I keep finding myself torn between my mother who is attempting (and unbeknownst to her, failing) to indoctrinate me into Islam, and my father, a spiritualist (essentially a Gnostic but less Christian), who claims to be able to talk to, “higher dimensional beings”, and a reincarnation of Vishnu. Oh, and he’s a misogynist. You can’t make this shit up.
Anyway, my father has these conversations with me in private, that he can’t have in front of my mother; this encompasses things like religion (which he disagrees with), philosophy, and politics (the latter of which I shall get to in a bit). My mother does the same; she tells me stuff that she can’t say in front of my dad, which is mainly Islam. I pretend to agree to both of them, to save myself an argument with them (although both have on occasion said things I agree with).
My mother told me to tell her stuff that my dad talks about to me, which I, to an extent, honour, although I do omit some details.
Politically, my mother has some pretty anti-imperialist tendencies, whereas my father is more or less a crypto-fascist; he’s an anti-communist, an individualist, an anti-Semite, and has said things against illegal immigration, and, as I said earlier, a misogynist, saying that women are, “possessive” in positions of power.
As you can tell, my family dynamics are, complicated, to put it mildly.
Oof, that sounds really exhausting, how often does this happen? Often enough to never really put down your guard?
Well, my dad can only talk to me about what I referred to in the post on my way to school (which interrupts that), so not that often. Also, for the better or worse, (probably better) it has never broke into open confrontation between my parents, although sometimes it feels like the only thing that is holding my family together is, well, me, and probably also my mothers’ dependence on my father (she has some sort of mental illness from the stress of working in a retail job for 13 years). For this, and my father’s heart complications (he underwent cardiac arrest when I was one), we are relying on disability benefits.