I
need to lay out a few qualifications for tonight’s entry, which will be about
an email my Mom sent me yesterday, my response to it, and my further
reflections on the contents of those emails this morning. I love my parents. I know
they mean well. Also, I’m well aware that just about everyone disagrees with
their parents on fundamental levels and that these disagreements often lead to
heated arguments where each side defends its view of the issue rather than come
to some sort of understanding. I would consider it abnormal to have any other
kind of relationship with my parents (though that does not mean that what I am
calling a ‘normal’ relationship is unproblematic). Nonetheless, the very short, ‘well
intentioned’ email my Mom sent me was both surprising and hurtful. Keeping that
in mind, I want to make it clear that I am not writing this entry to attack my
Mom or my family, though a constructive critique of the contents of my Mom’s
email will be part of how I work through its contents. But the salient point I
wish to get across before I go any farther is that I am writing this entry for
me and to tell my story, because nobody else is going to tell it.
The
contents of my Mom’s email to me and about me were as follows: a thirty-or-so-word personal message stating that my Mom read on Facebook that I am a
Marxist, that she hoped I would read the chain letter she included (she did not
use the words chain letter, of course, but that is clearly what it was), and
that she hoped I would give serious thought to what I believe and what I am
doing. She then added XOXOXO, Mom (there were a good deal more ‘hugs’ and
‘kisses’, I think, but I don’t know how many). The chain letter was a list of
five so-called ‘cogent’ reasons why the government should not tax the wealthy.
There’s
no need to go into the chain letter other than to note that I thought the
argument it made was preposterous and a defense of corporate greed.
As
I’ve written above, I was shocked and hurt after reading my Mom’s description
of me. I’m not sure exactly what she meant by calling me a ‘Marxist’. If I had
to guess, I think she meant ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’. I do have training in
Marxist theory and believe some of the points Marx makes about capitalism are
valid, but I do not think he is entirely correct, and in any case his solution
to the problem of capitalism ends up participating in capitalism, as anyone who
has considered how the former Soviet Union handled communism could tell you.
There is also good evidence to suggest that some socialist programs work or can
work, such as our fire department system. I point all of these things out
because, whatever my Mom means by Marxist, she means it pejoratively. This
misrepresents what Marxism, Communism, and Socialism are supposed to be about. And
the the tone of her message clearly indicates that she does not approve of my
being a ‘Marxist’. More than that, her suggestion that I think seriously about
how I think and act implies that I should change how I think and act. And by
change she means that I should think and act as she does. Or that is one way to read it.
What
hurt me most in this message isn’t the suggestion that I change because my Mom
wishes me to. In no case will I simply change for that reason anyway. Rather,
what truly hurts are the implicit assumptions in this message that there is
something wrong with me. At no point
does my Mom’s message ask me any questions about me. Rather, it tells me who I am: someone who does not
give serious thought to their beliefs and actions, a dangerous agent who may
find himself in trouble if he continues on the path he has inadvisedly stumbled
upon (rather than purposefully chosen), a misbehaving or astray child who has merited a
scolding by his much wiser, more experienced parent.
I
perhaps should not have been as shocked as I was when I read my Mom’s email. It
is hardly the first time she has treated me this way, always, I am quite sure,
with all the good will in the world. But those good intentions don’t erase the
damage messages like this have done to me over the course of my life. For, of course,
I do want my parent’s approval of who
I have chosen (and not chosen) to be. And, to be fair, there have been times
when my parents have praised me, supported me, and aided me when I turned to
them for help and aid. But those moments do not stick out nearly as vividly to
me as all of the half‑spoken signals of disappointment, disapproval, and
presumed failure. At least they do not at this moment. And I think this is the
biggest shock to my system, to discover, despite that I have not been a child
for a long time, that I can still be a disappointing child in my parent’s eyes.
I’m
not going to go through all of the details of the response I wrote to my Mom. Suffice
to say, I attempted to tell her some of things I have voiced here, though not
in quite the same terms and not at such length. I felt guilty for doing so,
even though I believe my response was wholly justified, because my response
puts me in the role of the misbehaving or astray child. I wondered if it would no have
been better to call her and confront her more directly. But I ended up avoiding
that. I’m not quite sure why. And I couldn’t help but begin to doubt who I
think I am given the very specific and negative terms my Mom constructed me in,
even though I knew those terms were inaccurate and said more about how my Mom
sees me than how I see me.
And so I asked myself in my
writing session this morning just who I think I am. I came up with quite a bit,
much more than I’m going to discuss here. But as for the kind of thinker I
think I am, one of the ways I would describe myself is as someone who is keenly
interested in the way that we humans tell stories. We never tell our stories
innocently. My Mom’s story about me is not innocent. Nor is my story about her
story about me. And what this means and what interests me about how we tell our
stories is the stories we try not to
tell but which leak out of the story we are narrating. That’s what happened
with my Mom’s story about her son the ‘Marxist’. Or it did when I asked the
right sorts of questions. And it is what happens in the texts I am studying as
I write my dissertation: the stories of the conquered peoples that inhabit them
leak out ‘in translation’. Or they do when we ask questions rather than make
assumptions that we are getting the whole truth or even a tiny part of it.
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