Welcome to September!
In May I faced down the one year anniversary of my mother’s death and also what would have been her 92 birthday. I tried to reconnect with one of my sisters and her oldest kid when they came to Vancouver in early May and it didn’t go badly. It didn’t go the way I hoped, either. My wishes for our mother’s birthday did not go the way I asked or wanted it to go. I felt disappointed and a bit dejected. I learned that not every broken familial connection needs fixing, especially if both sides of the connection do not want the same kind of connecting, or any at all. So I stop trying so hard to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Forgotten. Love means letting people go. And so I did that. I let go and never looked back. What would be the point of a forced connection?
I tried very hard to love the other humans my mother made with a man who is not my dad, a task that challenged me severely and searingly throughout my life. My siblings were not able to love me back the way I wanted or needed as a child, they hated me. I was like Joseph of the Old Testament. I felt sorry for many years that I existed because it seemed a sore point to my siblings. I only wanted acceptance and never received it. My mother always wanted me even when I was angry at her and that was enough for my whole life. I did not grow up with siblings and yet I have 5 of them. Two are dead now. I am an only child with siblings. I feel close and connected to one of 3 living siblings, the one who reminds me the most of mum. I don’t know how Diane feels about the projections she has had to receive in her life because she is mum’s double. She is a lot like mum and looks like her in appearance and she is not our mother, she is a wise old crone who is my older sister who looks like our mother. She was punished as a child for her strong resemblance to our mother.
As a child, for Diane, being around abusive adults who hated our mother, it meant abuse and torment. Jealous women can seem particularly cruel to children in their care. My sister has come a remarkably stunning way since her 20s, when I first laid eyes on her. She was 9 when mum had to leave suddenly. When I met her I was 10 and I remember this vivacious bolus of powerful energy, rage and bitterness. Diane had a lot to transform and she blew everyone away. Mum was incredibly proud of her. We all are. She is stellar, like a star, in many ways to me. She is triumph for all the young women who are struggling to overcome abuse—she did it with her own grit and self belief. She is practical, down to earth and joyful.
I thought I didn’t like Diane for many years. I told myself that I struggled to like her. Sometimes very strong magnets repel one another and I feel like that happened with Diane — we are most like mum of all 6 children I think. I tried really hard to understand her and the other two living siblings because it was important to mum. Mother loved her very much and so I also had to love her even if I had a sibling resentment to grind. Eventually the resentment dissipated because love is always louder, it just takes time to travel to its target. The love I have for my sisters is not anything I decided or chose, it just is — as though I was brewed to love them. When I was gestating mum was in deep grieving for my sisters, that stuff crosses the placental barrier. I felt her grief and anguish as she did. I felt her heart break from the inside, I wonder if it sounded like anything to my foetal self. No other child of my mother had that in utero experience of intense craving and grief for her other children. Only I did.
What does that mean? It means love is a state of physiologic being.
The beauty of mum’s end of life is that she had her lost/stolen daughters with her, managing her care and looking after her. It seemed to me to be appropriate for the three of them to have what they never did in their adult lives — a connection without me or my dad interfering. I had her my whole life, in a way no other did. The least I could do is have the grace to let her have the death she needed — with my sisters who missed out on so much because jealousy and hatred drove people to rupture that attachment between them. I missed Mum a lot and I let her go to the children she chose to die with, not me, she did not choose me and that hurt and it’s okay now. Then something happened after mum died. I could see and feel and think what mum must have. When mum died it felt like she was returned to me, like she was put back into me, somehow. In my grief she was and is near, like she is talking to me, like we did during our marathon phone calls.
So, in death my mother comforted me and helped me see beyond my own visual path. I attribute the changes in me to that experience with her death. And I have come to a resolution about my siblings. Every human, really. Who wants, wants. Who does not, does not. I chase no one, I beg no one. I love who reciprocates and participates in the relationship. I release those who ghost, who do not engage. Not everyone wants to connect and so then I will honour that and turn my attention to the human connection that engages and reciprocates. I release those who treat me like a trough to drink from and not a human connection. I release. I release. I release.
I released a lot. It hurt a lot. I compete with my yesterday Self and no one else.
I am not in your cult, whatever that is. I am not tribal. Tribes want to buy me and I am not a social connection prostitute any more, I am not so desperate that I will settle for anything mediocre and false. I have value even if few see it right now. I do not want to be in your circle or club if I need to give up my candour and values to play with you, whomever you are, or if I will be the topic in my absence. I love myself too much to prostitute myself to anyone who seems remotely available to socially connect and who does not have the self respect to refrain from gossip. Just because we agree on some key things, does not a friendship or social connection make. I don’t need a sorority, I need a foundation and maybe just a soft landing spot. The social death I suffered when my marriage ended and the dark times struck us left a cruel indelible mark. I never regained what I lost socially or professionally and, being attachment oriented, did not have a big friend pool. I turned to cocaine for comfort because my husband morphed from a loving man to a wounded man who wanted to destroy me and eventually tried to kill me.
When you are a cocaine fiend your social circle is an ass, not much better than than guy who rapes you in your sleep, kills your cat out of jealousy, manipulates you into moving heavy furniture on the day you get home from a 7 day admission with bacterial pneumonia, and tries to choke you when you are bold and defiant, leaving a physical mark on your body. Your cocaine friends will steal your sh1t when you aren’t looking, no one in the drug scene cares unless you are getting high together in the moment.
And so here I am, living in a word where people fear one another, where people constantly decide they are leaving and where people decide this one and that one cannot sit at their table. I am taking my marbles and leaving. You can’t sit at our table. Nazi .. Groomer … Pedo … Kafir … Harm … Mutilate … all loaded words chosen for their dramatic effect, all words that atrophy the mirror pathways in our social brain that help us understand and connect with others. Through our chosen antagonism we teach our brains the opposite of empathy and understanding — essentialising that leads to dehumanisation. And yet, we somehow expect to change the world and fix all the broken things in Canada without committing to ourselves, individually and collectively.
I am so damned sad about Canada. I feel so alone and I also know that I am not because others feel this too and I just don’t see them or feel them, only know they are there. Objects in the dark I cannot see. I do believe. I do have hope and look for joy in the mundane and even the bleak. I fear and maybe that is grief, which C. S. Lewis says feels like fear. I miss so much my mother, the way things were before dad got sick and yet I am a different person than those times and I am here now and now feels alright. Robert and I made a decade together in July. I love now. Now is beautiful. Now is love. Now is Robert. I wish my mother had met him, that’s a wistful bit. Ambivalent describes me, perhaps. Ambivalence does not mean bad. It means conflicted. It means seeking balance between two powerful valences.
What do I see now in the GenderWang Warrior World? I see loaded language. I see deliberately incendiary language—verbal molotov cocktails lobbed in strategic offense for maximum impact, like landmines, only ones that explode in your face on contact, not when you step on them. I see a war being waged, a socially vicious + cruel one. War creates casualty. It creates trauma. It invokes the currency of rape. Pillaging happens. War is about dominance and power. War solves nothing, it creates suffering. The GenderWang Warriors will not put down their flaming guns and their loaded arrows coated with poisoned-tipped words. The GenderWang Warriors refuse to relinquish their deliberately offensive and socially destructive approach to collaborate and problem solve. This war now defines the existence of many prominent GenderWang Opposition influencers, whose entire individual personas each revolve around hating GenderWang and not much else of substance.
I remember being a suffering parent — I was an insufferable ass when I was a suffering parent, amygdala driving the bus, angry, unreasonable, filled with hate and vitriol and bitterness. The human brain cannot engage problem solving and collaboration in this kind of survival mode. The human brain does not want to take advice from anyone in this state. I remember being that person. Parenting is difficult and can feel really painful. I started to see familiar reactions in parents who lost their kids to GenderWang — things that reminded me of my own experience with losing my youngest son, of my own mother’s experience being alienation from my sisters by her abusers.
At the same time, deep + intense grief for mum set in. Unrelenting, a barrage of flashes of stories and memories flooded back into my neurons like a deluge of a tsunami. I started to remember things from my own childhood about my mother’s abusers that I forgot. One day I came home at the age of 6 from school and a lady was sitting in the kitchen with my mum. This lady was the same lady who participated in stealing and estranging my sisters from our mother. She was not a nice person and I did not know then all the evil things she did and I could still feel her energy, it felt sick and dark. Mum handled it like a pro — this disturbed woman who was jealous of her and stole her life and her kids and was evil and awful showed up at our home, mum was trying to rebuild her life with my dad and me and this psycho is following her, showing up at our home, calling at late at night threatening my immigrant dad who was a new citizen, showing up at prayer meetings and church and even the Eaton’s store one day.
I had no ideas as a very little girl that my mother truly feared for mine and her safety. Thinking about how the evil woman appeared so often after they returned to Canada with my sisters made me rethink some parts of my early childhood. I was a highly anxious child, struck with chronic hyper-emesis that saw me hospitalised once at the age of four and in the ER frequently throughout my childhood and youth. My mother never took me to crowded fares or malls or things like that. It is like we were hiding a little from dangerous people. A child does not think like this —I was safe and it was a lovely early childhood. Mum outdid herself with me. My dad made it easy for her to be the mum she was meant to be — a good man supports and upholds his strong wife. My father and mother worked hard to create that bubble and they guarded it well in the early times.
Attachment foundation makes or breaks a childhood. I had a strong one and it equipped me for the tough times that came later on. It still serves me to this day. My parents served and united and they devoted everything to family attachments. I did not get farmed away, I was not an inconvenience or a burden, I was a desire, wanted, a passion of my mother’s, beloved, always welcomed. I did not get sent to the kids table. My parents wanted me around and I felt it. Money and work and business were NOT more important than me to my dad. I was the most important thing in his life when I was growing up, his career and work all revolved around what would be best for me as a child. Those are the things that matter to a child so that they make you safe as a parent to turn to. If you did not invest in that attachment you will not be that safe person your kid runs to — some other adult will be that for your kid. You cannot influence them if you do not have a connection with them. You cannot fake it. You cannot parent without influence.
Who is parenting your child? Peers? Teachers? The school system? TV? TikTok? YouTube? Do you know? It is your responsibility and no one else’s to know and provide for your child’s education and social and spiritual needs. You had unprotected sex, now you are responsible for the result. Don’t put your shyte on any teacher’s ass, you are ultimately it, parents. Buckle up and level up. If you do not no one will.
And look, I see the fascists amongst you: your kid will have secrets and you are not entitled to them all. You had secrets from your parents, it is part of growing. They do grow away as they are meant to do—they are not your property. Your kids are fully human and will choose what they choose and you often won’t like it and that will be your problem.
You must trust them and let them discover things and fail and be there to catch them and help them recalibrate. That said —a sex change is not an appropriate secret to keep from parents. We call it gender identity affirmation, however, when your gender identity affirmation requires you to modify secondary sex characteristics, then you have described a sex change. A banana that I mould into the shape of an apple is just a round banana, nothing more.
Summer brought some exciting changes for those of us battling GenderWang.
In June New Brunswick announced changes to their SOGI policy that would require parental approval for social transitioning of kids. This new policy and announcement apparently followed a lengthy review of the New Brunswick Department of Education SOGI policy in May. Players operating behind the scenes grease the wheels with petitions and correspondence in ways the public does not often know about. The Child and Youth Advocate for New Brunswick, Kerry Lamrock, wrote a report about the new parental inclusion policy, in which he expressed criticism and claimed that parental consent to socially transition children violates the child’s Charter and human rights. Policy 713 remains hotly debated, and came into effect on August 17, 2023. Recently the Canadian Civil Liberties Union launched a challenge of Policy 713. That case will be heard September 18th, 2023 in Fredericton.
On August 22 Saskatchewan released its own parental inclusion policy and also announced an end to political lobby groups accessing the classroom. This followed a shocking episode in Lumsden, Saskatchewan on June 19, in which a sexual health lesson for 14 year olds by Planned Parenthood featured a game that showed graphic sex cards. The Daily Mail reported while the presentation itself was aligned with the Saskatchewan curriculum, the presenter brought a secondary resource which was not…At this visit, a resource the school did not approve ended up in the hands of a student. On September 5th Egale challenged the Saskatchewan Parental Inclusion Policy in court, that hearing will take place September 19th, 2023 in Regina.
On the weekend, at its annual convention, the Conservative Party of Canada adopted a policy position on Gender that protects sex based spaces and sports and promotes safe limits for gender care that would ban the chemical castration of children.
On September 20th, 2023 parents will hold a nationwide protest to raise awareness of the fight against SOGI in schools and the dangers of social transitioning leading to sex changes for children with mental wellness challenges. In Vancouver the protest happens to take place on Cheque Day, a day associated with high levels of street drug consumption, public chaos and unrest across the city. A large gathering near city hall and a skytrain station on an already very hectic day in the city should prove interesting. The movement to oppose GenderWang has many segments and factions that do not play well together, it creates a certain amount of tension that can invigorate and also impede the work of trying to make policy changes. The egos of the various factions do not work well together, they do not have great emotional regulation skills. They argue over words that offend them like children sometimes. They want what they each want more than they want to understand their opponents.
The real global pandemic, the real mind virus, is psychological essentialism that leads to dehumanisation and the destructive and repugnant moral superiority it exudes.