Reply #48: My parents were both born in 1936 [View All]

[neebob]

They became Republicans because they were brainwashed with religious and other 19th-century bullshit that neither of them ever questioned, or if they did, the brainwashing was too powerful. My mother is now 69, and while she thinks Reagan was swell, it's not him or that era. What happened to her started in the sixties, when my dad persuaded her to join the Mormon church. He was a loud, overbearing, gun-toting old-fashioned disciplinarian king of his castle who couldn't stand to be disagreed with. He became severely disabled about five years before he died, and my mom spent those years essentially trapped in their house with him and his Limbaugh Letters. She became the wingnuttiest wingnut you could ever imagine.

My mom remembers the forties and fifties with incredible fondness and has actually said she'd rather go back there. But don't you dare suggest she might like to redo 1958 and marry someone else.

After my dad died, I made the mistake of sharing my true feelings about him with my mom. I stupidly thought it would improve our relationship, but it had the opposite effect. We did nothing but argue for two years.

My mother lives in a world where everything is either good or bad but most things are bad. Conversing with her is exhausting because her religious, political, and social views are the polar opposites of mine and everything - even an offhand comment about the most mundane of things - has some hidden tie-in to her beliefs. I'm constantly screening what I'm about to say for its potential to violate one of them and result in her correcting me. There are only two safe topics: animals and the weather. There aren't too many things I'd rather not do than go hang around her in person.

For a while it seemed like she was tired of arguing, too, and we'd reached something resembling an understanding, but lately she's been assailing me with rants about things she knows I disagree with her on.