should know better than this saying these kinds of things. So get ready for another post explaining how exclusionism flies in the face of our community’s history, basic compassion for others, and general sense.

“i believe we shouldn’t allow cishet aces within the LGBT community”

First point of order, there is no “allow” involved in this. Aces, right now, are a part of the community. You can’t say “I think I’ll let you sake a seat at this table” to somebody who’s already been sitting in a chair the whole time. Secondly, “cishet ace” is a self-contradicting phrase. You can not be a heterosexual asexual. You can be a cis ace. You can be a heteroromantic ace. But asexuality is not a kind of heterosexuality. It is a separate sexual identity.

And the term “cishet” was itself coined specifically to define those whith unconditional and unquestioned access to privilege and social acceptance for their identities. That does not apply to aces and never has.

“BUT i would encourage more recognition to the ace/aro community as well as proper sourcing on issues ace/aro people face that isn’t literally stealing from other people’s struggles”

You don’t encourage recognition of the a-spec community. You very directly don’t do that in any amount or way. If you think they’re “stealing from other people’s struggles”. Fucking christ, do you hear yourself? If somebody gets punched in the face and then somebody else says they got punched in the gut, would you tell them to stop “stealing from other people’s struggles”? I should hope the fuck you wouldn’t because that would be total nonsense with absolute lack of awareness. Aces aren’t stealing anything from anybody by just fucking Telling You what they deal with. And you’re probably referring to the fact that exclusionists reuse biphobic and transphobic rhetoric. Which is just. Mind boggling that you can recognize that’s what’s happening and then pin it on a-specs, as if them pointing out how fucked up it is is somehow the problem. Look... I'm not cis, and I'm not het. My whole identity is, at minimum, 3 kinds of queer, and I could expound on my identity. But right off the bat, I’m going to tell you I am ace. And you do not care about any part of me. When I hear people say "cishet aces don't belong at pride" the only thing I hear is "I don't care about your identity; I'm just going to pick and choose what parts of you I say are worthwhile; I don't accept your aceness, and I I don't actually care about you". Because you don’t care about anything I have to say. You don’t care, because I’m ace. You don’t get to dissect me and tell me what I experience or what part of me is queer. When I tell you that I’m ace, you immediately, in your mind, discredit me. But, like I said, I’m not either half of “cishet” (not only because my aceness makes me not heterosexual). You had better not think for a fucking second that you are doing me any favours by keeping out the """cishets""". Don't you fucking dare pretend you're speaking on my behalf or that you care about me. I'm pan, I'm agender, and hell, I prefer femine pronouns, even though I’m agender. I'm queer as FUCK, and I'm also ace. And that is IMPORTANT to me. It IS a part of what makes me queer. If you don't accept all aces, you DO NOT accept me, because my aceness is a part of the whole package of queer that I am. You are not allowed to dissect my identity and throw away what you don't like. All aces belong. It is so immensely disrespectful to try to use my identity against other aces by ignoring MY aceness because the rest of me is "queer enough". Just. Fuck you. If you think “cishet” aces should be removed from the community, then FUCK you. Also, it is incredible that somebody has to point out how fucked up it is that you won’t count first-hand accounts as a “proper source”. Do you fucking REALIZE how little information there is on asexuality? It’s not grass, you can’t just go outside and pick up a fistful. But the studies on LGBT+ issues that take aces into account also get dismissed. Everything aces have given, no matter how direct or nuanced or straightforward or detailed or academic or anecdotal has ever been sufficient for you. It doesn’t matter to you what anybody has to say about oppression that aces face, because you will always actively try to rationalize a reason why it isn’t a “proper source” of evidence.

“i don’t believe ace/aros are oppressed because by definition, they just dont experience it.”

The definitions of “asexual” and “aromantic” are not “a person who is not oppressed”, what the hellfuck is wrong with you? Aces keep TELLING YOU they face forms of oppression, and you just tell them it isn’t true, to their faces. How do you rationalize that?

“however there is some actual stigma they deal with, and denying it is unnacceptable.”

GOLLY, REALLY? IS THAT SO, OH ARBITER OF SOCIAL STIGMA? THANK YOU FOR APPROVING ACES CLAIMS OF AT LEAST THAT MUCH.

You can not pretend like you care about aces and prove you don’t with everything else you say and expect to get a gold star sticker for seeming like you give a fuck.

“the issue is that the LGBT community is treated like a club and not a place of solidarity for people who experienced oppression for their sexuality and gender identity and that needs to be addressed.”

JESUS FUCKING LOUISUS, NO ACES ARE TREATING IT LIKE A “CLUB”. The fuck kind of infantilizing accusation is that? WHAT the FUCK.

You think aces don’t need suicide prevention resources? You think the historical and current pathologization of asexuality doesn’t happen? You think no ace person has ever been hurt for their sexuality? You think aces don’t get kicked out by conservative, bigoted parents for being “deviant”? You think no people ever will think ill enough of aces to harm them? You think aces never are victims of corrective rape, because they “won’t put out”? You think aces don’t deal with any forms of oppression or abuse? Nothing at all? ‘Cause you have absolutely no sense of what society does. Bigots really don’t tend to differentiate their bigotry. If a heavily conservative christian person knows you aren’t straight and cis, that’s all they need to know to loathe you and want you hurt. You just. Don’t get it.

I’m super fucking queer, and I have been on the receiving end of a whole lot of hate in my life for being agender, and for being pan. I know what oppression is, you fuck. Don’t think I defend aces without any knowledge of what the whole community deals with. Don’t think I defend aces without knowing what oppression is. I’ve been the victim of it, sometimes with dangerous and violent severity. But do you know what the MOST aggressive hate I have EVER received for any part of my identity has been for? Take a wild fucking stab in the dark. It’s the reason why I'm defensive of other aces. You have no fucking clue how hated aces are. None. At all. You refuse to think maybe they’re actually oppressed. Even when they tell you. Aces, whether or not they are heteromantic, are very much not a part of the social class in a privileged position that is Straight™. Aces face oppression, and you are not capable of denying that fact except to your own mind, which is all you do.

And I’m CERTAIN you’d find an excuse to deny what I tell you. Also, if you think that social stigma isn’t a part of why the community exists, you don’t know why it exists. It isn’t solely about equal marriage. Because a lot of the time, people will go “you’ve got gay marriage, how are you oppressed?”. The community exists to affect social change and bring awareness. Aces are a part of that.

“cishet ace/aros will never understand the oppression that gay, bi, lesbian and trans people deal with”

Cishet a-specs do not exist. A-specs, by definition, are not cishet.

And heteroromantic aces and heterosexual aros very much UNDERSTAND the oppression that the other members of the community deal with. You act like aces are all children with no sense of comprehension.

“and that needs to be told to them without the aggressive “you guys are fucking idiots for thinking you’re one of us”.”

It’s no different. It’s insensitive and defies the reality of the situation either way.

“something i think a lot of exclusionists forget was that aces/aros were encouraged to be apart of this community for a decade.”

They ARE a part of this community, and if you fucking god damn KNEW your queer history, you’d know that the only thing recent about a-specs in the community is awareness of them. They’ve been here the entire time. They’ve always been in the community. It’s only widespread awareness that’s new.

“its less that they forced themselves in and that LGBT”

Because, guess what, they didn’t. Because they already were in it.

“people legitimately believed they were one of us”

They did. There was a reason. And still do, because that reason is that they are. The overwhelming majority of the community knows this. Right now. Currently. Your opinion on this is so extremely in the minority of the community.

“due to being misinformed and not well educated about it.”

Oh my GOD the irony of you. Here. Have some stuff to stop you from forming a kugelblitz of ironic density: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x If any of those links die in the future, whatever. As of now, that’s a whole lot of evidence you’re being bigoted. In exactly the same way that there are transphobic and biphobic and panphobic members of the community, when they obviously should know better... In exactly the same way those people try to kick me out of the community, because I’m agender, and because I’m pan, you’ve got the same problem of bigotry they have toward me, and it’s toward me again. You really should know better. MOST of the community knows better than this. By far, the community, as a whole, knows that aces are a part of it. There are exclusionists, but they represent extremely few. You don’t get to say people are “misinformed and not well educated” in the same breath you state you want to take aces our of the community, because you think they’re “not oppressed”. You can’t call people uneducated when you demonstrate a direct lack of education on what you’re talking about. But nothing anybody gives you will get you to consider “hey, maybe there’s a reason that most of the community accepts aces” and “maybe there’s an underlying reason why the correlation to terf and biphobic ideology keeps getting pointed out” or “ I am TELLING YOU this AS A PAN AND AGENDER PERSON, you are recycling rhetoric used against me. And what’s worse, you’re using it against me AGAIN, because I also happen to be ace.

Aces are not “co-opting” bi or trans struggles. You’re Just an asshole doing exactly the same thing other assholes are doing to other members of the community. All aces belong. I am SO. Sick of exclusionists thinking they’re being courtious or civil, no matter how they dress up their willing ignorance and unawareness of our own community’s actual history, and the oppression they deny the existence of. You’re also the kind of person who thinks the community suddenly sprang up out of nowhere after Stonewall, which, I mean... is a benighted notion on its own that ignores the entirety of our much more involved and extensive history, but even still, you are not, to any degree, supporting the spirit that Stormé DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major stood for. Not even a little bit. And again, Stonewall was what started the Pride event; not what started the community. They are Different Things. Stop saying things that imply aces are automatically outsiders trying to wedge themselves into the community, when you are the ones trying to remove people who are members of the community. Signed, a member of the community who’s “””queer enough””” to tell you how fucked up your opinion is. Hopefully you’ll listen to an agender, pan person, because you sure as fuck won’t listen to anything any other cis and heteroromantic ace, or heterosexual aro person says about the issue.

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geode-sol · 6 years

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Psych of Self Memoir: The Pattern of Infinity

I’ve never truly understood, certain aspects of my reality. I mean like, I understand that they exist, however a lot of the times I do not understand why they exist. One of these aspects that I do not understand is the collective human ability to create societal concepts that limit us. I bet you can tell that I was one of those kids who asked “why?” about everything. The number of science books I got for Christmas was a bit overwhelming at times. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in science, it was just the sheer amount of the books. So, it shouldn’t have come to no surprise to my mom when I told her that I was no longer believing in Christ. I wonder why they still tell me things in context to their beliefs. I think they mean well, but it’s draining and depressing to hear them talk that way to me. It’s as if I never actually said anything to them at all. Needless to say, organized religion doesn’t hold a dear place in my heart. My mother is a minister of their faith so it was quite difficult to tell her how I felt about my feelings about my Christian experience and religion as a whole. Basically, I feel that organized religion is just organized hypocrisy. I never told her what I’ve experienced being a part of churches. Maybe if I did, or if I do, then she’d understand.

There was this one summer I went to summer camp at Mount Mariah Baptist Church. All the camp kids were out for recess, and I remember grabbing the jump rope. I thought I could try enhancing my jump roping skills. Then, a boy grabbing the basketball and then called me gay for doing so. I didn’t understand what it means to be gay, but I knew that being gay wasn’t welcome in our community. I remember asking a friend in the camp what gay meant. She told me something along the lines of “It means you want to have sex with boys”. This was not the last time something like this would happen to me. Not only in church, but at my school too. I remember one day I complained to my mom about the kids picking on me and calling me gay.

She looked me and asked me,

“Do you like girls?”

I shook my head up and down. Then She said,“You ain’t gay then.”

The truth was I answered “yes” because most of my friends at the camp were girls, not because I understood my attraction to those of the same or opposite sex as I. It’s important to note that during this time I also didn’t truly understand the concept of sex yet. I understood that sex was a way grown-ups showed each other that they loved each other, but I didn’t understand the physical process of completing the act. The concept of love is an ever-evolving one in my mind. Especially how it’s expressed.

I now think of love as more than just an emotion. One of the ways I attempt to express my love to others is to try my best to be 100% unapologetically myself to others. I haven’t fully accomplished this task, but I like to see it as a journey. One the steps on this journey is honesty. I’ll admit I haven’t always been as honest, so I try to be as honest as I can. I’m already more open to most when it comes to discussing my life. Although while I was in college my social self-developed into something completely different than my personal self. My social self would put on an act, so that way you think I’m happy and having a good time, but in reality, I’m probably over analyzing whatever situation in a negative context towards myself and or contemplating the meaning of my and humanity’s existence. Once I realized that the person who people saw was a construct of my own mind, I became more or less a recluse. I believe I became a recluse because I realized that I was being a hypocrite. I remember asking myself “how can I say I want to be open and honest while putting on a mask for friends and other people?”. I remember asking myself “why do I care what they think of me?” I now think this mask I wore was ultimately a way to protect my true self and emotions from the judgments and critiques of others. I did my schoolwork, homework, slept and repeat for the next 3 years of college.

During one of those years, I became friends with someone unexpected. I consider it an unexpected friendship due to the circumstances of our lives and the beginning of our friendship. Visually if you didn’t ask them, most likely you’d assume they were a young woman. They dress in all black most of the time, and they had a cool hairstyle that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. They were the most intriguing individual I had met at school at the time. I first formally met them freshman year on Halloween. After Halloween, we had this very interesting conversation one day. We were in the main building finishing up class. When in the context of conversation, they said that they found women with penises sexually attractive.

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“Absolutely, penises are just oversized clitorises anyway.” They replied. There was a pause afterward. I swear all the background noise of other students walking to class and conversating in the hallways just stopped. You could hear a pencil hit the carpeted floor.

“So, I’ve seen a few people around here who look like a certain gender, but say they’re not, is it wrong for me to think they are the gender they appear to be?”. They sighed and turned to look at me,

“Ultimately yes, it’s never right to assume someone’s gender based on what’s on the surface. It only causes the person who doesn’t identify with who they look on the outside, to feel dysphoric.”

This was one of the first conversations I’ve had with another person who actually felt similarly to the way I felt about our societies gender constructs. We continued to work on our projects together and give each other critique on our projects, and even started hanging out a bit more. They helped me learn more about the LGBTQIA+ community. However, it wasn’t until my partner started being open about their sexuality and their gender queerness did I start questioning my own sexuality and gender.

I never felt fully attached to one gender. In private I would act what people consider more feminine than most guys should act. In public, I acted more masculine in order to appease those around me. However, as far back as I can remember I never fully felt completely attached to either. Although it wasn’t until my senior year in college when I started to really understand this part of myself. I was having school financial issues, personal financial issues, family relationship issues, school issues, and friendship issues, and romantic relationship issues. I wanted to drop out of school and out of life constantly. Bad things kept happening, all while I was realizing that I didn’t fully understand myself. My outer self is still seen as male by most. I think it’s only because I have zero fashion sense, even though the clothes I do like and wear can be worn by both genders on the binary, it’s hard for other people to get past my “masculine” features.

I always kept to myself about for fear of being blessed out or cursed out, or worse, kicked out. “That’s what girls do”, “That’s what girls want”, “Be a man”, “Man up”. These phrases I never really understood. I always asked myself, “what does it mean to be a man?” “Why do I have to be a man?” “Why do my privates dictate how I should feel or act?” “Why can’t I just be myself?” Questions I’ve never had the courage to ask out loud to those around me.

My earliest memory of the start to my pansexuality and my journey being non-binary was when I was watching the national Geographic T.V. show called Taboo. The theme for this show was transgender individuals. I remember watching the show and my older cousin coming into the room, looking at the T.V. and asking me,

“Do you think they look good?”. He said pointing to the T.V. as a Singapore drag pageant was being shown. I said yes, and my cousin started laughing and said

“Those are men. You like men?”.

“No! No I don’t!”. I exclaimed.

He kept laughing harder and louder at me while I began to shout,

“NO! NO, I DON’T LIKE MEN”. Eventually, my auntie, whose house we were both living in at the time, walked by the room.

“What’s all that hollering?!” She asked. My older cousin with tears of laughter in his eyes simply stated,

“I asked Gee if he liked those women.” as he pointed to the T.V. My auntie replied,

“Those are men.” My older cousin busted out with laughter again and through the laughter, he uttered the words,

“I KNOW!”. Then continued to laugh as my auntie shook their head in my direction. I actually found them attractive, but I didn’t understand at the time why I did. All I knew was that it was a sin to find them attractive. I’ve had many random flashbacks to my childhood like this one in the context of my thoughts on my own identity. Memories forgotten, and then resurfaced after visiting a psychiatrist several times while in college. I slowly began to understand myself a bit more. I even became more interested in my personal psychology. The patterns of my life that either I can break or make. Patterns like honesty, love for one’s self, love for others, and a continuous education of myself. These are the patterns I’ve come to terms with within myself. I like being honest with others. I like when I feel love for myself. I like expressing my love for others in a positive way. Most importantly, I love educating myself about that which I do not understand, and others who do not understand me.

It took a long time for me to realize and accept that I identified with being pansexual and being non-binary. I’ve only come out to one person in my family. In times like these I like to remember what my mom would always tell me “Remember who you are. You are a son of God”. Although I never really felt like a son or daughter to my mother, I see the deeper meaning behind their statement. I’m not a literal “son of God”, but I am a product of nature and nurture. I recognize I cannot control every aspect in my life, but ultimately I decide my fate through the patterns I learn and the actions I take. For me, this is my own personal religion. Carl Sagan once said “We are all made up of the same star stuff” from the beginning of the universe. When I lie awake at night this thought comforts me as I contemplate the pattern of infinity.

#nonbinary #panseuxal #trans #genderqueer #LGBTQIA #Christianity #carl sagan #coming out #memoir #psychology #psychology of self #childhood #alexsolomon

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seekingheavenlymother-blog · 5 years

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While I no longer remember the exact words my house mate said to me on that day, I remember her fervor. As she sat perched on the edge of her bed, expressing her sadness that not everyone knew they had a loving Heavenly Father and a Savior who died for them, I thought of my Mother – the Heavenly Mother, so unknown and oft-ignored, yet so powerful and vitally important to my testimony. It was that testimony that had brought me to this point, serving as a missionary in Santiago, Chile. I had chosen to serve a mission for many reasons, but among them was my belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ as the most empowering, ennobling force for good in the world. A key element of its empowering nature is found in the belief that godliness and divinity is not only for men, but for all of God’s children, as reflected by the existence of Heavenly Parents. To leave out one of our Heavenly Parents is to lose one of the most beautiful truths the gospel contains – and yet, this omission occurs often.

It is hard to say at what precise moment I became aware of my Mother’s existence. It certainly did not occur in my Primary classes, where we learned about the all-male Godhead. It also did not come from my years in the youth program, where all the young women recited every week about their identity as daughters of a Heavenly Father. The only clue I have as to the beginnings of my awareness is a piece of wrinkled paper I found among my childhood things. On the paper is drawn a family tree. It lists my immediate family and extends off into other beloved relatives. At the top is listed, “Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, and Jesus.” In my rough, childhood handwriting, I found the beginnings of my testimony of my Mother. I remember that as a young child, I asked a relative about my Heavenly Mother and was told that she was too sacred to discuss. This standard, doctrinally incorrect response given to questioners who go seeking for traces of her was acceptable to my young mind. For years, my thoughts of her dimmed to a dull awareness in the back of my subconscious. I testified from the pulpit of the Father and the Son; I celebrated their plans for me as outlined in my patriarchal blessing. For a long time, I was happy without answers. I was complacently content.

It was when I was fourteen that my journey truly began in earnest. I did my Faith project for the Personal Progress program on the priesthood. I wanted to confront the controversial questions regarding women and the priesthood head-on, especially since gender issues had begun to appear in my life during my early adolescent years. I compiled a binder, overflowing with documents, that contained everything from scripture references to blog posts on the subject. I felt satisfied. At that time, I still did not recognize my hunger for Mother, but I had already begun my search. I had studied priesthood because I wanted to understand power, and in order to understand power, I needed to know its source. Therefore, questions regarding the priesthood, church policies, gender roles, and all other doctrinally-based discussions related to womanhood were all stepping stones in the journey.

At sixteen, I again became conscious of my questions while in the car with a friend whose husband had left the LDS Church. She did not know everything about our religion, but she knew a lot – and she definitely knew why her husband had left years before he married her. She never told me exactly why, but I came to understand that it had something to do with equality. She asked me questions about temples and gender, but I did not have answers for her. As I myself had not been endowed, I did not know what happened in sacred temple rituals or if any of the rumors she had told me were true. I was unsettled, uneasy, and concerned. Again, questions filled my mind about power and the worth of women.

At the age of seventeen, I was looking for answers to these questions when I found my Mother. She was tucked in the pages of a piece reconciling doctrines related to women and ideas of equality – it was a faithful feminist theology. Mother was an integral part of it, and I rejoiced. I came to see her as the counterpart to Father – which she literally is, of course. Rather than simply try to understand what power men had and why I did not have it, I began to think in terms of my own power as a woman and where it came from, as well as how it could be manifested. My journals filled with pages seeking for knowledge and explanations. I drew, I diagrammed, I outlined. More than anything, I was happy. I had a Mother and a Father, and they loved me.

It was at age eighteen that everything shifted once more. I had just started college, and I was seeking to find my path in the world. The experiences of new people and new places opened my mind to bigger problems than I had encountered at home. The answers that had once seemed satisfying were now inadequate. If women had a Mother and were empowered to become like her, where was the power and where was the Mother? I felt a physical ache that would not go away. I cried and prayed and pleaded. Were men destined to become gods, but women destined only to be priestesses and helpmates? Where were the answers?

As I look back now, I blush at my impatience. So many other questioners have spent years and lifetimes asking and suffering. Much of their work that was born out of their struggles was essential to me as I began my own search. After three weeks of nausea and confusion, I was blessed with a measure of peace. I say only a measure, because to come to the awareness of the Mother and then see how forgotten she is by her children, one is never fully at peace again. Nevertheless, this measure of peace did come, and it gave me the strength to push on. It did not bring me all the answers, but it strengthened my convictions enough to motivate me to search for them. Re-established firmly in my mind was the truth that equality is innate – men and women, my male counterparts and I, the Father and the Mother. The two halves must be equal, for everything has its balancing force. To weaken and degrade one half was to endanger the whole. Yet, now that I had my convictions firmly in place, the questions were even more pressing. If they were equal, why was she absent? Where was she? What had happened?

Just as I had done for my Faith project years before, I began to search. I found blog posts and poems and articles and artwork. At about this time, the Church published an essay about Heavenly Mother, and I rejoiced. I devoured it, I shared it, and I celebrated it, but I did not pause. I displayed quotes from church leaders on my dorm room door that gave evidence of her existence. I shared copies of the essay with every woman in my hall. I began to include the words “Heavenly Parents” in every single testimony I bore from the pulpit. I continued my search for her as I prepared to serve a mission. As I boarded the plane to the Mexico City Missionary Training Center, I carried a copy of the Heavenly Mother essay in my luggage. For me, it was more than just a reminder of her existence; it was also a reminder of who I was, what I could become, and the testimony I had that motivated me to serve.

It was in the early part of my mission in Santiago, Chile that I sat and listened to that eager house mate, so anxious to tell the world of her Father and Elder Brother, but so wholly apathetic to the presence of her Mother. Her testimony, though beautiful, grated against my heart, reminding me of the absence of my divine counterpart. Though I had found her, it seemed that few others were even searching.

It was months later that my companion, the young missionary I was training, bluntly and loudly told me that Heavenly Mother was important, but Heavenly Father was God. Eve was subject to Adam, women were subject to their husbands, and that was the way things were. Her proclamations were so bold, so disturbing, and so deeply painful. It was so odd to hear such an empowered, fiery young woman declare with resolve her subordinated status, both here on earth and in the eternities. No matter what I said, she would not hear me, would not listen, would not feel what I felt. She made it clear that she had no interest; she was convinced that there was nothing to be known about our Mother. The reaction I received from her was the most painful rejection of my mission – far more heart-wrenching than any door slammed in my face.

Despite this painful experience, I persevered in my journey. I continued to keep copies of the Church essay with me, as it was the only Church approved resource about Her that I could find. I had copies of it in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. I was ready to present it to any fellow missionary that showed the least bit of interest in knowing their Mother. Eventually, I was inspired to share knowledge of Heavenly Mother with a few members as well – most of whom were converts and had never even heard of her before. As I did so, I kept reminding myself: “if not now, when? If not me, who?” How else would they come to know their Mother if I did not share? Most of my experiences were overwhelmingly positive. While a few members showed disinterest, most responded with joy, happiness, and surprise that they had not learned of her before. It seemed to them that knowledge of her was important and inspiring.

At about this time, the Church produced a new missionary pamphlet about families and temples. The opening paragraph talked all about our Heavenly Parents. It was the first missionary resource outside of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” to even acknowledge her existence. It was a valuable tool for me in my efforts to spread knowledge of her. I quoted the opening paragraph in a Church talk, and I used it for my spiritual thought after meals with members. I gave copies of the pamphlet whenever I could and urged members to study it with their families. While I still spent most of my days testifying of only the Father and the Son, the moments of my mission when I spoke of my Mother are the ones that changed me the most.

After eighteen months of service, I completed my mission. The year that followed was filled with more searching, questioning, and learning. More books had been published, filled with poetry and light and love for the Mother, since I had last been home. I eagerly tore through the pages, finding others who, like me, had felt her absence and longed for her presence. As I sought for direction about how to continue with my life, I realized that I wanted my search for my Heavenly Mother to be a central part of it. I wanted to help others who questioned their power and worth as women to come to know her. More than anything, I wanted to discover why she had gone missing from our collective memory and testimony as a Church, and thereby find a way to restore her to her rightful place in our religious understanding.

Almost exactly a year after my return home from my mission, I agreed to do an interview with a student researcher on Latter-day Saint cultural beliefs about Heavenly Mother. It was in that interview that I came to an incredible realization. As I explained to her my way of connecting to Heavenly Mother, a phrase fell out of my mouth that took me by surprise. “For me, research is a form of worship.” As I heard myself say the words, they rang true. Heavenly Mother is not explicitly mentioned in any official ordinance, any frequent practice, any corner of our temples, any page of our canonical scriptures, or any element of our normal, everyday experience as Church members (outside of an occasional reference to Heavenly Parents). However, my act of seeking for her in each of these places and in the voices of other disciples had become my act of worship and adoration. Research – the act of seeking information, recording it, analyzing it, and searching for more – had become a habit to me when it came to my Heavenly Mother. I never stopped searching, seeking, or asking. I never let a setback stop me. I had come to know of my Mother, and I would never let her go.

As I reflect back on my house mate who so boldly proclaimed her love for the Father and the Son and her desire to serve a mission to share her knowledge of them, I now feel a bit of gratitude along with my pain. I too love the Father and the Son and seek to share my knowledge of them. That was part of the reason I chose to serve a mission for eighteen months. I recognize in myself the same feeling she had – but for me, it is not only for the Father and the Son. It is for the Mother, too.

Though I no longer wear a name tag, have no official mantle, and have been given no formal call to serve by my Church, I find myself once again on a mission. This is a mission for my Heavenly Mother. I bear her image, I carry her spiritual DNA, and I have the potential to one day become like her. I am her daughter, she is my Mother, and this is my lifelong calling. While I will also spend my life proclaiming the truth about my Heavenly Father and my elder brother Jesus Christ, I recognize that in those missions I am joined by the millions. In the mission for my Mother, those of us who serve are far and few between. Yet, we are persistent. We believe that by questioning, we have received answers; by searching, we have become enlightened. Now that we have been given the gift of knowing, we cannot – we will not – turn away.

The doctrine of the gospel of Jesus Christ is indeed powerful, transformative, and uplifting. It is for everyone, always. There are no exceptions to the plan of God – it is for all. However, I have come to know that we cannot harness its full power unless we include our Mother in our doctrinal consideration. Learning to live like our Heavenly Parents requires coming to know both of them. The pathway may not seem obvious – Heavenly Mother is not found in manuals or Church magazines. However, it is in taking the unseen path that we learn to rely upon the Spirit. It is in following the questions of our heart and soul that we find what our true mission in this life may be. In my searching, I found not only my Mother, but also myself. I learned why I am here, at this moment and in this time.

I have been called to serve by Her. Her truth, Her existence, and Her love I will proclaim.

#journey of faith #kayla bach #lds #mormon #the church of jesus christ of latter day saints #tumblrstake #heavenly parents #heavenly mother #seeking heavenly mother

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apostateangela · 5 years

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The Family You Choose- Part One

The FAMILY You CHOOSE!

Recently I went to see DC’s movie Shazam!

And it made me think and feel many things...

You might be asking yourself,

“Is this how it’s always going to be?”

I’m asking myself something similar,

“How many posts are going to connect to the movies you see Angela?”

The answer is, “Who cares how many, if it helps me to write?”

I’ve missed a week or three-ish because I haven’t been able to pick what to write about next. There are many things happening around and inside me right now.

And so many things that have already happened.

And that night, while watching Shazam!

...there it was before me,

This post is about family.

Before I add my Shazam! Spoilers, as always, it is important to establish the baseline of how family has been defined for me.

Mormons have large families. The average number of children in a Mormon family is 5-6 with many families consisting of 8-12. Yes, you read that right, 8-12 small people you are responsible to support and raise. This is not history, but current reality. I myself have only two brothers.

But that is because my mother has type 1 diabetes and was told by her doctors not to have ANY children.

She had three and each pregnancy and birth threatened her life.

We were miracles.

She wanted twelve.

I have four children, small by Mormon standards.

And just to give you a sense of timeline, by the time I was 28 I’d had 5 pregnancies, one of which was an ectopic and four of which resulted in live children--all relatively healthy adults now.

It can be said that ‘family’ is one of the most important things/themes for LDS members.

It is a well defined and deep paradigm.

There is even an official church document titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” which outlines the very traditional and patriarchal structure of Mormon families.

For example:

1.Two heterosexual married parents; in fact it is not only a commandment to get married but to have children.

We, The First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children…. The First Commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife. We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force. We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

2. Mother and Father, man and woman have gender identified roles; in fact gender and their subsequent roles are divinely defined and created by God.

All Human Beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose….

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children…. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.

Let me translate:

Heterosexual marriage, only.

Two defined genders, unchangeable.

Set gender roles with the man presiding (sets all the rules) and providing (as the sole breadwinner).

The woman has babies and stays home to nurture and take care of them.

Only in the case of disability, death, or some other drastic circumstances is the woman allowed to work, and really only after extended family support has been solicited.

This equates to quite literally keeping the woman barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen

(unless she needs to clean the rest of the rooms in the house).

This document was released in 1995 and has not been modified since. It is something the Church subscribes to today. Most Mormon homes have an embellished copy of this document framed and hanging on the walls of their homes. I did, for 25 years.

Let me make something clear, I am not saying that a household with two committed parents working together for the welfare of their children is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I wish it for all children. But the delineation of a singular acceptable structure for that endeavor causes problems for those of us who do not fit into the cookie cutter.

As I child, I benefited from a mother who DID fit into the cookie cutter. A woman who made my brothers and I her entire world. Who used her incredible homemaking skills to take the money my father made (working two jobs and farming on the side, absent in almost every way) to create a home centered around her children and Jesus Christ.

As a woman, she taught me how to be like her; I can cook, bake (7 kinds of homemade bread from scratch) clean, garden, preserve food, raise farm animals, butcher meat, sew, embroidery, crochet, iron, play the piano, arrange flowers, and craft a thousand different ways--to say nothing of my mothering skills.

So when I married at nineteen, I tried to fit. I made my home and family in that cookie cutter, its edges skinning pieces from me for fifteen years. As my children grew and were old enough to be in school all day, I started to take steps outside the mold, fighting my husband and my culture to hold a job, attend classes at a junior college, and find my own way. It took another ten long years to get a bachelor degree that should have taken me three. Had I not done so, my life would be incredibly more difficult that it is now.

I have said this before. I will say it now, again. I love my children. I am glad I am a mother--even though all motherhood is bittersweet.

Forgive this digression, this post is less about how I was oppressed as a woman in this structure and more about the meaning of family for me and how it has changed. But the reference to Mormon doctrine and reminder of my past is important to establish the understanding that while I wanted to further my personal development (feeling guilty for every step I took in that quest), I ultimately did as the church taught with my whole heart. I poured myself into my family and believed I was creating something that was lasting and eternal. The biggest catch phrase of the Mormons is “Families are Forever”. That is also something I had hanging in variations of crafty attraction in my home: painted, crocheted, embroidered, photographed, and always framed.

The sealing of a man and woman together that is performed in the temple as part of a temple marriage also binds those children born into the covenant of that marriage to those parents for all of eternity.

(To be continued)

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firstjustgoin · 7 years

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Going Down

3. Start with the shit going down. An event you’ve never witnessed. A moment in history that you wish you could have. A mystery that was never solved.

Her father’s health had been steadily declining for months now –– in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices where he had been met with the thin-lipped mouths of professionals who saw people like him every day, wide-eyed and vacillating between disbelief and despair –– and so when Candace called her, her voice low and mournful, to get on the next plane and fly home, Tessa did so without needing to ask why.

She usually flew at the holidays when the halls of JFK or Laguardia or Newark, whichever airport had the cheapest flights, roiled with agitated parents dressed in faux cheer, willing even to push their own children out of the way in order to make their 6:00pm to Orlando. She hated airports for this reason and as chubby people in red and green sweaters squeezed by her on the moving walkway, she always imagined their planes falling swiftly from the sky as penance.

But it was early November and she breathed a deep sigh of relief when she arrived at Laguardia and saw that there was room to move without elbowing people like you’re digging yourself out of a trench. She bought a pack of unsalted peanuts and a Diet Coke and settled into a corner chair by her gate trying to block out the frantic sounds from the TV. She had a theory that CNN only really existed within the universe of the airport and it was all just a huge collective hallucination everywhere else, but here it was almost maddening.

The president-elect stood at a podium wearing a red hat that screamed Make America Great Again. She still could not believe it; millions of people had voted for this moron, this misogynist, this bigot. Just two days ago she had met up with some friends at a bar in Brooklyn to watch the election results roll in. They drank whiskey sodas and progressively ate more and more fries as it dawned on them, this always possibility never probability, was real.

“Tell me something that will make me feel better,” Tessa whispered to her friend, clutching at the edge of the table until her knuckles popped white.

“I can’t,” her friend said back, and she knew in that moment that it was over. The unfiltered joy she had felt voting for the first female president just 12 hours earlier, how powerful and in control she exuded as she walked into her office that morning. Gone. The whiskey went straight to her head, now throbbing, and her whole body shivered at the shock.

Tessa trudged around the city the next day, mourning alongside millions of others doing the same. She loved the camaraderie in sadness that existed in New York City in those hours and days afterwards, knowing that everyone was spinning in circles too, their flags at half-mast.

But now she had to go home to Wisconsin. A state she abhorred, filled with overweight, undereducated people who clung to their conservative ideals with as much loyalty as their God. Just imagining the church service she would have to attend this Sunday made her stomach turn in disgust. Thank you oh Lord for blessing us with this man, for helping so many see the light of truth and righteousness. As if God, if he did exist, would go within several hundred miles of the White House once the president-elect moved in.

Tessa thought about calling Candace from the terminal a dozen times to wriggle her way out of coming home, but then she remembered her last visit around Christmas the year prior and how it ended. Her father had just been diagnosed and saw imminent death as a clarion call for an onslaught of his favorite brand of straight talk.

“You know, now that I’m going to die,” He said with a chuckle as he carved the turkey and Candace quietly sobbed and snotted into her napkin, “I think it’s time to finally buy that rifle I’ve been eyeing over at Jack’s. There’s no use in saving up that money for time that’s never going to come.”

Tessa rolled her eyes, always immune to her father’s self pity that had lived like a fourth family member in their house almost her whole life. Candace cornered her in the kitchen later that night as she was washing the dishes. “We’ve got to do something about Dad,” she whispered through gritted teeth. “This is literally the worst thing that’s ever happened and you’re not doing anything.”

“Literally, it’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened, Candy.” Tessa knew that her sister hated when she called her Candy almost as much as when Tessa projected her New York City sensibility on her. “The shit that’s been happening in San Bernardino a few weeks ago, now that’s the worst thing. Fourteen people dead. We’ve got a gun crisis on our hands and we’re all just sitting around pretending that owning assault rifles is some kind of American birthright.”

“Fuck, Tessa, can’t you just stop spewing this New York Times shit at me for one minute and focus on your own fucking family?” This made Tessa pause. Candace never swore. She had talked like a kindergarten teacher for as long as Tessa could remember. Just shy of three years older than Tessa, she always carried herself like the de facto mother neither of them could remember.

“Fine, fine. I’ll try to do something.” But both Candace and Tessa knew that she wouldn’t. She had moved all the way out to New York because she knew it was a place that neither of them would ever visit her. Candace had sent her a letter a few months into living in Brooklyn that just read, Looked your apartment up on Google Maps. God, Tessa, I don’t know how you do it. Don’t get hurt. Love, C. She lived in Fort Greene, for Christ’s sake. But there were some battles that just weren’t worth fighting; it seemed like she was battling on all sides these days.

Tessa had tried calling and checking in on her Dad, she really had. But as the humid spring gave way to a viscous summer and convention season began, she just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t listen to him laugh alongside Trump as he mocked a family of a fallen soldier or echo the stump speeches and one-liners he soaked up from hours of watching Fox News. Even as his words began to slur and memory faded, after Candace would call her in thick, obnoxious tears pleading for her to come home, Tessa found ways to avoid making that flight. “It just isn’t the right time. Things are crazy right now,” she would tell her sister before hanging up the phone and heading out to smoke weed and shoot picklebacks at a rooftop bar.

So she did not call to cancel now, much as she wanted to. Instead, she read Ta-Nehisi Coates on the flight and blasted Lemonade and stuffed dry peanuts in her mouth to prepare herself for the world she was landing into, a world where she knew that most of the people she had grown up with wouldn’t bat an eyelash if suddenly all of the water fountains and bathrooms and schools in town were Whites Only.

***

Early November in northern Wisconsin is a cruel time of year. When she landed in Milwaukee and drove her rental car forty-five minutes up to West Bend, the clouds hung low and gray in the sky like they were holding their breath for winter too. A steely wind slapped against the car as she drove and she found herself having to actively stop herself from turning the car around and flying back to the safety of her bodegas and beer gardens and discerning podcast listeners.

When new friends asked her where she was from she would give away information begrudgingly in small morsels: the midwest, near Chicago, Milwaukee-area, and, if she was unlucky enough to talk to a fellow Wisconsinite, finally West Bend. Sometimes she lied and said Madison so she could joke about it being an island amidst a sea of crazy but she had visited just once and could only wax poetic about the farmer’s market for so long before she was discovered.

On select occasions a look of recognition crept slowly on the listener’s face. “Wait, wait, I’ve heard of West Bend. Why does it sound so familiar.” Tessa would sit there, knowing full well what their brain was searching for, but unwilling to say it aloud. “Oh wait, yeah, I remember! Y’all were the people who sued your own library for having books with gay characters, yeah? With that church that wanted money for it being so ‘disturbing’, right?”

She would nod slightly, averting their eye contact, and pretending she could hear someone call her name from across the bar. “Uh, yeah,” she would say and then run away. She hated being associated even in passing reference to such ardent stupidity and she got a B.A. in Political Science from an expensive private liberal arts school in the Northeast as a defiant push against it.

When she arrived in West Bend, she saw with dismay that the red and blue TRUMP/PENCE signs littering almost every lawn had survived the recent sleet storms. Some were as large as the front doors behind them, waving arrogant and proud in the icy wind. It made her sick to think how many joyous celebrations were still taking place inside these lower middle class split levels; men drinking beers and watching the Packers while the women giggled from the kitchen, living comfortably in their gender roles.

Candace hated when she made these sweeping generalizations. “What good was that pricey college degree if it just taught you to hate everyone you grew up with? Everyone who loves you?” She had asked once when Tessa was home from her first semester. Like Candace contributed a cent to that college fund, she practically strong armed their father into not paying for any of it either.

“It’s not us that hate everyone,” Tessa spat back. “We just don’t tolerate people who perpetuate white supremacy and systemic oppression.”

Candace sighed. “You learn all these big words that teach you to hate your own people. But when you’re in trouble, who’s going to take you in? Your black friends in the Bronx or wherever or your own family?”

That conversation rattled within Tessa for years afterwards, following her like a specter of a past and identity she could not shake. She couldn’t quite pinpoint why she had been able to escape those narrow mindsets her sister and father and classmates had all embraced so easily. But now that she knew everything that she knew, it was impossible to go back –– both intellectually but also physically, to enter the home that she had grown up safe and happy and healthy with anything but a thick layer of disdain.

***

She pulled into the driveway just as the last of the dull light faded in the sky. She could see the yellow lights from the kitchen window and a shadow of her sister, heavy-set and scrambling, and the flickering whites and blues of the television from the other room, likely with her father reclined and mumbling. She turned off the engine and closed her eyes, bracing herself before her entrance, not knowing whether she would be more saddened by the hundreds of pill bottles cluttering every counter and tabletop or the Make America Great Again poster hanging in the dining room. For a second, a flash of shame filled her like an electric shock; could she ever feel real pain for her dying father if she couldn’t let go of her pulsing contempt? At this moment, sitting alone in the driveway where he had taught her to ride a bike and lifted her up off the concrete every time she fell, she did not know.

Her father’s cancer had been slow but ruthless, crawling through and licking every surface it touched like an encroaching wildfire. When Candace first called her over a year ago, Tessa had been in bed with a boy she had met at a bar down the street. Frank, perhaps, or maybe Francisco, she couldn’t remember. He had spent twenty minutes going down on her and she didn’t stop him although his tongue flitted in and out of her aggressively like it was blindly trying to find the exit. She finally had coaxed him out of her vagina when the phone rang and her sister’s straight-toothed smile flashed on her screen. Moment over. She pulled up her panties and answered while Frank/Francisco heaved to the side of her bed.

“Yeah, Candace can I call you back?”

“T-Tess––” Then a cascade of sniffles. “Tessa. You’ve got to come home. Dad, he’s––” Another cascade, this time punctured by heavy sobs.

“God dammit, Candace. What? What’s up with dad?”

“He’s got,” Candace’s voice dropped to a whisper, “he’s got cancer, Tessa. In his bones. He’s got what the doctor’s are calling Osteosarcoma and he’s not going to get better.”

A ring had begun in Tessa’s left ear, a baritone hum that grew and echoed. Soon, it reverberated through the right ear too until Tessa let her head drop to her pillow and eyes pull shut.

“Uh, are you okay?” The boy whose tongue had been inside her just seconds ago pressed his finger to her arm tentatively. “Should I, um, go now?”

Tessa could not remember what she said to him, could not remember how or when he left, but the next time she opened her eyes, she was alone in her room, her mouth dry and eyelids crusted at the edges. She saw six missed calls from Candace and one from her father. She called him.

“Daddy?”

“Hey baby.” Tessa had spent the better part of her late teens and twenties distancing herself emotionally and physically from her father. She dyed her inherited blonde hair a dark umber and ran ten miles a day to outpace her father’s genetically poor metabolism; she policed her Wisconsin accent with its long a’s and o’s and dontcha knows, sliding into the neutral tones of transplants all over New York. But it took just those two words to catapult her back into her childhood home, sitting on the couch squeezed between her father and sister watching old Law & Order reruns.

“Daddy, I’m so –– I don’t know what to say. How are you feeling?”

“Well, I been better, sweetheart. But you know Candace, she’s got me set up with everything I’d need, like we’re going down into a bunker or something. I told her, ‘the doc said I gotta year to live, no need to treat me like infirm already.” He laughed quietly and fell silent. Tessa didn’t know what to say. She stared at the wall across from her bed, Gloria Steinem holding a sign that read “We Shall Overcome” stared back.

“Are you getting chemo? What are you going to do?” She felt like a puppy dog clawing at the toes of their owner, desperate for a resolution to their anguish they did not understand.

“I’m not sure, honey. I spent this whole day at the hospital squirming with Obamacare welfare junkies and whatnot. Not sure there’s much else those doctors can do for me. They got me on a whole cocktail of drugs, don’t worry, I’m going to be as loopy as the kids you hang out with in Brooklyn every day.”

“Okay, dad. I’m going to come home soon okay? I’ll see when I can get some time off of work and then I’ll fly out and we’ll figure it all out. I’ll be there before you know it.”

That was September, just as New York’s air had begun to deflate into a cool, short Fall. She didn’t go home until the end of December and by then, there wasn’t anything much left to figure out. Her father was dying and there wasn’t anything to be done.

Almost a year had passed since that last visit and now she sat in the driveway of her childhood home and practiced breathing exercises she had learned at Vinyasa Yoga classes.

Breathe in with the whole body and out. The tips of her fingers trembled in the cold. She walked up to her door and considered knocking for a second before twisting the handle. The house was cleaner than she had been expecting, teeming with the smell of lysol and simmering garlic tomatoes. She knew that smell well: a staple of her youth. Before it had been uncool, her friends loved coming over to her house for dinner: her father’s thick, creamy pasta sauces –– garlicky and herbaceous. He loved to cook for a crowd, sent her to school with plastic tupperware packed with last night’s feast enough to share with her whole lunch table. She was embarrassed by the assertiveness of the aromas –– how they overtook the room of Lunchables and peanut butter sandwiches –– but she slurped up each noodle anyways, loving how it warmed every inch of her mouth, throat, and stomach as she swallowed.

She turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Candace at the stove, slowly stirring the sauce as it splattered across the counter and up her forearms. She flinched and then saw Tessa.

“You’re here. Thank god. I was beginning to worry the food might get cold waiting on you.” Candace threw a roll of paper towels at her. “Now wash off all that plane grime and we’ll sit down to eat in a sec. Dad’s in the living room.” She jerked her head towards the other room as if Tessa might have forgotten where that was in only the year since she had been home.

“‘Kay. Nice to see you again,” Tessa said, waiting for her sister’s begrudging nod and smile before continuing to the living room.

“Daddy?” Tessa peered through the door into the dark room, the only light throbbing from the television screen. House Hunters played on mute. “Daddy, I’m going to turn on the lights okay?” She flipped on the lights and almost screamed at the sight of the room now illuminated. In the year since she had been home the living room had transformed from a clichéd, frilly, TV den with embroidered bible quotes on throw pillows and clean glass surfaces to a makeshift hospice. She could barely see her father embraced by a deep recliner and swallowed by wires attached to monitors and tubes attached to hanging bags. The floor was littered with old pill bottles, just as she had expected, but also with napkins stained with dried up blood and gray clumps of hair.

When she finally got a full view of her father, she had to do a double take. All of her life, her father had been an intimidating man –– scaring off prom dates and trick-or-treaters with his wide shoulders and thick gut. She had known that it would be bad; Candace had warned her –– “It’s metastatic, that means the cancer’s eaten out his bones and now has started eating other things too. His lungs, his throat…” She had trailed off then, or maybe Tessa had stopped listening. Either way, nothing could have prepared her for seeing her father look like the carved out inside of a man –– wearing the remains of his bones and veins and decaying muscles on the outside of his body.

She kneeled next to him and grabbed his hand. She hadn’t realized before that he was sleeping. “It’s me, Tessa. I’m here.”

He opened his eyes and parted his cracked lips into a half-smile. “Hi honey. You here for Thanksgiving already?”

“No, Daddy, it’s not quite Thanksgiving yet. I’m here just to visit you.”

Her father let out a gruff laugh, somewhere between a wheeze and a chuckle. “Oh dammit, don’t tell me I’m dying already. I was just dreaming I was golfing in Mexico again and I really thought I was going to do it this time.” Tessa rolled her eyes. How could a man that looked like an alternate reality version of her father still be so unmistakably him?

“You hungry? Candace made your special pasta.”

His mouth turned downward as he scrunched up his nose. “Not that filth again.” He lowered his voice to somewhere even below a whisper, “Don’t tell your sister this, honey, but she’s a terrible cook. I haven’t eaten in weeks.”

“Dad!” Tessa tapped his hand lightly. “You’ve gotta eat. No wonder you’re looking like the first guy on the food chain.”

He smiled. “That’s my girl. Good to have you home. Now bring out some noodles, no sauce and I’ll see if I can work some magic.”

She returned to the kitchen. Candace was scrubbing the pans in the sink vigorously, muttering a string of curse words under her breath.

“So, do you usually eat in the living room with him?” Tessa asked.

“Some days. Honestly, Tess, it’s been next level depressing to stay in there all the time with him. He won’t eat and I hate cooking, you know that. Sometimes I’ll just get so tired I’ll just take a plate up to my room and watch TV instead. You haven’t been here so you don’t ––” Tessa sensed Candace winding up for one of her soliloquies, so she walked over to her sister and rubbed her shoulder.

“You’re right. I haven’t been here. But I’m here now. Whatever I can do to help, I will.”

***

It didn’t take more than two days at home for Tessa to begin falling into a deep pit of equal parts fury and despair. It was bad enough that Candace had convinced herself that she must be her father’s nursemaid, attending to his every need with an exacting level of care that drove both Tessa and her father up a wall.

They would be sitting in the living room watching another rerun of Law and Order: True Crime, nearly bordering on a nice moment, when Candace would jump out of her chair with the inertia of an electric shock and run to the kitchen to find whatever pill their father had to take, all the while mumbling, “I can’t believe I almost forgot. I can’t believe it. If I had forgotten, who knows what could have happened. How could I forget?”

The stress Candace placed upon herself rippled out to poison them all. Every time an alarm went off on Candace’s phone, Tessa watched her father twitch and scrunch up his eyes in a kind of pain she had never before witnessed from him. He was a man transformed from the one she had known growing up. He had been a heavy, sharp presence in her life. The kind of man to yell at his children in restaurants for spilling their juice, to push them into playing team sports even if all they wanted to do was chase butterflies through the soccer field, to demand longform birth certificates from their boyfriends.

Tessa had spent enough time unpacking her father’s mind games during overpriced armchair therapy sessions in wide-windowed offices on the Upper West Side to know how this had affected her upbringing. Ladies with round glasses and high-waisted khakis would say cookie-cutter phrases like, “It sounds like you still harbor a lot of resentment about your father,” and Tessa would laugh all the way to the bar.

When she told Candace that she was seeing a therapist, her sister’s voice had dropped to whisper. “Don’t tell dad,” she said, “You know he thinks therapy is a liberal conspiracy.”

She did and she loved telling her therapists about her father’s conspiracy theories, as if the only reason she paid $200 a session was to give them a well-rounded character arc. Sometimes, although she would never give her sister or father the satisfaction of knowing this, she wondered if therapy was indeed some kind of machination on the part of a government that wanted to fill its people with an unending supply of self-doubt. She bought it in bulk from Whole Foods alongside the kale smoothies that would also likely give her father a conniption.

Now that her father’s sharpness had melted along with his beer belly and thick jowl, revealing a softer, calmer man, Tessa thought that maybe she wouldn’t have to have the conversation with him that she dreaded the most. She had been home for nearly three days, with just passing mentions and references made to the recent political shift in the country, before they stumbled upon it head-on and must as she attempted to pivot away, it was too late.

They had just finished up lunch –– tuna fish for her, mashed potatoes for him –– when he looked up at her with his shrunken face and asked, “So how is your snowflake island dealing with the latest reality check?” For a man with nearly no muscle on his body, he sure didn’t pull his punches. This was the father she had slyly avoided for the last nine years; the man who demanded a recount at her elementary school class president elections when the girl who campaigned on building a compost heap won, the man who created a facebook page just to share articles he found on Conservative Daily.

She thought about saying nothing, biting the insides of her cheeks until they burned like she had so many times in her childhood. Unlike when he would say things like this over the phone, she could not just roll her eyes and make up a quick excuse to hang up. She had to say something.

“Well, we’re not doing so great, dad,” she said, her eyes bouncing across every surface in the living room to avoid her father’s eye contact. “I’ve never seen so many people cry in public than on November 9th. On the bus, in the streets, waiting in line at the pharmacy. People think their lives are in danger.”

He sighed and shook his head. If he had been the man he once was, he might have raised his voice, but he couldn’t anymore. He could only mumble. “Danger from what? The only people who are in danger are those who don’t deserve to be here anyways. I honestly don’t understand why you can’t get that. It’s like you’re pretending that the first eighteen years of your life never happened. Like nothing I said mattered at all.”

Tessa knew she shouldn’t be shocked anymore by the things her father said. Nothing should shock her, and yet. “No, I don’t even want to have this conversation with you. How is it up to you to decide who deserves to be here or not? Why do we deserve to be here just because we’re white?”

“White! This fucking liberal arts education I shelled out for really did a number on you, Tessa. Paid $200,000 for you to hate yourself and your own family. This has nothing to do with being white and you know that.”

There was no arguing with a brick wall –– this was the logic she had used to squirm and sidestep her way out of confrontation with her dear, dying father for the last year. He was a brick wall, now cemented even further in righteousness due to the victory of his belief systems personified.“I can’t, anymore,” she said and held her hands up and walked away.

***

Her father didn’t die, at least not right away, like Candace thought he would. He lived from day to day, breath to breath. In the early mornings when frost crept like spidery fingers across the window panes, Tessa would wake up and touch his shoulder lightly, half-expecting him not to open his eyes. But he kept living –– angrier and more hollow every day.

A month into being back at home, Tessa spent most of the interminable hours of the afternoon when Candace was at work and her dad slept scrolling through flights and trains and rental cars she never booked. The longer she stayed, the more her feet sunk in the quicksand of her childhood home. She knew she’d suffocate soon, but she couldn’t get herself to move.

Headlines pierced the vortex of everyday life: CIA concludes with 'high confidence' Russia tried 'to help Trump get elected'; Trump chooses fossil fuel industry ally to head EPA; Trump attends 'heroes and villains' costume party as himself. Outside of the vortex, the world churned.

After he could not keep down his lunch, she wiped the vomit off her dad’s chin. When he fell off his chair trying to get the TV remote, she picked his bones back up, horrified at how easy they were to lift. As she walked by the living room one day, she pretended that she could not hear his brittle, aching sobs. It didn’t take four weeks for her to come to wish that she wanted him to die. And she soothed her own aching sobs by assuring herself that he likely wanted to die too.

Candace, meanwhile, was quickly unraveling in her own way. She had stopped doing the dishes and keeping the rest of the house clean, so soon the maelstrom of the living room infected every other room too. Although she only worked four hour shifts these days at Kohl’s on Main St., she wouldn’t come home until well after dinner –– usually plain noodles, rice, or cereal these days –– and arrive with her hair matted and eyes darting, making up lazy excuses about a broken exhaust pipe or customer service emergency. Tessa thought that perhaps this was Candace’s way of exacting revenge for not being there all those months of spoonfeeding and doctor’s visits and chemotherapy.

One thing was certain: each of them were completely alone. Her father –– empty, dying, boorish eyes in the body of a house of cards, falling but not fast enough to the end. Her sister –– one knot atop another, bloody fingertips, a mind meandering off the ledge. And Tessa –– the one who finally came home and stayed, but still every morning awoke with a jolt to notice that she was back in her childhood bedroom. The world spun on while they spun out.“You know I love you, right?” Her father said one day as they sat, for hours in silence, watching the wind thump against the branches of the bare willow tree in the front yard.

She pondered that for a moment. Maybe she hadn’t known. “Yes, of course, daddy,” she said instead, reaching out to pat his hand, pulsing with thick, purple veins. “And I love you too.”

He smiled and put his hand over hers and they sat there in silence once more for another two hours.

A week later her father was dead.

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