I am an Angry Man - reflections on failed familial relations from 2011

I am an angry man. I can also be a gentle man. Mostly, that is what I am: gentle. But, most people will not remember good things. They remember the bad. Keep that in mind.

I took down a blog that I had here that happened to be a rant. It’s my blog, I’ll rant if I want to. Remember that too.

The intent and purpose of the blog was to discern a difference between love and ego: as we understand the meaning of love, we often confuse things that are attached to ego as love. The adoration of a singing idol would be a more blatant example of what love is and is not. I think we can make classifications for love. These would include love with a lower case “l”. I love pizza (and I do). But there is also Love with a capital “L” and Universal Love with all kinds of upper-case implied.

The opposite of love is probably not “hate”. Hate is cursory, and little, and way to small to be the opposite of something like Love. It is only the opposite of love with a small “l”. I hate the cold! Is there Hate and Universal Hate? It seems like there should be, but, I must admit, I am less convinced. It would seem to me that any form of hate is the residue of ego – bad ego to be sure. The truly selfish part. I hope to write more on this later. It can’t exist without human accompaniment. Evil is indeed something like the horrors Adolf Hitler brought. That was all pretty surely attached to Ultimate Arrogance and Ego, but even with its endless horrors, it’s still so much smaller than love. Its increasing horror somehow continues to diminish its allure and power, doesn’t it? Then we all have to make it end. And so we did.

Whether Universal Love came from humans or not is no longer of great importance, although thinking it did come from us alone seems to smack of ego again. In Ayurvedic cosmology, Perusha is something like Universal Love, and, we would seem to spring from it instead, as part of its quest to find meaning for itself. How would you like to be considered the answer, or, the part-answer to the question of the meaning of life? Well, obviously, you are. No matter what you believe, you probably agree that you are alive, and, that having life is explicit in its meaning… But, as the cliché says, I digress.

In my rant about growing up as a homosexual and talking about our inclusion in society, I was exploring how we are different. It’s important how we’re different. We cant’ see how we’re the same without it. Probably I need to write future blogs about that too.

At one point in my missive, I talked about my failed relationship with my mother’s brother. I had said he was 12 years older than me, and, wrote sarcastically about it. AS I said, it was a rant. This blog is not. Still, I wasn’t lying about what I said. This uncle used to ridicule me and call me “fem” as I was growing up. He pretty much bullied me the way any kid in school might bully a younger kid. Years later, in the 1990’s, while I was in my 30’s I confronted him over it, and he not only never thought he ever did anything wrong, but he continued to criticize my relationship with my partner (and now husband) whom I had been with about three or four year by that time. We’ve been together 26 now. He said he just didn’t understand homosexuals, and, I had a lot of work to do to get him to accept me. Telling him about the emotional abuse he spilled on me in my youth was 

clearly not going to win his favor. It was about 1994, and, at that time, I decided it wasn’t my job to work to “win his favor”. That’s just a way to have power over someone and the way his bullying morphed by that time. So, I wrote him off, mostly just ignoring him over the years. I was sure we had minimal interaction at family gatherings- something we were both most comfortable with. He had always believed, I guess, he somehow “won” in our conversations in the 1990’s. I don’t know. I didn’t care. I had written off the relationship, now, 20 years ago.

As Gay marriage reared its ugly head, for some reason, in about 2011 my uncle started trying to share his opinion about it with me and my partner and not-yet-husband, Steve. I told him pointedly at one point that I did not have any interest in his opinions about gays or gay marriage. I’m not an issue, I’m a person. My uncle is a relative.

I was surprised to hear he read my rant blog. He immediately went on the attack. Why respond with love when bullying always worked, right? Gays, and I were the hateful ones, not him. He was very upset when I just didn’t engage with him. There’s no fight to believe you’ve won when no one shows up. I got emails from my mother and her sister. My mother’s sister said I had to read an email he was about to send to me - it was utterly important. I did see he sent an email entitled, “Sale ends Monday at 9 p.m.” Another ultimatum and power move. That’s why I stopped engaging.

Yes, I thought about it a little more. Here’s the short of it. This charming uncle never once in the 52 years I’ve known him ever express any love for me. Never once did he indicate care for me as a human being or family member. There is not one single good memory where we had any good times together. Well, once, when I was 4 and he was 16 and got a new VW beetle, he took me up for ice cream. It was almost nice, but, on the way home, I scratched my throat (it was an awful noise I know) and he ridiculed me. I was 4. I had allergies. My only almost-good memory of him is marred by his ridicule. The rest just got worse over the years as I grew into my current gender-inappropriate self.

I still do need to get over myself: we all do. But, when there is no love, and no form of love, only a history of abuse, we quit relationships. I could see that my uncle might have good memories about our relationship, but power and control are not fruitful outcomes to relationships. 

I don’t hate my uncle. I don’t really believe in that, but I’m still angry. So, we always remember just that bad stuff more easily. I told you to remember that…

I have had contentious relationships with others in my life and my own family, over people’s inability to accept cross-gender behavior. I hope one day everyone will realize how stupid gender-based behavior requirements are. I have happy memories for each of those friends and family members for whom my gender behavior has been a struggle to accept. We also had good times that I do remember, though.

In the end, being able to write about my life and experiences as I have lived them, and as I remember them is more important to me than preserving relationships that really never 

existed. Only love makes a relationship. You cannot ever blame someone else for your inability to love them. I love my uncle. I have to. It’s the way I am. I can’t have a relationship with him or interact with him though. I don’t feel regretful any more about it and haven’t for many years. 

Sometimes letting go is love’s best expression.