Parents.

Janice came back from China last week, and our household imploded within three days.

One's relationship with parents is always going to be part luck, part design. By design I mean there's going to be a foundation for getting along because you are almost certain to adopt many of your parents values. And by luck I mean the age old cliche that gets poo-poo-ed far too quickly and dismissed that you can't pick your parents, you can't even decide to be born.

But peeps come in three varieties - Nourishing, Toxic and Blah. Nourishing people you should actively seek to spend time with wherever and whenever you can, Toxic people you should actively not spend time with, and Blah just be friendly to.

This goes for everyone, and I really have to emphasise it includes parents.

I chose to do something awful in the past couple of days and that was to tell Janice that she was 'border-line Toxic' this was an awful thing to do, but I did it because something had to give. Body-language can't lie and my siblings and I had been avoiding Janice like the plague. Everyone knew something was amiss and it was better to just break that negative silence than let it fester.

I said border-line and I meant it. Janice is a chronic worrier and always has been, and I know the 'Toxic' behaviour actually comes from a place of love and concern. Specific to me, she routinely gives me 'reality' talks. That is, for those that know me I'm currently restructuring and exploring my life. I want to take more risks and I feel fortunate to have been put in circumstances in the past that have allowed me to realise that what I want in life I can't buy with money. I have to work for it and work really fucken hard.

My mother gets anxious about the cost of undertaking this work, namely that I'll meet some partner and want a house and to send my kids to the best schools & shit. It's entirely plausible, the thing is I decided when I set out that these are the things I'm willing to put at risk to pursue what I want and that I will have to forgive myself and not be bitter at losing out.

Now, what I need is support and encouragement from peeps I know and 90% of the time I get it. But from my mother I get doubt and anxiety, I get long conversations that force me to apologise for my existence, push back and revisit all my doubts and anxieties. Over the years though it has become pure pushback, I told Janice that I just switch off the moment she mentions 'reality' and go into a mild depression.

It's bad, it's very bad because Janice percieves me as a wholy different person than most people. She sees me as an aggressive intimidating bully which for a large portion of my life I was, but now I suspect most peeps see me as a lovable douchebag.

What I articulated to Janice was that 'your choice is whether you are coming with me or staying behind.' which is an unfinished thought but I was thinking on the fly, the finish to it is 'you don't get to decide where I'm going.'

What makes it awful is that Janice is just another mum. Miki would have been quick to lecture me 'you don't understand about her feelings' but I do. I know everyparent is fallible to creating hopes and expectations for their child and then is going to experience undue anxiety when their child deviates from their imagined path.

Probably no parent on earth wants their child to consciously take a gamble on winding up a bum on the street in order to pursue some ideal and perhaps delusional career. But any individual can concievably make that choice and be at peace with it.

So I understand. I know some TRULY toxic parents, that don't even do the basics, like lavish love and support on a child in trouble, and my parents are not these parents. This is why I say I'm fortunate, I don't have to actually remove my parents from my life. We are quite capable of being friends, Ijust have to do awful things like tell them I no longer enjoy spending time with them.

And I'm sure now we will move through it and over time, hopefully the behaviours can change, I can stop defensively lecturing Janice, she can stop second guessing my life.

In another way I'm unfortunate. Choosing a career path is a choice, unlike sexuality and if I was gay I'm sure I'd never recieve talks about 'reality' from Janice and constant questioning of whether this was just a phase I was going through. My parents are that enlightened at least.

Now I need to speak about parents in general. I hold the view that some call childish but I shudder to contemplate what is implied in the alternative, that children owe their parents nothing and their parents owe their children their lives. Parents are responsible and accountable to their children and not the other way around. Whence children become adults then they can relate to their parents as they would to any other adult.

I think most peeps envision that I'm saying kids can act like a selfish fucking prick and parents just have to suck it up. Not at all. Parents have a responsibility to make sure their kids are taught to empathise, respect and have compassion and all the shit that having possession of makes life much easier. Much in the same way 'Anarchy' doesn't mean that peeps will instantly start killing whoever they want and raping the corpses.

This regards the important things, who someone loves, what somebody believes, what somebody does, who somebody is are all personal decisions and Parents recieve no special priveledges or indeed any say at all. Their choice is the same as Janice's they can decide to go along for the ride or they can stay home, they don't get to pick the destination of your lives.

Things like your hometown, where you go to school, if you are schooled etc. or more broadly speaking what Bill Gates called the 'ovarian lottery' (you have a 80% chance of being born into abject poverty and not surviving your first 12 months of life) such things are not really choices made by parent or child, a great deal of opportunity is pre determined. If you can survive infancy though, I think even the poorest of us have a great deal of choices left, and these choices should always be made by those who have to live it.

Everyone is a child of somebody and every child has the right to tell their parents to 'just fuck off'. For some people cutting their folks out of their lives completely is the right choice. For me an awful and uncomfortable conversation was hopefully the right call. I believe that my mothers intentions have always been beyond reproach and it is merely the articulation that is toxic, and that is relatively easy to change so long as you are made aware.

The sad irony is that Janice is one of those good mothers, and furthermore as she mentioned to me a lot of her anxiety comes from the fact she grew up in poverty both materially and emotionally. Everything I said of Janice she by rights could say 100 x over for her own parents, whom like I to her she still loves. I know she loves me, and doesn't want to become her own mother, which is why for me telling her I didn't appreciate her interrogating my life choices was the awful but easiest option.