I’ve known granny was evil for a couple years — the interesting thing about her, recently rising to the surface in a kind of epiphany, is structure.

My dad moved to HarCo for two reasons:

1) To escape the black people of Baltimore, where he grew up.
2) To escape his mother by completely isolating himself an hour drive away, but for some reason, still fulfilling his expectations as her son only with one hell of a commute.

My therapist strongly believes he has Aspergers, which would explain a lot of his inappropriate reactions to things and his dogmatic binding to hierarchy.

I had transgressed against the matriarch – and it would be up to me, and me alone to learn to live with it.

No participation trophies where he was sending me 🏆

I think my heartbreak lay in my expectation that love on an individual level would supersede that of traditional power structures.

My mom was the only one who had the emotional nuance to understand or care about my estrangement, but she was so isolated in Harford County that she had zero power in any decisions.

My mom was my best friend. The only person who cared if I was happy or well.

But she was also the only person in my family that had less gravity, less power, than me.

****

*Possibly an unfair diagnosis, as my therapist has never met my father. For the moment, this framework and understanding of him helps me navigate the trauma he causes.

Thinking of him on these terms:
-helps me leverage my expectations of his emotional capacity, so I don’t break my own heart over and over
-lessens the pain, as the only other alternative is that he categorically hates the immutable fact that is me