To Hell with them all, TBH

I live in this weird dichotomy in talks about family. Like, my first 9 years of life were pretty good, apart from being bullied at school for being weird (read: autistic, non-binary trans without knowing it until my teenage years, and bisexual). In those years, home was my one safe space. My parents were great. My only complaint about them during that time was them laughing in the face of the doctor who diagnosed me with ADD. In the 80's. You know how fucked up you had to be to be diagnosed with ADD in the 80's? But no, "ThERe's NotHinG wrOng With thEm, tHEY'rE jUsT cREaTivE!" Gee thanks, mom and dad. I might have been a functional human being if you'd taken that doctor seriously.

And then my sister was born, and everything about her turned our lives upside down and inside out, and then did some M. C. Escher shit to it.

So despite pretty good early years, my present reality concerning my family is this: I don't talk to any of them anymore, and it's so bad I'm not even convinced I love any of them anymore. Seriously. The love I once felt for them... when I go looking for it, I get a 404 error. Despite all my parents' many flaws, they are at least both capable of unconditional love, and still love me and my sister despite everything.

But me? My love is completely conditional. I won't just stop loving someone on a mere whim, though. I tried for a couple decades to maintain a relationship with them despite everything, before I finally gave up. But once I give up on someone, that's it. Any good feelings I had for them turn to ashes and even the positive memories taste the way diarrhea smells.

Anyway, reasons for this: My mom is an anti-masker (despite being a Democrat) whom I had to block entirely since it was the only way to get her to shut up about it, my dad is an anti-LGBT bigot,(1) and my sister is a huge transphobe. But then, my sister was a screaming demon child from Hell, the kind of child you rent out to couples thinking about having kids to make them decide to immediately sterilize themselves to prevent the possibility, whose hours-long screaming tantrums triggered me to have autistic meltdowns and also she’s literally (not figuratively) the reason my parents got divorced, so to Hell with her anyway. She's the main reason I left Iowa. But by then I was having enough issues with my parents that I didn't mind moving hundreds of miles away from them, either.

We had myriad other issues before that, my mom and I, like me pointing out that my sister is a lazy parasite living off Mom’s money while refusing to even look for a job or even help around the house, in addition to her being unable to take care of her pets properly. My sister’s guinea pigs smell of piss constantly (or smelled past tense; I doubt they lasted long under her “care”), and she refused to take her stupid dog to the vet despite it having an obvious, disgusting, dripping infection on its dick (like, “its dick is bound to fall off at any moment” level infection.)

The reason she turned out this way? Well once my sister got started crying about something, nothing would stop her short of getting her way. Waiting her out was a pointless waste of time. She's probably autistic as well, but where I was the "unusually quiet autistic child" type, she was the "screaming demonic changeling baby" variety, except they weren't meltdowns she was having, they were actual tantrums. (She had some meltdowns too; I could tell the difference.) If you think cats are stubborn, well, no. Cats are pushovers compared to my sister. Mom would try to get away from it by locking herself in her room until it was over, but she'd always eventually break and give my sister what she wanted. Dad had more patience and stubbornness, and would get angry at Mom for caving in like that, but I totally get it. If I hadn't agreed with Dad on that issue, I might have done the same as Mom. Instead, my own stress and anger would pressure cook inside my brain while I hid in my room, and then it would eventually explode, and I'd storm out of my room and scream and throw stuff around the room, and then it would end when I would hit my sister and turn her tantrum into a meltdown.

Every time that would happen, a switch would flip in my brain. Or rather, one of the others was responsible for the hiding part, and then I - Alex Antonin - would take over for the screaming and breaking things part, and finally the single hit that would flip Fay or Tempest back into control again. They were horrified by my actions. But can you really blame me? Literally nothing would shut her the fuck up apart from giving into her demands. If she'd been my kid, I would have given her up for adoption.

And she would do that shit pretty much every other day. Looking back on it, it's a wonder I never got driven insane enough to drown her in the tub. Looking back on it, with how bad she eventually got, I think I would have been doing my parents a favor if I'd done that. They were too tied down by their unconditional love to give her away, or maybe they considered it and decided it would be too cruel to whoever had to deal with her in their place.

I am not fucking around with how bad she was, how bad she is even now. I even wrote a short story about a changeling baby driving its family so insane that his older sister, at the age of 7, tries to drown him in a tub. Of course, it doesn't work, but only because its actual parent -- a powerful malevolent faery -- shows up to save it, and magically binds any of them from trying to kill it. Inspired partly by the old changeling baby stories, partly by the cuckoos from author Seanan McGuire, partly from (gestures at the rest of the post above), and partly by the stories of black-eyed children.

Seriously, my sister could have been used to torture people at Gitmo. I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and giving Mom a tea made of herbs that cause abortions before my sister could be born, and the much happier life my past self would get as a result as time-traveler me fades away. And about how much better people my parents would be if they hadn't had their own lives ruined by that little shit.

~

Oh, and let's not forget that my half-sister -- who I never even met til I was in my teens (and haven’t seen or spoken with her since) -- is even worse. She's someone so awful that if she caught fire, I’d hand her a full can of gasoline. Even my dad doesn’t like her. Literally the only thing I like about her at all is the fact she's a lesbian. I'll give my dad credit; despite his homophobia, he tried to ignore that about her and tried to establish at least a civil parent/child relationship with her. But her life was even worse than mine. Like, monumentally worse.

Dad was dating her mom when her mom got pregnant, and he wanted to stay and marry her, but her parents hated him for no good reason. She had gotten raped at some point; not sure when, but they were certain Dad was the father of this child, so either years prior to that, or some point during the pregnancy, genuinely have no idea which is worse. Either way, they told Dad to fuck off and forced her to marry her rapist instead. Understandably, stuck married to a rapist who wasn't even the father of her kid, she eventually committed suicide. The rapist either lost custody, died, or fucked off for parts unknown, but my half-sister ended up with her grandparents. Given the fact they forced their daughter to marry a rapist who wasn't even the father of her kid, you can guess what kind of people they were. Except you'd probably be giving them too much credit. I don't know how bad they were, but I'm guessing at least "Flowers in the Attic" but not quite "A Child Called It." I'm pretty sure my half sister developed Stockholm syndrome as a result, and she definetely blamed Dad for "leaving" despite him being so vehemently rejected by her grandparents that I'm surprised they didn't file a restraining order, just because her brain was so fucked up that she thought her abusers were capable of telling the truth about anything.

It's been too long to go into any more detail than that about her, but let's just say that my gift for reading people's hearts got an immediate Red Alert upon first meeting her. This was at a time when I didn't pay much attention to those alerts, not knowing consciously I had the ability to psychically see someone's character until years after moving to Portland. But the more she talked, the more I started taking that Red Alert seriously. I don't know what all was wrong with her, but given she seemed to believe her abusers about Dad, and didn't seem to understand quite how horrible they were (while knowing enough to know that life with our family would have been much better), I'd say she probably absorbed a lot of her grandparents' personalities.

I didn't figure out how bad she was until after years of back and forth letters between her and dad, finally ending in him getting to the point where he gave up and stopped writing back. I don't, again, remember a lot of details from the letters, but with every one of them my estimation of her sunk more and more until it went to the bottom of the Marianas trench and started tunneling down into the mantle.

Really glad he didn't get to marry her mom, though. Apart from the fact that I likely wouldn't exist if he had, there's the fact that if I did somehow exist anyway from their union, I would have had that for grandparents. That, and if those were her parents, I have to wonder how she got out of her childhood sane enough for Dad to want to marry her (but he was also abused as a kid, so that might have something to do with it.)

But my mom and dad did hear about her mom's suicide and the rapist dude being gone, somehow; they would have taken her into our house if the grandparents had also been dead, or had seen the error of their ways. I could have had an older sister living with us. But that didn't happen. Dad probably could have sued for custody, given it was his child (and I guarantee you, I saw his traits in her face and frame; she is for sure his kid), but we were poor and the grandparents weren't the type of person anyone sane would want to tangle with.

(Sigh) I hate humans.

1 = I do find it hilarious that this man who is such an anti-LGBT dingleberry fathered a lesbian with one woman and a non-binary bisexual with another.