Ruined my day, but I needed to hear it

Are you ever in a meeting or chatting with someone and they unintentionally say something that just ruins your day but also you needed to hear it?

That happened again today but let me start with the last time this happened.

I was doing an interview for a podcast, which to my knowledge never aired, but the topic was DNA testing and my experience with that. I was answering all of her questions and talking about all the people I'd met or reconnected with on Ancestry when she asked me if people had contacted me. I clocked what she said but kept the pace of the interview and wrapped it up.

But it got me thinking. And fuck, I hate that kind of thinking. Too introspective, too much examining my belly button fuzz, as my father-in-law called it. 

Had any of my DNA matches contacted me? As it turns out, the answer to that is ‘no’. When I first got my results, I was already in contact with my biological half-sister and father. I was the one reaching out to them. I saw a couple of close-ish cousins and I reached out to them around that same time. Then, a little over a year later, I checked my results and saw another cousin that I was fairly close to when we were kids, and I messaged them, got back in touch with their sisters, who I also knew when we were kids. 

I had found my father, my half-sister, and reconnected with my stepfather all in the span of a couple of months. Now, I do want to emphasize that I don’t resent this. Something about me is that I do put myself out there. I reach out and try to build connections. But there is a cost to always being the one to reach out, to forge that connection, to reconnect. 

When I reconnected with my stepfather, I did it by writing him a letter and reminding him of my phone number. I started to say here that I gave him my number, but I’ve had this number for over 25 years. Same email address too. I shared my number and waited. Then when he called, I let it go to voicemail because I was just waiting on him to chew me out. For what? Being estranged from his ex-wife and her family. For not keeping in touch. For who knows what. I listened to the voicemail and called him the following day. 

I found my father on facebook and sent him a friend request. Actually, before that, I messaged him on Ancestry.com and waited. I guess he either never saw it, or ignored it. I waited on him to accept the friend request on facebook and in the meantime, I sent a request to my half-sister. I’ll have to write more about how that went later, but it was me putting myself out there with my stepfather, my father, my half-sister, distant cousins. 

I later found out that my father was (supposedly) in law enforcement. He could have found me at any point over the last 40+ years but chose not to.

I knew on some level that it wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, solely my responsibility, all this reaching out, reconnecting because of my DNA results. But here it was, a person I’d never met before, in the middle of a podcast interview - her making a casual remark that hit me like a ton of bricks. That was a year ago and I’ve thought many times about emailing her and saying “you know that thing you said in the podcast interview? Yeah, I needed to hear that.”

I did need to hear it from someone else because I’ve felt it for a long time, but she was seeing it from a distance, objectively. It’s not my responsibility to carry a relationship on my shoulders alone. I spent all of my childhood and early adulthood chasing my grandmother’s approval, chasing my mother’s acknowledgment that I existed. Running interference between the two of them. Craving acceptance I would never receive. I was in my late 20s before that hit me. 

Then I did it again at 43 with my biological father. I messaged him. I listened to him. I set up the one zoom call we ever had. I talked to him on his schedule. He’d wake up and I’d see the little green dot by his name on facebook around 2 pm and I’d start the conversation. I’d stay up entirely too late to listen to him. Notice I don’t use “talk to” because I couldn’t get a word in edgewise and I quickly saw his lack of interest in me, my life, my family. It was all about him and he made sure to let me know what would happen if I stepped out of line and that I was lucky to have any of his attention at all. 

43 year old me put up with way less bullshit than 20-something me and 46 year old me would not accept that at all. Again, stories for another time. 

I’ve mostly lost contact with the cousins. Again. One didn’t like me calling her out for how she acted when my grandmother died. Like I said, I don't tolerate any shit these days. Another “accidentally” kicked me from a politics-related signal group for not being active in the chat and I decided it best to stop pushing the relationship. It’s fine. I thought about confronting it, but they know what they did. Sometimes people grow apart, things happen, and reconnection just doesn’t stick like we might hope. 

I guess my point is that every now and then I need to stop and evaluate how much of the relationships I am carrying. Do I always start the conversation? Am I always the one picking up the phone? Does the other person ask me questions about me? Can I get a word in sideways? Do they ask about my kids? Do they remember important information about me? That sort of thing. And I have to be willing to step back if it starts to feel like I’m pushing or carrying the whole relationship. 

Which brings me to what I heard today in a meeting about parenting. The guest speaker was talking about parents meeting their kids where they are and apologizing for missteps we all make. He and the other parents were talking about meaningful apologies and restorative justice while I listened with my camera off. (I had a late-ish meeting then had to get up early to take the youngest to an 8 am dentist appointment and I'm dragging) He said that a real apology goes beyond the “I’m sorry”. You’re supposed to apologize and ask how to make things right.

And that started me thinking about how when things completely fell apart with my mother and I think she gave me the “I’m sorry you feel that way” line, which is not an apology at all. Before that, when I was pregnant with my oldest, she sent me a birthday card saying how she wanted to “mend fences”, which I suppose she meant it to appear as an apology, but again, I had to chase her. I called her. I left voicemails. It was on me to chase her to schedule a time for us to meet. It was up to me to try and be a good daughter and absolve her of any responsibility as a parent. Same thing with my father. No apology, no attempt to make things right. Neither of them see what they did as wrong - together, and then separately, then or now. (I have so much more to say, but that’s for a different post.)

Anyway, the guest speaker’s comments just hit me. Like, there was never an apology, but there was also never any attempt to fix things or ask me how they could fix things. I was supposed to just accept them, accept their continued behaviors, be the glue that holds everything together for them. That guy ruined my day, but I think I needed to hear it. It’s the parent’s job to apologize when we mess up and to try and make it right with our kids, not the other way around.