It’s not all doom and gloom with the Kuhns.
It took a while, but I realized my brother Chris has always been my silent sympathizer — his crime being remaining silent when I needed him to say something so badly.
And mom — I’ve also come to understand the only people with less power than gay men in Trump’s America are women. She told me wanted to move to be closer to me and her brother’s family in Baltimore.
But she couldn’t because of my dad.
He wanted to move to Colorado, buy a pickup truck, and pretend to be a cowboy.
His crimes against his community, his son, are unending and never to be acknowledged.
Sure, he had offered me one of the apartments he owned and leased out in Baltimore when I needed to escape Frederick on a dime.
But he started punishing me when I stood up to my grandmother by becoming a negligent, abusive landlord. Dictating the terms on which my mom could see me.
Giving the car he gifted me for my college graduation, my only asset, to my brother the same day I was laid off from NASA and found out they were moving to Denver to be with Chris behind my back simultaneously.
(My mom, realizing the reality of a parting impression, gave me her car before moving to Denver, at cost to her, as remediation for my dad’s cruel gesture.)
But the good thing about using the nuclear options in a war, is that they’re left with nothing once the dust clears and the survivors get back to their feet.
My brother just had a daughter, whom he and his wife, much to my Dad’s rage, refuse to get baptized. My mom doesn’t care; she’s just so ecstatic to have another girl in the family. Kev and I, too.
Larry has lots of ideas of what women should be able to do and how she should be raised. And he can howl all he wants about it. No matter what, though, now, in the container that is his own family, he hasn’t a single ally.
So, it is here one could notice that, while some allegiances die, wither, change, others are being created —
and I’m personally starting to see how beautiful that is.
#Lent #KuhnFamilyTraitor #MaleTraitor #ContainThem
Dusty Bookshelves 