Seeing Each Other

By Anonymous / Spring 2022

Hi Mom,

These past few years have been stressful for the both of us. Between me and my brother becoming adults, me going to college, and the whole world going through everything related to the coronavirus pandemic; there has been a lot happening in our lives that has made it difficult for us to connect as much as we used to. Which is definitely sad in many ways, but also very exciting. I’m growing up and feeling more and more like my own person with my own goals and beliefs and interests, and I am sure that you are every bit as happy as I am to be able to see that happen for me. Now, becoming my own person unsurprisingly means that I will have different values and reactions to your words and actions.

These differences between us should not drive us apart, especially when we are family, but I’m sorry to say that sometimes it has driven a wedge between us and that is in part on me. I have yet to grow up in some ways and learn to not just treat you as a caregiver with no faults, but as a human being with their own ideas and opinions that I should do my best to understand and respect, even when I disagree with them. Especially when I disagree with them. Especially when the person I disagree with is someone that I love. So for the rest of this writing, I am going to be doing everything in my power to understand and respect your point of view when it comes to society and politics and vaccines and the pandemic. I hope that if I can better understand you, there is hope that I will be able to understand people who disagree with me in many regards.

I remember one of the first times I was able to vote, we began discussing our opinions on who to vote for and why. You told me about how you no longer trusted the entire party that you used to always vote for, because you knew that they were in the pockets of pharmaceutical companies and would be voting for conservatives now, both because those politicians would sometimes bring up your issues with vaccines or the pandemic or autism, but also just because they were against the other party you felt betrayed by. I remember at the time I was so bewildered by what you said to me. I shut down a lot of what you said and became increasingly frustrated as I talked about people you supported being bigots or just as corrupt and you rolled your eyes at me like I was some poor child being controlled by the government. When I told you about specific issues that I had, your biggest response that stood out to me was, “why do you care so much about things that don’t affect you?” and that distinctly struck me. Now, I’d tell you that there is both other people who I care about that these issues affect, but also that I think it’s important to care about the whole picture of what ideas and politicians involve, even if they don’t directly affect me because I would hope other people would care if I was affected by something they weren’t affected by. Back then though, we both continued to say harsh things until we shut each other down. We made no real discussion during that entire interaction, and since then, I don’t think I’ve felt any progress from us being able to understand each other’s opinions. There’s many parts I regret about that.

So, for the rest of my letter to you, I will employ everything I have learned in school on how to communicate, everything I have seen in getting to know people, and everything I have learned from you on how to love someone else. Then hopefully I can tell you about my perspective, and how our differences make me feel and what I would want you to understand about where I am coming from. The most I can hope for, though, is that someday I can tell you all of this face to face.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure I fully know who you are. That sounds silly in some ways when you’re my own mother, but in general I believe that you can never fully understand a person even if you knew every single thing about them. That includes understanding oneself as it can be very difficult to fully know why you are the way you are, and that also includes being able to understand you, my own mother. This is the barrier to cross if I’m going to genuinely connect with your perspective, which will be difficult when neither of us are highly emotionally communicative. But, I shall start with what I know.

I know you were born on a farm in the midwest to a much bigger family unit than ours currently. I know you grew up catholic, and that your name is Resa because your mom wanted to name you Georgina to shorten it to Gina but someone else in your small community did that first so she named you Teresa and shortened it to Resa. I know you didn’t think you had much of a future where you grew up so you joined the military in order to find something to do with your life. I know in the military you met my dad and by the time you were in your mid 20s you were getting married and within the same time you had my older sister. I know that my dad was the one who left the military to stay home and take care of your new kid and you were the one who stayed in the military and even got a PhD in administration for your job; all the while you tried for years and years to have more kids before you were eventually have me and my twin brother through in vitro. I know you don’t really like fictional stories and you like going outside and you love dark chocolate. I know you’re very well organized and spend a lot of your time researching topics that interest you.

I also know you never took me to church and never really wanted to. I know your mom was known to gossip behind people’s backs, and your dad wasn’t very good at showing affection. I know you didn’t really have any love for the military or any strong feelings of patriotism, so joining the military was mostly just a job for you. I know that in your last deployment before you left the military a friend of yours was killed. I know that after you were finally able to have me and my brother, you lost a chance at having another child because of a misdiagnosis from a doctor. I know that my brother being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder greatly affected you, and now your research is heavily focused on what autism is and what caused it and why everything that happens to my brother happens. I know that your search for answers has led you to people and communities that connect and relate to you, but then offer up ideas of fear and distrust that deeply resonate with you.

When it comes down to it, that’s all a minuscule fraction of the person that you are. It does still offer enough of a glimpse into seeing where you are coming from though. There’s a lot of pain you have experienced in your life, and a lot of that pain has been subject to your trust being broken by someone or something you were told to listen to. Whether that betrayal comes from the church you no longer trust or the strained moments you had with your parents or the military that sent you through harrowing experience after harrowing experience or the medical system that robbed a potential child or the world for not giving you a clear reason for why bad things happen. Your tenacity and vigor in your search for justice was, and continues to be, something I greatly admire you for. However, your mind being dominated by feelings of anger and hurt have led you to places that make me worry to watch you. Don’t take that as me giving you pity as I in no way think less of you as a person, but I hope you can understand that I see that we are being driven into different ideological directions. I worry for where our relationship will be as this continues, unless we both try and make an effort to bridge the newly discovered gap between us.

As far as I can remember, you have been preoccupied with my brother’s autism diagnosis. With how he’s doing with the school, taking care of him directly, how to communicate with him, and how to find comfort with the idea of him being around and taken care of after you pass away. This is all very understandable, but you also have become deeply steeped into the dangerous thinking of how this happened, can you find someone to blame, and can something be medically done about it. It makes me sad that after I went into higher education in order to follow my own dreams of going into medicine, our conversations about it are either criticism for me wanting to be in such a system, or you asking me to explain or discuss biological concepts exclusively relating to some new understanding for the cause of autism. It’s often scary to see you try to find ways that someone must have damaged your child, as if he’s been broken. From what I have seen, you’ve never been able to accept that he is the way he is. Again, this saddens me, and makes me fear for the inner thoughts that you have about him and other people around you. However, I still understand why you react the way you do. You were hurt by the revelation that your child will always be in need of help, and that a large part of our society may barely ever understand why he is like this or how to help him. It’s scary stuff, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like for you to think of that every single day. I also fear for my brother. Even if our sister and I are likely going to be around longer for him, he’s still subject to the rest of society in so many ways. His difficulty in expressing himself and understanding others leaves him very vulnerable in uncaring societal systems that can leave very little room for people with disabilities and behavioral differences. I also think about this every day.

I personally feel these pains in a lot of ways. Largely because I learned from your experiences, especially the ones I was there for. I hated the military for taking my mom away from me for a year when I was eight, and I was the lucky one because you came back. I learned to question many authority figures, from teachers to politicians and doctors. You taught me to do my own research and learn all that I can in order to understand truth from lies.

You have given me a lot of important lessons on being informed. However, I also see where you choose to get your information, and it is here where I have to admit that I feel disconnected from you. The internet is a great source of information, but I was taught (by you and many others) to be very critical of what the internet tells me. There are still times where we discuss this, however, I do see a disconnect with the concept when we find information on the internet that specifically caters to something that we already think; confirmation bias (and for the record many people including myself are vulnerable to this as well). You go into a topic, let’s say vaccines for an example, and you read any argument that disagrees with what you hold to be true and you denounce it as either lies meant to manipulate or “sheep” who just do what they’re told. This deters me or anyone else from trying to make an argument against you, from fear of a negative response.

Again, I know a lot of why you have such a negative response. You’ve been burned far too many times by authority figures who are supposed to help. You have had to put up with too much bullshit to not get a worthwhile answer. An answer that gives you someone to blame and target. An answer that gives you a community of like minded people who build upon not just their theories, but their solidarity and support for one another’s beliefs. There’s even a lot of problems with things like the medical industry that you and I agree with. Too many parts of the medicine are for profit, and politicians are. Our society needs to take a serious reevaluation of the systems we have in place that allow an exclusive club of rich people and corporations with a disgustingly disproportionate amount of power. With or without my agreement though, I am genuinely glad that you have found a way to provide yourself with a focus for your hard to deal with feelings. An outlet that you can sink all your frustrations and anger into.

What I want to ask of you is to take a step back for a minute with all of it. You make your judgements of what you want with society based on what affects and motivates you, which is totally valid to have as a priority, but you either don’t care for other parts of the wider picture, or are entirely unaware of them because of your ideological bubble. You basing things like your vote on your limited scope of issues leaves you just as vulnerable to manipulation and lies from politicians that don’t at all care about your opinions anymore than they do anyone else. Like we have agreed before, they’ll say anything to get you to vote for them.

This is why I can’t get behind your beliefs. I haven’t had the same experiences as you. I’ve had quite different experiences and personal relationships than you. These experiences have led me to prioritize things like climate change, Queer identities, immigration, cost of education, and social and economic inequality. I fully believe that you care about these things too, but you have to understand that the politicians and ideas you would prefer to vote for because they’ll mention your issues, are ones that I could never support because of my own beliefs.

There is no way I can ask you to change your entire system of thinking that creates your beliefs, and I won't. You are your own person with your own values and beliefs, and I have no right in any way to tell you to change just because I disagree or am embarrassed by your beliefs. What I want to do, is to try my hardest every day to understand your wants and why you have them and what to do about them. I want to acknowledge and call out where the systems and people in our society have hurt and betrayed you. I also want you to do the same. I want you to see the issues that are important to me and even other people. I want you to see where we all can relate on issues and, just as importantly, we’re all different on issues that we can work on understanding together. If people like you and I are able to unite our passions for change and justice, we will be all the more powerful and capable to do so.

Sincerely,

Your loving son

P.S. I think the most important part for all people who aren’t able to agree, is to be able to still love each other, even through the worst of times. I will always do my best to hold myself to this.