dear mom (re: your email)

---- lori stockwell <*******@gmail.com> wrote:
> ps I am still thankful you are in my life and I am more than willing to
> discuss your trials and try to find a way to support you in and thru them,
> help you problem solve or just be.  But no matter how much I love you, I
> cant be someone's batting practice. I have to be treated with respect....
> and 15 calls only to attack my character & faith and misinterpret/misapply
> previous conversation or events  is not respectful. It promotes
> confrontation or adversity. So, I will not respond to all of your
> accusations.

Those 15 calls were not batting practice, they were honesty. You showed me honesty in our long conversation on thanksgiving even when that honesty was irrational and hurtful. I felt invited to make that mutual.

I was not attacking your character and faith. I was specifically attacking your faith. Because you use it to excuse insulting statements and justify harmful priorities. You regard your own personal worldview as more valid than the challenges your children face, and that mindset being religious doesn't make it any less selfish.

---- lori stockwell <*******@gmail.com> wrote:
> I made every attempt to be supportive in our conversation: asking you how
> long you felt this way, how you came to your ideas, to  help me understand
> and then how I can support you.  I stayed without opinion & expressed my
> concerns for the challenges you will face. It’s difficult to hear you twist
> things & retract all expressions of loving-kindness & respect for me; but
> more sad to witness you decide to respond with blaming and berating and
> withholding love.

If you were truly attempting to be supportive you would have shown that you accepted me, focused the conversation on what I'm feeling (instead of spending hours explaining how *you* feel), and also asked what you could do to help reaffirm and encourage me. That's what the other people I'm close to did. Naturally. Even my dad, an occasionally stubborn and misguided asshole, had no trouble following those points. Because that's what loving-kindness and respect are. If it seems like I'm withholding that loving-kindness and respect from you it's only because when I do it's a one way street. As for how you did attempt to "support" me, your narcissistic idea of how to do that was provoking and amplifying the doubts that I was already struggling to fight. I expressed that so many different ways to you. If you were trying to understand you should have been listening.

You claim you "stayed without opinion and expressed your concerns for the challenges I will face." Your very wording of that proves it wrong - if you were concerned for me and not yourself you would recognize that I am trying to solve a challenge I have already faced, for a long time. The concerns you expressed were about the possibility of me addressing what I face and improving it. As if it wasn't enough for you to consistently pressure me with societal norms and your disgusting attempt to guess what "God's plan" is - even admitting yourself it wasn't based in the Bible - you went on to insinuate something that could not possibly be without opinion. You worried that the problems I have because of family trauma would not only impact my GENDER IDENTITY somehow, but also render me incapable of making a decision about it. I come to you because I'm figuring out how to make decisions for myself and you respond by using the shitty childhood THAT YOU HELPED CREATE to try and suggest that I still can't make decisions for myself?! That goes far beyond failing to "stay without opinion." That is manipulative undermining garbage. After all these years we face the same problem: you make mistakes, blame me, and then insult my frame of mind to try and stay in control. That is why I bring up you calling me a coward for being with my family within days of my brother's funeral. Because for me that isn't dredging up some distant memory. That's the memory I always turn to when you manage to strangle me with my insecurities again and again - because it's the clearest memory I have (and with witness remembering it just as well) where you proved just how far you are willing to go in abandoning what love and respect you have in order to maintain the world in your mind. The more you bring out my insecurities the more that remains the only memory I even have of you that I'm certain about.

---- lori stockwell <*******@gmail.com> wrote:
> But these are your choices to make; you choose what
> thoughts to receive/feed or deny & how & when to act on them.  I won't even
> try to defend against the things you are telling yourself. and, I wont be
> an excuse for anyone's unacceptable behavior, indecision or poor ones.

You can't "but what about" me here. Yes, I left 15 voicemails. Yes, it was excessive. But at least I'm accountable for every damn word I said in those voicemails. They came out of my mouth, and those thoughts belong to me and me alone. You use an undefinable idea of what god wants in order to condemn something you don't like about your child, while being okay with almost dying a continent away from them. In our conversation you had 4-5 hours to focus on me. You were focused on yourself. This is about you now.

And you're right, I'm not exactly being the most loving or kind. But I'm emotionally vulnerable, and I'm hurting, and I'm not going to blame myself alone for the wounds in our relationship that I've had since I was a fucking child. This is between you and me. And I keep giving you chances to try and help these wounds heal. But you don't want to work to heal them. You say whatever you want and then you end all your letters with all the ways you're praying for god to fix everything. That's why I spent years never responding to them. Listen to yourself:

>  I will continue to pray for God's direction on your journey;  that you
> accept responsibility for yourself and find something productive to focus
> on and take an active role in pursuing that.

(That's.. what I was doing..?)

> I am praying that you move out of this pain, that you focus on what you can
> do to get healthier and that we connect soon.

God isn't a proxy, and you don't get to feel good about yourself by asking god to support people when you fail to. There are a lot of problems in this world that you could be praying for, but when you ask god to reconnect relationships and heal the pain that you caused - you're avoiding responsibility for the problems that are really yours.

Coward.