I moved 4000 miles away from mine. That’s it, that’s my coping mechanism.
I’ll level with you, I’m 30 and still trapped in a toxic cycle with my parents, even 4000 miles and an ocean apart. They are manipulative, guilt tripping fuckers and I still love them dearly and would be devastated if anything happened to them. And while I’ve had many conversation with them over the years which should have lead to progress or emotional growth…if the other people aren’t willing to heal with you, you need to concentrate on yourself.
I’m going to start therapy soon. For this exact reason. Cause I’m 30 and a phone call from my mother who is 4000 miles away can still send me into a depressive week long spiral because we have, quite literally in my case, a lifetime of knowing how to hurt each other on the tip of our tongues and while I try (oh my god do I try) to be better and not rise to the bait, it still leaves me exhausted and hollow feeling some days. Some days are indeed magical and great and I’ll spend the whole time laughing and joking and I’ll wonder why I ever felt like I needed to move quite so far away.
Other days I’m more than fully aware.
And I know the holidays in particular can be stressful, and I wish I had something more reassuring to say, but this thing you are going through is a process and it will take time. And sometimes all you can really do is just try to breathe and remind yourself none of this is permanent. Pain, guilt, anger, the feeling that you’re never going to escape or get better…these are all temporary things that will pass and you’ll be able to step away from it at some point and heal. Which is hard to do. I know it’s hard to bite your tongue and take the emotional baggage people heap onto you. But you’re stronger than how you feel in those moments and you’re going to be okay.
Self care. Make sure you have things to do that give you reasons to not be around them 100% of the time unless you want to be. It’s also okay if you don’t feel like you have the strength to fight and argue back. It’s okay not to engage, and to do whatever it takes to preserve your emotional well being. And remember, you’re not obligated to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.
No matter how tempting it is to burn it all down.
“You’re not obligated to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
That is one helluva statement, and I agree wholeheartedly.
As Ontario’s Child Advocate Irwin Elman tucked his pink slip into his pocket, and his office staff dumped desk drawers into boxes, I wonder if Doug Ford and his PC party patted themselves on the back for money saved. It appears Ontarians will be drinking their cheap beer at the expense of vulnerable children and youth.
Foster children, Indigenous children, disabled children, abused children — collectively a group most Canadians would wish to protect and champion — have been thrown under the bus in a reprehensible wielding of political power. Last Friday, the Conservatives repealed the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth Act, 2007 as part of their fall economic statement, stripping these children of the one person guaranteed to be in their corner: The Ontario Child Advocate.
Not beholden to any agency or government, the child advocate (a position held by Irwin Elman since 2008) educates youth on their rights and pushes for action on their behalf. Because the office reports to the legislature, it remains independent. Most provinces have one, but now Canada’s most populated province has lost theirs. Although some people may not be familiar with the role of the child advocate, even those who have never had personal contact with the children who might need it would be left scratching their heads as to why kids in jeopardy have been targeted by the PC government.
With Children’s Aid Societies having limited oversight, the Advocate’s office was the one safe place where foster children could turn to report abuse within the system. For youth with mental health issues who have found themselves in the criminal justice system, the child advocate could push for a plan of care so they didn’t end up spiralling in the system. For blindsided parents who’d adopted children with severe special needs, the advocate helped their children receive critical services. The office called for mandatory inquests into the deaths of children in foster care and demanded rights for Indigenous youth. The advocate was the voice for the voiceless. Why did Doug Ford want that silenced?
Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness. Emotionally disconnected parents don’t suddenly develop a capacity for empathy just because a child does something to please them.
People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other person first.
— Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
Ford is… Such a piece of shit. A project that would save families $17,000 a year will in no way be made up for with tax cuts.
He’s driving Ontario into the ground; I didn’t love Wynne but the social programs she fought to implement would have lifted so many families from the paycheque-to-paycheque struggle to some kind of meaningful life.
What do we do? What CAN we do? I’m so afraid other provinces will follow us to hell.
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Anonymous submission
Also, just to recap the article for those scrolling who don’t want to click:
Cuts that have already been made include prescription and dental coverage, three planned university campuses, increases to welfare and disability programs, funding for domestic violence victims, and mental health programs.
And Ontario already had the lowest program spending per capital to begin with.
This is going to hurt people. This is going to cause SO MUCH pain and misery and deaths– yes, deaths, because you can’t cut access to healthcare and the social safety net and deny DV victims the resources to leave without that resulting in people dying.
So, please, call your MPPs, especially if you have a Conservative rep. Signal boost this post, and others like it. Attend protests if you can. Vote every time you’re eligible to. Call your MPPs. Because this is terrifying and scary, but it’s not going to get better until we decide that our futures, and the lives of everyone we care about matter more than our fear.
This father consoling his baby son at the doctor’s office is SO CUTE 😍😍😍
Awwwww😂😂😂
This father is doing SO much more than consoling his infant son …
• this father is showing up as a pillar of safety; he’s told his son he acknowledges and believes in the boy’s strength.
• the father is completely present and accepting of his son’s story and helps him tell it. When the son recognizes that his father was fully present and heard the story of his experience of pain, the boy calms completely.
This piece of video will now be at the very top of my teaching tools when training parents and caretakers to work with shock and trauma in infants. It’s one of the finest examples of exemplary parenting I have ever seen in my 35-year healing career. ❤️
I find it fascinating that people who choose not to have children are generally assumed to feel really strongly about not having children (or even to feel really strongly against children, anyone’s children, in general). I am probably not going to have children, not because I REALLY REALLY HATE the idea of having children, but because I don’t really really love it. Out of all the major decisions I will make in my life, this one is the only irreversible one. I can sell a house, quit a job, divorce a spouse, whatever. I cannot unhave a child. I cannot opt out of being a parent once I become a parent. I can’t even take a step back for the sake of self-care or whatever, or else my child will suffer.
So for me, having children is fuck yes or not at all. The default will be to remain childfree. Having children should be an opt-in decision, not an opt-out one. Until/unless I develop really strong feelings about wanting to have children, I won’t have them, even if that means I never end up having them at all.
I was presenting an assembly for kids grades 3-8 while on book tour for the third PRINCESS ACADEMY book.
Me: “So many teachers have told me the same thing. They say, ‘When I told my students we were reading a book called PRINCESS ACADEMY, the girls said—’”
I gesture to the kids and wait. They anticipate what I’m expecting, and in unison, the girls scream, “YAY!”
Me: “’And the boys said—”
I gesture and wait. The boys know just what to do. They always do, no matter their age or the state they live in.
In unison, the boys shout, “BOOOOO!”
Me: “And then the teachers tell me that after reading the book, the boys like it as much or sometimes even more than the girls do.”
Audible gasp. They weren’t expecting that.
Me: “So it’s not the story itself boys don’t like, it’s what?” The kids shout, “The name! The title!”
Me: “And why don’t they like the title?”
As usual, kids call out, “Princess!”
But this time, a smallish 3rd grade boy on the first row, who I find out later is named Logan, shouts at me, “Because it’s GIRLY!”
The way Logan said “girly"…so much hatred from someone so small. So much distain. This is my 200-300th assembly, I’ve asked these same questions dozens of times with the same answers, but the way he says “girly” literally makes me take a step back. I am briefly speechless, chilled by his hostility.
Then I pull it together and continue as I usually do.
“Boys, I have to ask you a question. Why are you so afraid of princesses? Did a princess steal your dog? Did a princess kidnap your parents? Does a princess live under your bed and sneak out at night to try to suck your eyeballs out of your skull?”
The kids laugh and shout “No!” and laugh some more. We talk about how girls get to read any book they want but some people try to tell boys that they can only read half the books. I say that this isn’t fair. I can see that they’re thinking about it in their own way.
But little Logan is skeptical. He’s sure he knows why boys won’t read a book about a princess. Because a princess is a girl—a girl to the extreme. And girls are bad. Shameful. A boy should be embarrassed to read a book about a girl. To care about a girl. To empathize with a girl.
Where did Logan learn that? What does believing that do to him? And how will that belief affect all the girls and women he will deal with for the rest of his life?
At the end of my presentation, I read aloud the first few chapters of THE PRINCESS IN BLACK. After, Logan was the only boy who stayed behind while I signed books. He didn’t have a book for me to sign, he had a question, but he didn’t want to ask me in front of others. He waited till everyone but a couple of adults had left. Then, trembling with nervousness, he whispered in my ear, “Do you have a copy of that black princess book?”
He wanted to know what happened next in her story. But he was ashamed to want to know.
Who did this to him? How will this affect how he feels about himself? How will this affect how he treats fellow humans his entire life?
We already know that misogyny is toxic and damaging to women and girls, but often we assume it doesn’t harm boys or mens a lick. We think we’re asking them to go against their best interest in the name of fairness or love. But that hatred, that animosity, that fear in little Logan, that isn’t in his best interest. The oppressor is always damaged by believing and treating others as less than fully human. Always. Nobody wins. Everybody loses.
We humans have a peculiar tendency to assume either/or scenarios despite all logic. Obviously it’s NOT “either men matter OR women do.” It’s NOT “we can give boys books about boys OR books about girls.” It’s NOT “men are important to this industry OR women are.“
It’s not either/or. It’s AND.
We can celebrate boys AND girls. We can read about boys AND girls. We can listen to women AND men. We can honor and respect women AND men. And And And. I know this seems obvious and simplistic, but how often have you assumed that a boy reader would only read a book about boys? I have. Have you preselected books for a boy and only offered him books about boys? I’ve done that in the past. And if not, I’ve caught myself and others kind of apologizing about it. “I think you’ll enjoy this book EVEN THOUGH it’s about a girl!” They hear that even though. They know what we mean. And they absorb it as truth.
I met little Logan at the same assembly where I noticed that all the 7th and 8th graders were girls. Later, a teacher told me that the administration only invited the middle school girls to my assembly. Because I’m a woman. I asked, and when they’d had a male author, all the kids were invited. Again reinforcing the falsehood that what men say is universally important but what women say only applies to girls.
One 8th grade boy was a big fan of one of my books and had wanted to come, so the teacher had gotten special permission for him to attend, but by then he was too embarrassed. Ashamed to want to hear a woman speak. Ashamed to care about the thoughts of a girl.
A few days later, I tweeted about how the school didn’t invite the middle school boys. And to my surprise, twitter responded. Twitter was outraged. I was blown away. I’ve been talking about these issues for over a decade, and to be honest, after a while you feel like no one cares.
But for whatever reason, this time people were ready. I wrote a post explaining what happened, and tens of thousands of people read it. National media outlets interviewed me. People who hadn’t thought about gendered reading before were talking, comparing notes, questioning what had seemed normal. Finally, finally, finally.
And that’s the other thing that stood out to me about Logan—he was so ready to change. Eager for it. So open that he’d started the hour expressing disgust at all things “girly” and ended it by whispering an anxious hope to be a part of that story after all.
The girls are ready. Boy howdy, we’ve been ready for a painful long time. But the boys, they’re ready too. Are you?
I’ve spoken with many groups about gendered reading in the last few years. Here are some things that I hear:
A librarian, introducing me before my presentation: “Girls, you’re in for a real treat. You’re going to love Shannon Hale’s books. Boys, I expect you to behave anyway.”
A book festival committee member: “Last week we met to choose a keynote speaker for next year. I suggested you, but another member said, ‘What about the boys?’ so we chose a male author instead.”
A parent: “My son read your book and he ACTUALLY liked it!”
A teacher: “I never noticed before, but for read aloud I tend to choose books about boys because I assume those are the only books the boys will like.”
A mom: “My son asked me to read him The Princess in Black, and I said, ‘No, that’s for your sister,’ without even thinking about it.”
A bookseller: “I’ve stopped asking people if they’re shopping for a boy or a girl and instead asking them what kind of story the child likes.”
Like the bookseller, when I do signings, I frequently ask each kid, “What kind of books do you like?” I hear what you’d expect: funny books, adventure stories, fantasy, graphic novels. I’ve never, ever, EVER had a kid say, “I only like books about boys.” Adults are the ones with the weird bias. We’re the ones with the hangups, because we were raised to believe thinking that way is normal. And we pass it along to the kids in sometimes overt (“Put that back! That’s a girl book!”) but usually in subtle ways we barely notice ourselves.
But we are ready now. We’re ready to notice and to analyze. We’re ready to be thoughtful. We’re ready for change. The girls are ready, the boys are ready, the non-binary kids are ready. The parents, librarians, booksellers, authors, readers are ready. Time’s up. Let’s make a change.
also I think it’s important we realize that being nice to children needs to also apply into their teenage years.
when I was 17, five months after my dad had died in a house fire and I lost my home and we nearly ended up homeless, I was lucky enough to go on a school trip to the bahamas to study the reefs. This was my Ultimate Dream, as an aspiring marine biologist, and I couldn’t believe it was coming true. It was the only good thing to happen to me since the fire, the only thing I’d genuinely looked forward to.
But I had ADHD and could be too loud (by then I was good at not talking out in class so I was only loud when we were ALLOWED to be) and a little whacky. My humor was “weird,” I had asthma, and to top it off, I wasn’t pretty.
When we got there, the outpost where we were staying was run by college students, probably getting their graduate degrees, all aged about 22-26. And they saw us all as their age, even though some of them nearly had a decade on us.
And since they saw us as peers rather than children, they felt comfortable making judgements about us, and they decided I was weird and annoying.
And they were mean to me. They made fun of me, deliberately made me feel excluded and odd in front of each other and my own peers, and sometimes when I’d say something in class they’d make a face, say “Ohhhkaaaayyyy,” and look at each other knowingly while they pretended they were even trying to hold back laughing at me. They avoided calling on me during classes, didn’t want me participating, and generally made it obvious how annoying I was to them.
I even noticed that another person in my class was just as weird, if not more, than I was, but she was gorgeous. And to people looking at us as adults instead of children, that mattered.
And it ruined everything.
Another adult on the trip started paying attention and thinking perhaps there was a reason the people in charge didn’t like me. After all, what kind of adult is mean to a kid for no reason? So one night at a festival when she saw me take apart my inhaler, she misunderstood what it was and told the teacher in charge of our trip she’d seen me using drugs. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere alone for the rest of the trip, not even the bathroom at the airport, despite my friends and a few other peers defending me.
I was mortified and ashamed and ended up lying there in bed every night, wondering how something I’d looked forward to so much could end up so terrible. I wanted nothing more as a child than to be good and win adult approval, and somehow I’d made all the adults there dislike me. I thought it was my fault.
I’d love to see all of these people again now, as an adult myself, and tell them what I was going through.
Tell them, “did you know, when you made fun of me all week back then, when you made me feel untrustworthy and called me a liar, I was grieving the loss of my father. I went away to try to stop thinking about him and the fire and losing my home and everything else, just for a week, and you stole that from me? You ruined that for me?”
Be. Fucking. Nice. To. Children.
Okay this is so important though. As much as they may act like adults and want to be treated like adults, high schoolers are still developing and maturing and it is So. Very. Important. To be kind and supportive of them. If you’re in your 20’s, a high schooler is no more your peer than the 10 year old next door is. They will expect to be (and should be) treated differently than a 10 year old, but you are still a role model/support system to them.
Queer Fiction Writer 