Expectations

This is not the first time I am writing about something personal. This is also not the first time I’ve tied personal challenges to broader social context.

Here we go… I am working backwards from estrangement from my family. I’m not alone (Fortesa Latifi in Cosmopolitan in ’23; Anna Russell in The New Yorker in 2024). But I’m uneasy about it.

I have a daughter who is trans, and I have evangelical parents. You almost definitely see where this is going, don’t you?

And maybe your expectations are not serving you. We are primed to react. I am not a scientist or even well read, so I won’t pretend to know the canon about evolution and human psychology. I also am not going out on the skinny branches to say that having a reaction to a situation is a survival reflex that all creatures have, and in some contexts it can save us, and, in 2025, with the quantity of complex situations that we encounter daily, maybe, just maybe, it’s (also) not serving us.

I’m wondering if we’ve forgotten how to pause and listen or read deeper since we all have the entirety of human existence, experience and history in our pocket, and it’s coming at us all. Day. Long. The algorithm also makes it near impossible not to get caught up in the culture war, even if it isn’t a super highway through the middle of your expectations about what family should be. The math that feeds the math of late Capitalism knows that the easiest food for attention is fear, anger, jealousy or some cocktail of all three. And yes I’ll acknowledge that it is totally an option to turn away from our phones and computers. I’ve been trying to do more of that and it seems silly not to acknowledge it as I sit at a computer to write this and, at some point later, you read it on your device.

I am trying to discard my expectations. I don’t know that I can work backward through the estrangement, which I won’t take time to explain because family business, any other way.

The most basic question that arises for me out this experience of living the culture war in the Southeast in real time is the one raised by Fortesa, Anna and I’m sure many others, about the misalignment of the societal obligation to except familial relations from, really, the requirement of basic decency, and the necessity that all good relationships have defined boundaries.

I. Do. Not. Take. This. Question. Lightly. 

It’s a contradiction for sure that our American ethos of individuality, which to be specific is, for most of us, an intense preoccupation with individuation, runs headlong into this cultural expectation for subordination to the nuclear family unit. Like many children of evangelical culture, my relationship with authority is complex and complicated. I certainly came out the other side of this childhood landscape with an aversion to groups that require correctly spoken purity tests and am often surprisingly and frustratingly demurring to strong willed authoritative language.

And… I’ve acknowledged many times in this forum that I plot myself left of center on our socio-political spectrum, so I tend towards the belief that the toxic aspects of hyper masculine, Judeo-Christian and white-centered ethnocentrism should not be allowed to continue for another generation. Yes, we’re going to skip right over the fact that I said I was averse to purity tests and virtue signaling and then said I was a progressive. Good for you for noticing.

I think we are in a cultural moment- have been for some time- where people across the spectrum of beliefs and values actually share the desire (I would say the need) to be around people who don’t hurt us. I’m not going to unpack the baggage and dishonesty inherent in my parent’s insistence that “my side” is, generously, inconsiderate of “other” values (yeah, it’s super weird to see that word come flying back this way). I am drawing the contours of this challenge and that one is real, for certain in the abstract, and because of that, I am filled with the entire range of human emotions. From grace for my birth family that often surprises everyone in my nuclear family, to a selfish desire to return hurt by severing relationships with people because they have hurt me and my family. 

My relationship with my parents gives me nothing but questions. They include:

• I feel affection for my parents, and is this the same as love (I tend to describe love as absolute trust and that is missing, I think on both sides)?
• I sincerely want to understand how we love another and expect nothing in return (you would think I’d understand this as a parent, but living it as a parent doesn’t require understanding it)?
• How do you have a relationship with someone you violently disagree with without feeling the need to change their heart? Right?!?!?
• How do you communicate with someone who has not just a different lived reality, but a totally separate set of “facts,” IE, when there is very little shared truth between the parties?

Asking questions means you have to be still and listen, without expectations. Fuck this is fucking hard.