#but in all honesty you have dad who works a typical nine to five thinks most things are just adequate and his son who ONLY does contract

[montygatorguy]

i like to think job bot is gig bots father mostly because they seem like such opposites to one another. same with vacation bot being temp bot’s daughter.

[littlestarprincess]

Kind of venting under the cut. Re: traumatic upbringing stuff? I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while just to like. Journal it I guess but anyway.

I was raised by a woman who believed that all men should be crygenically frozen, so that they wouldn’t be part of human society, and so women would be able to just unfreeze them for their semen and then have babies whenever populations were getting too low.

Like, this was straight up a belief that she would tell me about on multiple occasions before I was in middle school. When I was nine or ten years old, eleven at the oldest -- my mom would regularly talk about how all men should just be stuffed in a freezer and kept that way until women needed babies to maintain population. Not even really if women wanted to have babies, I don’t think, but if it was like. Necessary. Then they could just unfreeze a guy and have him make babies with lots of women and put him back in the freezer I guess?

My mother was also a brown supremacist, which in this context meant she thought that all white people were the devils, and asians who were more east asian (I think. . . anything Philippines and over for her?) were all smug jerks, and the darker your skin was the better. I remember when I was eight or so, constantly trying to prove to her that I was brown enough, because she literally used my being white as a way to prove that I was just inherently better off than she was. When I was very young -- though I’m not sure exactly how young -- she overheard me refer to myself as brown (because, surprise surprise, I’d picked it up from her) and took me over to our clunky family computer and opened up MSPaint and drew out a pie chart to illustrate how white I was. I went through school all the way until 10th or 11th grade taking it for granted that I just was white and my mom wasn’t until I started getting comments from people, to the effect of “you’re not white” (when I referred to myself as white to another white person), and “what are you? Korean?” when I was trying to get a kid on the bus to stop bullying another kid. His brother very much did not approve of that comment. And comments like, “You look Sumerian.” “You look like an ancient Persian queen!” They started in high school and just kept going -- people think I look native, and a lot of Saudi girls have latched onto me like, “Heeeeey!” expecting the same kind of cultural connection they’d get from someone else who was Saudi -- a cultural connection I’ve been denied since childhood, because my mom saw me as tainted by my dad -- who was never in my life, who was a one night stand -- and his whiteness.

Incidentally, my mom was also a eugenicist. She still is, more or less -- I think it started with a fascination with genes and genetics, and her own trauma related to that, but. . . I have memories of her talking about Rh - blood being superior to Rh + blood, and how the former was made up of introverts and cerebral people, while the latter was for social, gregarious types who like to bond with people. (Naturally, because I’m always disappointing my mother, my bloodtype is A+). I grew up in a house where it was important to be the Queen Bee but not to actually have a weakness like emotional vulnerability. My mother was competitive -- maybe that would have been slightly less painful if I was competitive too, but I’m not. She’s talked about taking me to soccer games and how everyone else’s kids were into it, and there I was frolicking with the flowers in the sidelines. She pulled me out of gymnastics because I wasn’t improving fast enough, because despite the fact that I got a late start, I wasn’t the best in the class by the end of the month (or maybe six months, I don’t know.) The truth is, we probably couldn’t afford the gymnastics anyway -- but she told me it was because I wasn’t taking it seriously.

I wasn’t allowed to have hobbies that cost money -- she told me that I dropped everything too fast. To this day, I struggle with the idea of buying art supplies -- even a ten dollar sketchbook can be too much for me to commit to until I’m absolutely desperate.

She resented that my grandmother would feed me when I went to stay with her; she talked about keeping me under her thumb because school meals still cost money and money had to come from somewhere. The summer between fifth grade and six, we moved to a new town, and I was required to take a ten minute walk every morning, then come home, clean a room or two of our apartment (typically the kitchen, bathroom and/or my room, but sometimes the living room too, and never her room), do a certain amount of crafting projects (typically beading or sculpey clay, I don’t know if there was anything else), and then read a chapter of a diet book (it was called fit for life, or it was the sequel to a book called fit for life that had a very derivative title) and write a book report on it. If any of these things weren’t done to her satisfaction, she docked my allowance -- which was like, five dollars in theory, but generally down to fifty cents or the negatives by the end of the week. And yes, if it was in the negatives, it carried over from the last week. My allowance, in all honesty, only existed as a way to punish me for not working hard enough. I’m pretty sure she still believes that she wasn’t hard enough on my for my diet too -- at the very least, she believed that a couple years ago.

Incidentally, that was also the year that she started force feeding me pills whenever I started “throwing temper tantrums” -- which was really, having any sort of emotions that weren’t peppy, helpful obedience. Anger, melancholia -- time for another happy camper pill! I’m honestly really lucky that she was super into herbal things, because I don’t know what kind of fucked up things would have happened to me if she’d picked something less boho-y (I found out recently that the pills in question are mostly caffeine pills. I’m honestly too scared to actually look for myself, though) and that finally culminated with her being offended that I wanted to celebrate Christmas with my grandmother, and calling us up while I was staying there and telling me not to come back home.

And. . . I dunno. There’s not really a point to this post. There isn’t an “end” point, really. This isn’t all that happened to me, before or afterwards, but. . .I wanted to at least get it out in words. It will probably never feel real.