Category: The Future

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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Well.  A book that might just explain everything.

A friend recently discovered it, and recommended it to me.  I showed it to my therapist, who wasn’t familiar with it, even though it’s been out for almost 10 years.

If I indulge my most cynical thoughts, I’d say it isn’t more widely known because it’s clear there are an awful lot of people it applies to, and they spend a lot of money trying to soothe themselves with just about everything:  substance abuse, religion, material possessions, other people.

More likely, it’s because the people who could use this info to become healthier, happier people — or at least, people who inflict less damage on other people — end up not being self-reflective people, which is the first requirement for change of any kind.

I would implore the next generation of this fucked-up family to at least give this book a try.  I no longer believe there’s the possibility to heal my generation, but I do believe the next one can be happier.  And I would always wish that for them.

The audiobook is on Libby, with no limits on borrowing at my library.  There are some exercises available as a free pdf file as well.

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Yes I have cancer. No the outlook is not good. Here’s what I want.

Yesterday I got a text from my oldest brother.  (The first text ever, actually.)

At first I assumed someone had died, and he was letting me know.  Turns out, they found out that I have metastatic triple negative breast cancer.  I’ve chosen to keep it from them for almost two years, for several reasons, and it turns out that was the right decision.

He said the way they found out was “almost totally random” but it was actually pretty deliberate.  Brother #3’s second wife, whom I have never met, apparently did a search for me and found me on Facebook, where there was a public post I wrote about it last summer, when a few high school people that I wasn’t FB friends with were pinging me, because I guess the news had gotten around among them.  I got a few really nice messages from some of them, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with each of them, so I just wrote a public post.  I assumed no relatives were looking for me any more (and I was right:  my actual siblings aren’t looking for me.  A stranger was, because a complete stranger cares more about finding out about me than any of my siblings).

I interpret what my brother meant by “random” here is something like, “we weren’t expecting her to find out something like this, where we might have to do something.”

His use of “random” to describe this could also suggest that the wife “doesn’t know the history”, to quote that long-ago revealing statement from Brother #2.  In other words, she doesn’t know that I’m not supposed to be treated like an actual family member.  I wonder just how that unwritten rule is going to be explained to her.

My brother started off using a very old childhood nickname, which was oddly touching.  I now wonder if that was a deliberate way to fake closeness or induce me to be more open, as he hasn’t used that name for me literally in decades.  And the rest of the conversation was fairly formal.

And with a little hindsight, I now see that it was indeed, as could have been predicted, all about him/them.

He didn’t ask how I was.  He didn’t ask what he could do for me, or us.  He didn’t even ask exactly what I have, or what my prognosis might be (although that information might have come from the FB post, but he said he hasn’t been on FB for years, so I doubt it).

He did ask, oddly, if he should ask what last name I’m using now.  I still don’t know what that was about. **  Do they think that my husband of 26 years would now leave me in sickness?  In fact he has been fantastically loving & supportive through everything.

(He reacted to this contact with far more anger than I had, over what they’ve done to me, which is a sign of love:

“Look, just so we’re clear,” he says, “if somebody asks something or says something about my sister that I don’t like, understand that I will break a bottle over their head.” Few words express love clearer than these.)

** ETA:  I probably figured it out.  Due to issues with FB Biz Manager, I had to close down my original account and start a new one, around April 2021. I christened that one “Morgan McDonald” so I could keep the two accounts straight, and then over a few months, I migrated friends from one to the other.  Once I had everyone transferred, I deleted the old one, and changed the name on the new one back to my real name.

BUT — if they are aware of “Morgan McDonald”, that means they’ve been spying on my account for at least a year and a half, and probably longer than that.  Way to “respect my privacy”, assholes.

If this is what they are doing, I’m pretty sure they spin it to themselves and each other  as, “We’re just being good people, looking out for our pathetic sister.”

They just canNOT stand that someone utterly rejects them, and especially someone they see as “lesser”.

Knowing that I’ve been dealing with this for almost 2 years, my brother made an offer for me to come and stay with them if I wanted different medical care.  Lymphoma was mentioned as a local specialty — which is not what I have.

What I have is quite aggressive:  it’s at the far end of the charts on every measure there is.  In fact, I initially had 2 kinds of carcinoma:  both HER2+ and triple negative.  I’m on my seventh therapy in total, including radiation and surgery:  I had chemo & immunotherapy for the HER2+, which looks like it did not metastasize; and chemo, immunotherapy and now another chemo for the triple negative, which did.

If I hadn’t been getting stellar medical care for the past 2 years, I’d probably be dead already.  As it is, a Residual Cancer Burden of III after surgery predicts:

    • 10-year recurrence/death rate = 40% for HER2+ BC
    • 10-year recurrence/death rate = 75% for triple-negative BC

And I’ve already had the recurrence.

Not great odds.

Anyway, it’s clear to me in retrospect that the offer wasn’t meant to be actually useful.  Once I explained that I am not in want of adequate medical care, the tone of the convo became that of someone who wants to end it as soon as possible.  I believe this texting was his way of “doing something” so he can stave off guilt and feel like he did something.  And he can report that back to everyone else, who can then say, “well she says she doesn’t need any help” and that’s that.  Go back to uselessly praying to that same god who GAVE me the cancer, if that’s what you believe in.  And keep pretending to yourself that you care about me, all the while maintaining your long-held beliefs & anger at me for things that were not my fault.

I’m willing to bet a decent amount of money that a few of them are actually glad I might soon be gone for good.

In other words, even though now they know I have aggressive cancer and am likely to die far too soon — I don’t believe they will change a thing.

Because that’s far more comfortable.  It’s easier.  And it’s especially a better option than facing up to the possibility that MY FAMILY gave me this cancer.

I can hear the eye-rolling from here, but it’s a scientific fact:  “The more Adverse Childhood Events a person experiences (such as …neglect…[or] Having a family member attempt or die by suicide [or] …Growing up in a family with mental health… problems), the more likely they are to suffer from cancer…”

From the University of Chicago:

“Local chemical signals released by fat cells in the mammary gland appear to provide a crucial link between exposure to unrelenting social stressors early in life and to the subsequent development of breast cancer”

There’s not much else that can explain how I went from a healthy 52YO who routinely got mistaken for being 10 years younger, to having a super-aggressive, treatment-resistant form of breast cancer.  I don’t smoke, I don’t drink to excess, I’m not overweight, I eat relatively healthily.  I have no other health issues.  I got all my preventive care checkups. I have no genetic markers.

Early studies explored ways that children who faced adversity such as… neglect at home were at higher lifelong risk for a range of problems including cancer…
…chronic, toxic stress in childhood can affect a person over the course of their life… the trauma of having one or both parents die does impact breast density, risk for breast cancer, and risk for especially aggressive types of breast cancer.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that having your mother disappear for a month at a time, twice, during your first year could have a similar effect on an infant as if she had died.

I’ve given up on any possibility that I might get what I actually want (apologies, respect, acceptance, love — in other words, CHANGE) from my siblings.  And now that they know about the cancer, anything they might do will more probably be out of self-preservation from guilt, and not because they love me, miss me, or care about me.

But – in the unlikely event that anyone actually wants to do something useful for me, here’s the only thing I’m asking for now:

I want to know EXACTLY what happened to me.

I want to know what Mom did that night that made Dad pack Mom off to the doctor, and made the doctor immediately pack her off to the hospital for a month, keeping her away from her infant daughter.  I want to know why & what happened the second time she was hospitalized, too.  I want to know about Mom’s medical history, any actual records, and anything known about her mental health, or why she received electroshock therapy.  I want to know everything my sister knows, because I suspect that’s at least part of what made her try to commit suicide that year.  I want to know what they themselves did to me, or didn’t do for me, when they were put in charge of me and the younger boys.  I want to know how long I sat around in wet diapers and had such horrible diaper rash, and why 40 years later the same brother threw at me the words, “WE CHANGED YOUR DIAPERS”.

I’ve been trying to get any information I could for years.  I had to trick them into giving me a good chunk of what I do know, but they put a one-hour time limit on that one discussion session, and I’m certain there’s more.  And I have a right to my own goddamned history.

Here are the terms I will offer:  any information I get will be kept confidential.  I won’t blog about it, and I won’t rat out anyone who tells me anything to the rest of the family.  I was able to keep knowledge of my cancer from everyone for 2 years, and they only found out by accident — so that proves I can keep that promise.

My time is limited, and there’s a decent chance it’s because of what happened to me as an infant and a child.  Now that they know about the cancer, I’m asking – one last time – for the one thing I can only get from them.  My sister is likely to get what she’s always wanted:  a world without my existence in it.  So the way I see it, it’s only fair that I also get what I want before I’m dead:  and I want the truth.

I hope someone finally has the courage to give me at least part of what I want.  I know no one has the courage to love me in spite of dictates from my sister, and probably Susan — but I have a little hope that someone will have the guts & the decency to finally give me information.

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“You’re not that good”

Adapted from Seth Godin

“You’re not that good”

This is what I’ve always heard from most of the people I’m related to.

“…once we start to build skills and offer something of value, some people are going to persist in believing that we’re not that good. Fine. They’ve told us something about themselves and what they want and need. This is a clue to offer our leadership and contribution to someone else, someone who gets what we’re doing and wants it. The smallest viable audience isn’t a compromise, it’s a path forward. Find the folks who are enrolled and open and eager. Serve them instead…

“The danger is that when you hear rejection during this stage, you might come to believe that you’ve accomplished nothing, as opposed to realizing that you might simply be talking to the wrong people…

“And then we get better.”

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More Validation

From this recent article on family estrangement. All the things I experienced, and all the conditions I put on any kind of reconciliation — all in one neat, brief little package.

“To heal or to prevent broken ties requires similar types of effort. Given what we know about why adult children walk away—namely: lack of acknowledgment about a past hurt or trauma, lack of acceptance, and toxic behaviors like judgment and control—we can try to reverse-engineer these behaviors by doing the opposite:   Acknowledge and apologize for past hurts and traumas. Even if you were not the person that directly inflicted the trauma, sometimes your denial of someone else’s wrongdoing is just as painful. Or it’s possible that you don’t think you’ve inflicted trauma, but your loved one sees it that way… denial of what the other person feels deeply to be true is a sure way to build the estrangement wall higher. A simple acknowledgment of their experience, without being defensive, can bring the most powerful catharsis.   Accept the person just as they are. Nobody is perfect, and most of us are far from it. There are also lots of reasonable disagreements between reasonable people about the right and wrong ways to live. So, between all this ambiguity and human frailty,

Ask yourself: What do I want more—for this person to conform to my standards, or for this person to be in my life?

[Guess I have the answer to THAT one.]

Make your best efforts to demonstrate that you’re willing to listen and learn, even if you can’t completely change your worldview overnight.   Change behaviors that your loved one finds toxic. … be open and non-defensive if your loved one tells you that your behavior hurt them… show that you’re open to change, because opportunities for reconciliation don’t last forever.

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No Tears Tonight


There’ll be no tears tonight
Slowly the shadows fall away in time
Now I know no future dreams
The things I have today are fine
And as I stumble through
I find that I can choose
And lose the things I’m not afraid to lose

Hold your hour
Live today and let the past go free they said
Try again and I will do the best I can today instead
And as I stumble through
I find that I can choose
And lose the things I’m not afraid to lose

We move in circles as we go
With nothing to guide us but our souls
And we keep on looking for something that we must have
Lost two thousand years ago

There’ll be no tears tonight
Slowly the shadows fall away in time
Now I know that we who fell from grace
Will find a way to shine
And as I stumble through
I find that I can choose
And lose the things I’m not afraid to lose

We move in circles as we go
With nothing to guide us but our souls
And we keep on looking for something that we must have
Lost two thousand years ago

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Journaling

Some more evidence that this blog was the right thing to do.

“It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action.”

Labeling emotions and acknowledging traumatic events — both natural outcomes of journaling — have a known positive effect on people, Dr. Pennebaker said, and are often incorporated into traditional talk therapy.

At the same time, writing is fundamentally an organizational system. Keeping a journal, according to Dr. Pennebaker, helps to organize an event in our mind, and make sense of trauma. When we do that, our working memory improves, since our brains are freed from the enormously taxing job of processing that experience, and we sleep better.

This in turn improves our immune system and our moods; we go to work feeling refreshed, perform better and socialize more. “There’s no single magic moment,” Dr. Pennebaker said. “But we know it works.”

On the other hand, Dr. Pennebaker’s research has found that journaling about traumatic or disturbing experiences specifically has the most measurable impact on our overall well-being.

In his landmark 1988 study, outlined in his book “Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotion,” students were randomly assigned to write about either traumatic experiences or superficial topics for four days in a row. Six weeks after the writing sessions, those that had delved into traumatic experiences reported more positive moods and fewer illnesses than those writing about everyday experiences.

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Family Estrangement

I’ve been coming across lots of pertinent things lately.  These are some interesting notes from this article that a friend sent to me about family estrangement.

“For me, as for most people, it took an exchange so toxic, so far outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable, that something snapped inside me.

“…my only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. Much, much earlier.

“The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. We see and feel the supremacy of the genetically connected family in a thousand ways throughout childhood. By the time we’re adults it literally goes without saying…

“For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. When — as Ann Landers once wrote — you’re better off without the other person in your life.

“I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.

“More than three-quarters of the participants in one study felt estrangement had made a positive difference in their lives. One woman I talked to who initiated an estrangement said her main feeling was relief, even liberation. Another told me it was as though she’d lived under a cloak of silence that had suddenly been lifted. A third said, “There really are cases where estrangement is the better course. It’s horrific, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s better than the alternative.”

“It’s also a lot more common than you might think…The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child…

Fascinating side notes from this paper: some suggestion that the lack of a loving relationship between my mother and me was far outside the norm, and probably caused or at least exacerbated by factors outside my control.

  • the mother–daughter tie has generally been found to be the closest, most enduring, and mutually supportive of all parent–child gender combinations.
  • mothers report being most emotionally close to last-born children.
  • parent–child relations tend to be more stable when both parents are present
  • maternal depression has been shown to interfere with parent–child relationships
  • mothers who have a larger number of children may be more likely to have an estranged child simply because the risk of having a child become estranged is greater as the size of the group increases.

“…and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum, a term coined by Scharp, one of the few researchers who studies the phenomenon…“I find that people are just more or less estranged.”

Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations.

In my case, what I did was put words to a situation that already existed, and eventually I escalated and formalized the estrangement when they refused to deal with it or even admit it.

I forced them to make a choice, and admit to an unpleasant reality:
Prove to me that I’m really a member of this family. Listen to me and defend me against this unacceptable behavior — the way you defend everyone else who’s really included in this group — or not.

Clearly, they chose not to.

They literally could not do otherwise.  They could not show me respect, love, or support against an in-law’s disrespectful behavior, and then a brother’s.
Not even the level you might extend to a stranger.  To them, I am less worthy of those things than a stranger.

It was far easier to judge me, instead of judging one of their own.
Instead they chose to scapegoat me again, to say it was my fault for putting the choice out there — when it was the actions of others against me that brought it out in the open — and then my fault for no longer accepting my scapegoat role.

What makes my situation different from those described here, though, is that I didn’t choose the estrangement.  I was estranged by them from the very beginning.  Thus the difficulty I had, the pain and the loss I dealt with, in grappling with the fact that I wasn’t a “member of the tribe”, and never had been.

What I am guilty of is wanting a family, wanting my birthright — when that “family” made it clear so many times and so many little ways over so many years, such that when the big thing happened, I was supposed to have known better than to even ask.

“In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family. They worry that if you can estrange yourself, maybe their parents/children/siblings could do that to them. Estrangement seems to threaten the primal order of things and opens the door to a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about…

“Imagine for a moment that these people have good reasons” to be estranged, says Scharp.”

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Hindsight

Happy 2019. Do less work on being friends with people who are doing zero work on being good to you.

Captain Awkward

I recently ran across this post online and found it surprisingly validating. While the whole thing has parallels to The Susan Incident, this paragraph really caught my attention:

“You are not overreacting, and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK [Susan] for this behavior and fuck family members for enabling it by acting like your reactions to bad stuff [are out of line].”

All I could think was, wow, I wish I’d had this advice and the ability to respond like this 6+ years ago. For example, I wish I’d been able to say this:

Hey, I don’t want this to be forever, but until I can trust that this won’t ever happen again, until I trust that y’all understand how serious this is, and until y’all stop treating me like I’m the one doing something wrong, this is how it’s going to be.” 

“Until you get a real apology and whatever else you need to put this behind you, as long as other family members keep pressuring you on her behalf, Keep. Naming. What. She. Did.”

(Well, I kind of did do that, after I found out that Joe & Susan lied about it all to everyone else. It’s just that no one wanted to listen.)

For her: “Susan, do you understand why I am mad? It’s not just for having a conversation. It’s because when I simply asked you to go elsewhere to have it, and it was clear that it was upsetting to me, you refused to do that one thing. It’s ’cause you could have said you were sorry but you didn’t. It’s ’cause you raged at me when I brought it up to Joe. It’s because you both lied about that rage attack to everyone else, and told them it was all my fault, that I picked that fight. It’s because your fauxpology came with a side of blame, like me being pissed off and upset about this is “overreacting”.” 

For other family members: “She stood there laughing and chatting with the hospice nurse, while I was trying to cope with my beloved father’s death. When I politely asked them to take their conversation somewhere else, she refused to do so and continued her behavior. The next day she flew into a rage, literally yelling in my face when I tried to talk to Joe about it. They both lied to everyone else about who started that fight. When I got understandably upset, they tried to blame me for “overreacting”.

If you want to work on someone about this, go talk to Susan about her behaviors instead of trying to police my feelings.” 

For everyone/both: “You want me to come back and visit, and put this all behind us? I’d like that, too, someday, so, show me that I can trust this won’t happen again by taking the time it did happen seriously. Show me that you’ve learned from this.

At minimum, going forward, you can’t continue to treat me like the problem person all the time. You can’t treat my opinions or feelings or life choices as though they are WRONG or inconvenient for you or a sign that I’m irrational.

You don’t have to agree with me or understand it in order to do it. Not negotiable. ” 

Not that it would have made any difference to the outcome — I highly doubt anyone would have listened any more than they did(n’t).

I just wish *I* had had the ability, the groundedness to see it that clearly, and communicate it that succinctly. I wish I’d realized sooner that I had spent my whole life fighting a losing battle whose outcome had been decided probably even before I was born. I wish I’d been able to understand that that boundary was needed — even though these people were supposed to be my “family” — and to set it a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time, pain, and work.

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Glad to Be Out of It

If you’d told me, back in that horrible year of 2012-13, that in less than five years, I’d be positively GLAD to be shed of my siblings — I’d have said you were nuts.

But, the American political landscape being what it has been since 2016 or so — I really am.  I’m super-glad I haven’t had the experiences of many of my friends, who can’t spend time on Facebook any more, or dread going to family events, because they can’t stand to see people they love and care about spouting conservative ugliness, and they know if THEY dare to speak up, it will become a fight (and they will probably be seen as the ones who started it).

It’s something I’ve continually wondered about, why conservatives automatically assume they get to say whatever they feel like saying, while opposing viewpoints are not even suffered to be spoken aloud – as was my experience in that group of siblings and which came blurting out of my mouth in a moment of truth in one of my first therapy sessions (“Oh, I can have [my own opinions], I just can’t say them out loud.”).

For a while I thought it was because they tend to assume they are in the right because they are the historical default, as well as they tend to believe they have God on their side. But that didn’t explain why they have to be so loud, and usually angry, about it.

Now I tend to think it’s not really anger but more that they are afraid:  afraid that if they allow another opinion to be heard, it could be a disaster for them and their stolid mindset.  It could require a lot of work to overcome the cognitive dissonance that will occur if it turns out that the other guy has a decent, logical argument – which progressives usually do, because that’s how we form our positions – and they can’t form an equally coherent argument back.

Reading this from Bertrand Russell cemented that for me. If you get angry, it’s because you are aware that you don’t have a sound basis for your opinion.

I’m glad I found George Lakoff ‘s book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” when I did, and read down the lists of the “strict father” and “nurturing parent” families — even though it was a shock to see it all laid out so neatly in two short lists, my siblings in the left column and me in the right.

What it boils down to is, I’m glad I got it over with prior to the American political shitshow of the past 2+ years, because if I hadn’t done it then, I would sure as hell have done it sometime after Chump’s election, probably in a fight — and then I would have worried that I was doing it for the wrong reasons.

But the divisiveness in the culture is real, just like the divide in my FOO is real.  There are two lists in the book, two ways to look at life, two ways to approach anything new or different:  one is with interest and curiosity, one is with fear.  You can say either yes or no.  It’s that simple (at the same time being as complicated as human beings can be).

I know a lot of conservatives like to say that “Obama divided the country!”  Not true:  Obama’s ELECTION divided the country.  Obama, or more accurately his election to POTUS, was the catalyst, but he didn’t do the dividing.  People divided themselves onto one side or the other, all their own choice and doing.  People decided they were against Obama, rather than deciding they were Americans.  And the crucial point here is, they did it for a NOT GOOD REASON.  They did it for the color of his skin.

I choose to divide myself from Chump’s “Great Again” America for a lot of really good reasons. Racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, what is in someone else’s pants or what they choose to do with their body — I don’t have the time or energy for that kind of judginess, especially when it’s aimed at me and my gender half the time.

I always want to say to conservatives, Hey, why not just TRY it?  Try spending a day NOT being automatically, knee-jerk critical of everyone you see who looks different, or speaks differently.  At the end of the day, I guarantee you’ll be a lot less angry and have more energy.  Minding your own business is a huge time- and anger-saver.

Caveat:  however, you may then have to spend some time figuring out what you are REALLY angry about, and that may take some work.  But you should still do it, because otherwise you are just transmitting your pain to others, and that’s not fair or healthy.

In fact, that choice to not be automatically critical was — ha ha — critical in my own awakening:  the day in 2008 that I got a link from my FIL to a website that was “funny pictures of cats with captions” was a turning point in my personal growth, and key to my future happiness.

I clicked the link, I spent a little time reading things, and I came very VERY close to turning my nose up, writing some nasty comment about how stupid this all was, and flouncing off in a superior huff.

I am eternally grateful that I did not.  Because on that site is where I started to figure out that my so-called family wasn’t really very nice to me — and it was because these people WERE nice to me.

I wrote a lot more about it here, but the short version is, I still remember how I was reluctant to post on there that my husband and I were going to New Zealand.  It was his first earned sabbatical from his job, and we had planned a huge 3-week trip.  No one in my family cared about it, of course.

And when I did finally post about it — because there were people from NZ that I wanted to meet if I could — I was expecting a fair amount of “Oh, sure, nice for some people” and “It’s dangerous to meet people from the internet!” and so on.  Because of course, that’s what I would get from my siblings.

What I got instead – to my delighted surprise – was interest, excitement, encouragement, and exhortations to “post pictures, please!”

In contrast, at the next reunion, we lugged along the laptop which had all our pictures on it from the trip.  Not one person expressed any interest in seeing them, nor asked anything about the trip.  NOT ONE.  We mentioned it ourselves a couple of times, but no one cared.  We made bids and got nothing.

And that was how I started to realize that the people who were supposed to “love” me were actually not all that nice to me.  Which started me asking why, and led to the horrible 2012 reunion, and so on and so forth.

It’s been a tough road, but I am glad I went down it then, and did the work, and transformed the pain.  I’m glad I am where I am today, confident in my opinions and beliefs and values, because they have been built on that work and are a solid foundation.

My Twitter bio says, “Spent 60% of my life to date as an angry conservative and 40% as a happy progressive . It’s so much better on this side of the fence.”

Speaking of speaking:  I am certain that some siblings are beside themselves in horror at Beto O’Rourke saying, “I’m so fucking proud of you!” to his campaign people last night, in a moment of overwhelming emotion.

I’m reminded of the time I sent an email to my oldest brother about the Susan Incident.  I pointed out the unfairness in how Susan’s thoughtless behavior was excused away because “Susan was very upset at Dad’s death”.  Yet my supposedly unseemly behavior was not given the same benefit, and I wrote, “What the fuck was I, do you suppose?”

Said brother’s reply focused almost exclusively on my use of the word “fuck”.

I now realize that was indicative of an inability to deal with the problem — specifically, an inability to deal with emotion, especially strong emotion — and more specifically, a complete inability to deal with strong and appropriate anger coming from a WOMAN who happens to be his “little sister” – and who also happens to be FUCKING RIGHT about what she is angry about.

And I’ll take “fucking proud” over racist, sexist, exclusionary bullshit any day of the fucking year.

Oh, and he also remembered to include us atheists.  Love it.