As in you can kiss my ass
Do you have someone in your life who you feel like you can’t cut off?
I no longer have anyone like that.
That is, there is nobody in my life whom I do not want to be there. I am very willing to set boundaries, a skill I have learned despite how I grew up. No shade on my family – they’re just doing what they were taught – but damn when Jesus turned the other cheek, it was an act of rebellion, not an act of acceptance.
I used to think I had to accept bad behavior from other people because FORGIVENESS.
Nope nope nope.
But it wasn’t until Mr T’s parents pushed and pushed their awfulness on us, including telling him not to marry me (I was allegedly after all his money? which he did not have a lot of? and certainly not theirs, as they had disinherited him, something I knew because I had seen their will when he and I started dating) and that they were going to boycott our wedding (unfortunately, they did not boycott it) that I learned that I do not have to put up with crap.
It was the pastor who married us who told me that. She said sure forgive because what forgiveness really is is dropping the weight you have been carrying.
But, she continued, forgiveness does not mean you are required to keep someone in your life. You do not have to have the jerks over for dinner. Or answer their emails. Or take their phone calls. You are allowed to say yeah I’m done with that crap.
It took a few years for me to fully implement the cutting off of Mr T’s parents. It took
- their accusing me of eating bacon wrong,
- of getting angry that I had eaten leftovers for lunch that they had wanted for supper (they did not feed us lunch when we visited and I had not known there was an embargo on these leftovers)(also Mr T’s father complained about these leftovers on his deathbed)(or maybe it was the bacon that he complained about?)(but he was still mad at me on his deathbed about something),
- of getting angry at me because I corrected them when they falsely accused my niece of mispronouncing “extract,”
- of his mother threatening suicide when we didn’t visit them for Christmas, etc, etc, etc,
But finally, after years of their crap, one year, for Christmas, Mr T said that he would not ask me to visit them with him anymore and I said RIGHT ON.
And for the next five years, I did not see them at all. I answered his mom’s occasional letters (she once asked me to list all the things I didn’t like about them and said she would do the same for me), but only with the most surface of emotion. The weather. My garden. The most perfunctory letters I could write that would satisfy her and not bring her wrath down upon Mr T. (I didn’t care if she was angry at me. But I didn’t want her taking crap out on Mr T.)
I never saw his mother alive again and saw his dad only when I went to his mom’s funeral.
A funeral at which Mr T’s dad, whom we picked up at the rehab center, thrust his urine bottle at me and told me to carry it. As if he was bestowing upon me the greatest of honors.
It took years for me to cut off Mr T’s parents, but it took almost no time for me to cut off his brother, whom we shall call Mean Jerk, or MJ for short.
It started when I made a joke about promoting that hammer thingy for breaking the window in a submerged car with Ted Kennedy’s name.
MJ became enraged and wrote me an email calling me a stupid imbecile. And he cc’d Mr T and their parents.
My friends.
I’m sure people have called me stupid before, but nobody had ever said it to my face.
In writing.
Even I know enough to know that if you are going to criticize someone like that, you do not do it in writing. (Unless it’s in an anonymous blog, of course.)
Yet MJ thought this was cool.
Actually, I’m not sure if anyone has ever called me stupid before MJ did. Other criticism, sure, but I am not at all stupid. I am stubborn and outspoken and direct and loud and so, so many things that are bad when women do them and good when men do them, but I am not stupid.
I don’t remember if this was when I blocked MJ on facebook – we weren’t friends but I didn’t want him to even be able to find me, but that was when I started to avoid him.
But it took MJ’s mistreatment of Mr T to make me truly despise him. Like – if Mr T dies before MJ does, I will not notify MJ.
When their parents died, Mr T and his brothers were disinherited. All the money went to the grandkids. I didn’t care about that, but I did care that Mr T was stuck doing all the work, both as executor and as trustee for the grandkids.
MJ screamed at Mr T and wrote a hateful, nasty email when Mr T would not reimburse him for the frequent flyer miles MJ used to attend their dad’s funeral.
He accused Mr T of stealing from the trust.
(Mr T was not stealing from the trust.)
He has repeatedly insulted Mr T, implying that Mr T has done a bad job with the trust investments, accusing the financial advisor Mr T uses (the advisor who came with the money) of being a “bantamweight” who “only goes for singles.”
(Because when you are in charge of someone else’s money, you are supposed to make risky investments?)
When our mutual sister in law died, MJ wanted to take his nieces out for supper the night before the funeral. And he wanted Mr T to give him money from the kids’ trust for it.
That is, on the night before my nieces were going to put their mother in the ground, MJ wanted them to pay for his supper.
(Mr T did not give MJ money from the nieces’ trust to pay for dinner.)
MJ complained to Mr T about the hotel where we all stayed for the funeral. Mr T had picked a place convenient for us and MJ decided to stay at the same place, even though I told Mr T not to tell MJ where we would be. MJ decided it wasn’t fancy enough after all and griped that Mr T should “open his wallet” – that we could have stayed at The Ritz.
And yet, despite all the things Mr T does wrong (according to MJ), MJ continues to call and text Mr T.
(Probably because nobody else will talk to him. Years ago, his best friend dropped him.)
Every time Mr T sees MJ’s name pop up on his phone, he groans.
“You don’t have to text him back,” I tell him.
“You don’t have to call him,” I tell him.
“You can block his number,” I tell him.
“You can block his email,” I tell him.
Mr T refuses.
He thinks if he just answers the text, MJ will leave him alone.
I think about what I have read about stalkers: If you ignore all the calls and texts but finally respond after the 50th one, all you have done is teach the stalker that it takes 50 times to get a response.
“Sometimes he’s nice,” Mr T says.
“I have almost no family left,” Mr T says.
“Maybe we can have a relationship,” Mr T says.
One of the worst things is that MJ threatens to call.
It’s not that he will call and leave a voicemail.
Or text and ask if now is a good time to call.
He texts something stupid – like “HBD MTF,” which means “happy birthday Mr T’s father,” which he thinks is clever and I think is a pain in the neck because now you are forcing someone to decode your message – and adds “Talk later!”
Which means it’s not even over.
It means that he will call later *at his convenience* because god forbid he ask if the other person even wants to talk to him.
He’s like that actress who told an actor she could upstage him even when she wasn’t on stage and proved it when she left her wine glass – with some double-sided tape on the bottom – poised halfway off the table before she exited left.
All the audience could do was watch that glass to see if it was going to fall off the table.
Even though my parents had the wrong idea about forgiveness, they got the rest right with parenting. They took parenting classes and tried hard to break the bad patterns they had learned in their own families of origin.
I want to point out that I don’t think anyone tries to be a bad parent.
But sometimes, what you learned as a child is not healthy.
And if you are not willing to examine your own beliefs and make change, then yeah, you pass your unhealthy shit to the next generation.
Mr T’s parents – or at least his father – thought they were already perfect.
So they made no effort.
They were mean alcoholics who had no boundaries.
Mean alcoholics with no boundaries create adult children who also have no boundaries.
Or at least adult children, who, once they learn what boundaries are, have a very hard time enforcing them as enforcing boundaries is contrary to everything their parents ever taught them and if they do try to enforce boundaries, their mothers threaten to commit suicide.
How do you convince someone to cut toxic people out of his life?
How do you convince someone he doesn’t have to take the abuse?
Texan in Exile 