Getting to hear savior bullshit from my MIL about this foster care program and then when I said “hey I don’t want to think of this as “saving” a kid, that concept has a lot of ugly history and I want to make sure we’re doing this for the right reasons “, I got to hear twenty minutes of “you don’t understand what I’m saying, words are meaningless”
A VERY WEIRD ALLEGORY ABOUT BLACKFACE WTF. Where Sergio and me were talking to ourselves about Private anxieties about messing a kid up or retraumatizing them and mother in law interjecting with “you guys will always have something that you do that isn’t okay. One day if one of you wears a red sweater, that will be like how blackface was when we were kids”
And I went “uh what the fuck” and so did Sergio and cue another 20 minutes of over explaining of her going like “well it wasn’t okay now but it was back then!” And I’m just like “IT WASNT OKAY EVER” and she’s like “well I know that NOW”
Bonus round: she and her friend were talking about musicians and the friend was like “I don’t like Adam Levine because he treats his fans terribly” and MIL went “well I like to keep the music and the artist separate”
And I go “oh I can’t do that.” And she goes “I can.” And I go “so you’re cool with listening to R Kelly?” And she blanched and went “no” And I went “so it’s a spectrum.” “What?” “You’re okay with behavior up to a point. Shoving girls off stage is okay but what r Kelly did isn’t. What’s the line?”
Also this morning my father in law wore a hat to the flea market but because he’s so tall we couldn’t see it until some dudes selling guns out of a truck cheered at “Let’s go Brandon” and I was like “for fucks sake.”
I just was in angry political activist mode and they were like “we can agree to disagree and make our own choices” And I think i said some things that implied fascist ways of thinking like what’s happening now make it so we CANT make our own choices and she went “well you personally can because you live in mass so I don’t know why you’re getting upset”
I think I come into town and make things awkward and uncomfortable and if only I didn’t mention politics we’d all get along great but. Sorry. Here to fucking wreck your home life and remind you that Jewish people exist and have loud opinions that disagree with you.
She yelled at father in law over the hat “they won’t let us see the grandkids!!!” And I’m like “well not for that but for the love of god please examine why you might think I might be unhappy enough to keep your kid from you and maybe. Reflect?”
and as horror stories keep piling up, she'll keep dismissing them as fake news? does she also uncritically believe the stories about abortion doctors having quotas and fetuses screaming in pain and clinging to the womb?
She doesn’t see it and if she does she prefers not to think about it. Because thinking critically makes her feel bad and why would she want to feel bad????
We also had weird fucking talks about adoption where I said we were going through DCF and she went “well I know there are Christian adoption agencies. Are there Jewish ones?”
And I go “you know, I don’t actually know. I mean, maybe where there are lots of Jews like in NYC or major metropolitan areas and a Jewish pregnant person was like “I want my kid raised Jewish” but I don’t actually know. Why?”
And that led to a whole weird ugly conversation about why I don’t like “Christian charities” and the ugly baby selling industry and why can’t I just get a baby, babies are the best
MIL was going on about removing the artist from the art and went “I love Edgar Allen Poe’s works but if I ever met the man I would probably hate him. He did drugs.”
(This is also where she was talking about how she doesn’t like Adam Levine not because of his behavior but because he has too many tattoos now and dyed his hair blonde)
And I went “okay if I had tattoos would you stop liking me” and she stuttered and went “not the same thing, he’s a performing artist. He performs badly so if you pay to see him perform that’s on you”
she strikes me as the kind of person for whom individuals she knows are people and allowed to be complex and loved in their messy complexity, but everyone else in the world is a stereotype of either Good or Bad behavior and shallowly judged accordingly.
the savior angle she projects onto you really does not go with her also pushing you to get a baby. everyone wants babies. older kids get neglected. you're a "better" savior for wanting to foster older kids
My mother in law feels she was cancelled because every time she would post shit on Facebook all her nieces and daughters in law would point out why she was wrong.
I’d like to also keep my mom when we punt all the boomers. She got arrested several times for taking part in civil rights protests and almost lost her job and pension because she taught the truth of the Vietnam war in her classroom when our government was still trying to cover it up.
She’s always supported my activism, and I truly believe the reason I have so much compassion is because she taught me from a very early age that freedom and liberty for some is not freedom and liberty at all. That being all right with bad things happening to other people, as long as it didn’t impact you, was turning your back on your humanity.
Also, something that I’ve found useful lately: “agree to disagree is for things like pizza toppings, not basic human rights. You do understand the difference, don’t you?”
And I’m just like “IT WASNT OKAY EVER” and she’s like “well I know that NOW”
And I went “so it’s a spectrum.” “What?” “You’re okay with behavior up to a point. Shoving girls off stage is okay but what r Kelly did isn’t. What’s the line?”
And I think i said some things that implied fascist ways of thinking like what’s happening now make it so we CANT make our own choices and she went “well you personally can because you live in mass so I don’t know why you’re getting upset”
Trying to show her the 8-14 year olds we were looking into and she kept interrupting to talk about how Sergio was so cute at 4 months old
“Oh this is cancel culture”
Fuck off