Estrangement, and the People Who Love MAGA More Than You

With a sweet childhood story that displays an underlying theme about the usefulness of documentation

On the eve of the election, I finally got the old cassette to play. A few weeks prior, I had met up with some dude in a parking lot and gave him fifty bucks cash in exchange for a bin full of vinyl LPs. He threw in a set of speakers, a blu-ray player, and a cassette player.

I prayed that the cassette player would work so I could play that tape again.

The last time had been almost twenty years ago, in a cassette player that has long-since disappeared or died. I tried unsuccessfully to listen to it again after Mom died, when I brought her boombox home so I could try it out to play the tape. The tape almost got eaten and destroyed. I carefully smoothed out the 1/8” tape ribbon so there were no twists, and slowly wound it back into the cassette with my finger.

There was a chance that this new cassette player would do the same thing, but it was the eve of the election, and it felt like it was time to play it again, this time for Husband. The player, a one-speaker, plugged-in boxy 1980s-looking thing, neither rewinds nor fast-forwards. But it plays.

I need my husband to listen to the evidence. Even though Husband will always say at just the right moment the magic words-- “your dad was a dick”—I need him to hear it, to witness me.

The tape is from when I’m about six. My now-dead father springs to life through the magic of memorex. In a voice meant to sound like an old-timey radio announcer, he tells me to sing.

He makes me sing many Christmas Carols, and won’t let me listen to any of them until I sing about three more, even though you could tell I was getting frustrated. Then he lets my older sister Tiffany do a “commercial,” followed by her telling me to sing some other song, except she has no idea what the name of it is and keeps repeating a phrase that I don’t even today think is part of a song that exists. Similarly, six-year-old-me has no clue what she is talking about. She makes her voice even more high-pitched when she talks to my father and still she tries to jog my memory, repeating the same thing, over and over, about some song that doesn’t exist, until I am audibly agitated.

“Ugh,” says Husband, Tiffany’s voice is so passive aggressive.”

On the tape, I snap, which sounds like a kid whining “nooooooo, I don’t rememmmmmmberrrrr Tiffanyyyyyyyy.”

“Don’t get so upset!” her words slam into the end of my sentence.

“Now this,” I say to Husband, gesturing wildly, “is when a normal parent would stop the activity and redirect an obviously tired child.” He agrees, not because he has to, which he does, but because he does.

We all know that’s not what happened.

Right then, when I seem completely done, as you can hear the weariness in my little voice, my father brings up “Clarissa.”

She is a fake person he has invented.

“Like an imaginary friend for your father?” asks Beverly, my writing coach, when I tell her about it a few days later.

“Yes,” I laugh, “that’s exactly right.” Clarissa was my father’s imaginary friend who is sometimes a potential new mother, babysitter, girl Friday, or another girl my age that unlike me, has blond hair and blue eyes and behaves sweetly.

This time, she is a girl who would never say no to singing another song for her father. He says, “Maybe Clarissa will sing a song, she loves to sing.”

There is a long pause. You can hear the wheels turning in my head.

Or maybe that’s the loud-as-fuck cassette player, warbling over the part that got munched by my mom’s boombox; but still holding, still playing.

Six-year-old-me finds her voice.

“Clarissa’s not real!” When I’m trying to appeal to him and sing songs, my voice is unbelievably high. But it goes low and deep. Six-year-old-me feels indignant. She feels so angry, but tries not to “get so upset!” Everyone is always telling her that she gets so upset, don’t get so upset. You can’t help but hear the upset in my voice.

Then Tiffany delivers the final blow.

“You don’t know, Lia, maybe she is, maybe she isn’t.”

The fuck? She was fourteen, gaslighting me about a fake girl? While my father laughed and egged her on? I try to picture my thirteen-year-old daughter doing that to a six-year-old. I can’t.

With Tiffany having stunned me in my tracks, my father begins to rip into my carcass.

“Do you think Clarissa would like to babysit Victoria (my doll) and change her diapers?”

Listening, I feel that old elephant sitting on my chest again. Six-year-old me said “doooooooooon’t,” in a subdued voice, again, lower in pitch than it is during the singing and the banter.

At this point in the tape, Husband cries for the second time (the first was out of a burst of sentimentality and love when he hears my six-year-old voice for the first time.) I remember this story made my therapist cry.

It’s validating when people cry for me, but also scary, because then they could decide I am too much, and leave. But, Husband won’t leave, and Therapist won’t leave, so, at least I have the two.

When my father was alive, whenever Clarissa was brought up (and she was brought up often, until his last days) I had this thing I would do as a way to cope with the feelings of anxiety, despair, horror and sadness that threatened to pull me underground.

Knowing that my father was trying to upset me, specifically because he thought it was funny to get a rise out of me, and desperately trying to avoid the humiliation that went along with it, I would drain myself of all visible emotion.

I withdrew, tunneling deep inside of myself, and peering out at him through a small porthole while he brought Clarissa up; again and again, in the same way, using the same phrasing, the same pauses for laughs.

“We had so much fun”

“father-daughter times”

“I thought you loved it”

I would try very hard to stop it, to interrupt, to change the subject, to find the one conversation-ending retort, especially before he could get to the song.

“There’s a song?” gaped Therapist, losing professional composure for just a millisecond. I love her so much.

Of course there’s a fucking song.

The song goes like this “Clariss, Clariss, a kiss a kiss.” If I didn’t react at all, he would act as though I hadn’t heard, or perhaps hadn’t grasped the poetry. And then he would repeat it louder. One time, when I was seven or eight, I sang back at him:

“Clariss, Clariss, a PISS, a PISS,” which was kind of fun because it meant I got to be a little bit mean and swear in front of an adult. He thought it was hilarious and repeated it even more. But it was sort of in praise of me, and I had some years before I learned that this was terrible parenting, so it was tougher to let that pass.

In that impossible crucible, a people-pleaser was conjured. One pinch of drained natural reactions, two shakes of self-censorship, and every ounce of intelligence focused on not having an emotion or reaction that would be mocked.

On the tape, six-year-old Lia takes a breath, gives a theatrically fake giggle and says, “oh alllll right,” in her best diva voice, and obliges his expectations for another Christmas Carol, grateful to be the one to sing for him, and not have it be Clarissa.

My father knew it hurt me deeply that he made up a fake girl that was better than me who was also sometimes a woman who was better than my mother whose name happened to rhyme with Melissa, the woman who was not my mom that he was fucking.

He knew.

Just like six-year-old me on the tape confirms, I had told him “a hundred tiiiiiiimes” that it hurt.

Each time he “forgot,” let me spin my wheels; explaining, arguing, keeping things straight, preparing, trying not to show emotions, but getting more and more mad, more and more sad, focusing all of my attention on him, because if I could just get him to see how much he hurt me, and how much it was damaging me and how that wasn’t good because that hurt my future, then he would finally see the error of his ways, and be nice to me.

Then my mom wouldn’t have to say, “what did you expect?” to me anymore, because that also hurt, and while I was really strong and understood that sometimes mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters can be mean, it probably means there’s something I should consider and be nicer about, because if I was just nicer about their bad misfortunes then they would all be nicer, and while sometimes I knew I couldn’t do anything right, it was a matter of practicality. If they could just be nicer, then I could turn into the kind of person they would respect. If they respected me, they wouldn’t need to be mean anymore.

Spoiler alert: that didn’t work.

But I did try. To be nicer, that is. I got a lot of therapy, grew up, began to respect myself, became respected in many circles and respect-adjacent in others. I found very adult ways to talk to them, and to have healthy confrontations. I made “I statements.”I empathized first, then stated my position. I softened. I gave benefits of many doubts.

They found new margins that I was outside the lines of.

For my father, the control he got to have over me, my body, and my spirit was well-worth causing me a little emotional pain here and there. Other people’s emotional discomfort was amusing to him. Besides, it created more control which was leveraged to cause further pain for future amusement.

My well-reasoned arguments for considering me a human being with feelings absolutely delighted him, “I just love to see the way your mind works!” he would crow.

He said the right things just enough. He would almost seem like he was thinking about changing. This went on and on, until he missed my daughter’s first birthday in order to go gambling. One sunny November day in 2012 I found myself in front of the post office, creaking the door of a blue postal box open, slipping my no-contact-letter inside, and swinging it shut.

As soon as he got the letter, which again, so calmly and while using “I statements,” explained that I needed a break, because I couldn’t manage the depression and rage I felt when interacting him, and I needed to focus on my family.

He, of course, blamed the estrangement on my inability to put aside “our political differences.”

Maybe it’s a coincidence that he was also a Republican, who looked down on women, treated them like objects, cheated on both of his wives, cheated on his girlfriends with his other girlfriends, and had at least one secret baby.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that he looked down on gay people and was ashamed of his gay son.

Perhaps it was a product of rigorous thought (and also coincidence!) that he was a Birther, hated Obama and harbored lifelong racial prejudice.

It might have even had to do with him shouting at child me about the stupid liberals and the goddamn Democrats, whom he assigned me to because my mom was sleeping in the next room.

But honestly, I cut contact with him because he was obnoxious, I felt deeply uncomfortable in his presence, I learned that his behavior had a name and that name was abuse. I cut contact because it was me or him.

But he blamed politics.

Maybe my father, who died in 2016, didn’t vote for him.

But his siblings did. At least two of my sisters did. Was one of them Tiffany? She did try to raise money for Hillary back in the day, but her husband is, shall we say, from Orange County. People are flipping like pancakes, apparently to own the libs. Did Tiffs toss out her pink pussy hat and decided to be on the team that uses red bedazzling?

To quote fourteen-year-old-her, “You don’t know, Lia, maybe she is, maybe she isn’t.”

A lot of people who, have at some point expressed that they loved me and my daughter and our queer relatives and our Black relatives, voted for him. My sweet cousin, with the soft voice and thoughtful manner who dreams of angels and remembers everyone’s birthday, voted for him.

She did the math, and cares more about having the power to prevent my daughter from having an abortion than she does about whether my daughter would die from carrying a rapist’s baby.

“I’m not racist, (or sexist, or homophobic,)” they say, “I’m just pro-life/anti-trans/traditional/Christian/masculine/feminine, and I think the boarders (always the boarders, never the borders) should close, and because Trump will save the economy. Don’t cut people off just because you have different opinions. Our country was founded on the freedom of everyone having their own opinions. Cutting off family just because of politics means you’re just as bad as you say he is, and this is a time we should all come together.”

The term for having little to no regard for others’ suffering is called sociopathy, even if it’s for a “ good cause.” One of the traits of which is showing visible indifference to suffering.

Like the time my father hit a dog in a car, and showed zero emotion.

Or that sweet white woman who brings all the neighbors cookies at Christmas time, who would be fine if you died in childbirth with your rapist’s baby. Or the yoga teacher who coughs Covid on you so you can toughen your immune system, fatty, or die, because you have bad genes and didn’t take care of yourself, or the neighbor who reports you to ICE, even though you’re naturalized.

I’m not a sociopath, they might apologetically confide, I just—(insert reason why their comfort supersedes your rights or substitute with “the economy!”)

Substacker Tia Levings reminded me today that a lot of so-called well-meaning folks who are actually quite toxic might want to you stay in contact with them not because it signals a new phase in unity, but because your presence absolves them and prevents them with sitting with and thinking about the consequences of their decisions. If you spend time on the internet then you have already been pummeled by the message that you shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships (because that worked so very well for us in 2016 and 2020.)

My father enjoyed my pain. Because I was his child, he got the same amount of attention from me whether or not he was kind.

He could have changed, but he didn’t.

He didn’t have to.

Was this because he thought I didn’t deserve bodily autonomy, boundaries, or a single day without someone shitting on my joy or being fucked with?

Was this because he was a Republican? Was he a Republican because he was an asshole? Was he an asshole because he was a Republican?

Eh. Sheesh. You can’t generalize about people! It’s probably just a coincidence.

You may be expected to show up at holiday gatherings and if you go and are unable to hide your upset about the election, you may be told you’re overreacting. Or, if your family is like my former family, where you’re outnumbered by people who do not think like you, and there’s a pecking order, you will be given the cold shoulder, made to “prove” yourself, laughed at, or shunned.

Maybe not though! Maybe they’ll just be passive aggressive! God, I’m such a Grinch. I mean, I don’t know them, they could be perfectly lovely.

And even if they are perfectly lovely…

You’ll know. And that will be hard to sit with and I do not envy you.

But…are they perfectly lovely? Because the stories I am hearing aren’t really even about how people voted, it’s about how obnoxious people are being about how they voted. The family stories I am hearing the most right now are about people not listening, responding to their loved ones’ concerns with condescension. Too often, there are stories that remind me of my father, who was, remember, a man capable of having an emotional affair with a fake child to emotionally control his real child, continuing to badger, and bait, and badger, and bait, until finally, when you can’t take it anymore-

you snap. To their amusement.

But hopefully yours are perfectly lovely. Hopefully seeing leaders that remind you of your narcissistic parents won’t trigger you so much that you will have to ditch your narcissistic parents.

Right?

Only you know the way forward. Just…if you’re going to hang in there and try to keep the peace or change hearts and minds, try not to lose your mind.

Families that truly love each other spend the holidays together because they want to be together, not because presence is owed. People who have your back and adore you don’t guilt trip you when you miss a gathering and don’t passive aggress at you over the peas.

That includes you and me. Why would we want to gather and go through the charade of family when absolutely nobody feels emotionally good to be there? I've been there, and it usually ends up with me hoping that Uncle Pasta will say something stupid so I can have an excuse to confront him, or better yet, leave.

Estrangements and no-contact can be temporary, they don’t need to be announced, and they can be couched in lies. You do not need to know how long you need, and you need as long as you need. Maybe it’s just skipping the one holiday, and then you will re-evaluate. Maybe it’s going, but refusing to play nice or allow people to be rude to you. Think of all the energy you could save by withdrawing from people-pleasing, and focusing on healing for yourself and those who support you.

I started my estrangement with my father saying I needed a break, to gather my thoughts, and instead of being given one, he pushed and pushed and pushed until the estrangement ended up lasting years. It wasn’t to punish him. That was the amount of time I actually needed for the break.

If you’re like me, you might find that estrangement, temporary or longer, is easier than you think, because they actually don’t care about you all that much. While that hurts, ultimately, it’s a good thing. It gives you an amazing amount of energy to show up for those who do care about you.

Even though I feel lonely and sorry for myself that I have been shunned, I can’t say that I miss the experience of actually being around all of them. When I gather with my chosen family, I am not batting off insults and slights, and I feel more relaxed and comfortable. They are happy when I am happy, not when I am riled up.

I am glad I listened to that tape again. Who knows what anyone else would think of it? Just like the Access Hollywood Tape, I’m sure many people would listen and think, how cute.

That’s ok. My six-year-old self doesn’t need those people. She needs me.

My fifty-two year old self willingly withdraws into the deep place inside herself, and sits on the floor, putting her arm around six-year-old-Lia.

I tell her one year after this recording was made, you will walk in on your mother having a psychotic break, and you will somehow immediately know that it is because your father has cheated on her with a woman named Melissa. This will be a major turning point for you. Everything that made you feel safe will be shattered; but you are going to survive and someday we will meet and I will love you and will take care of us until we die. Oh, and watch out for Tiffany. That bitch is going to sue you and have a secret funeral for your mom.

I woke up the morning after Election Day with a feeling that not only did my family not love me, but that many of your families don’t much love you either. Or rather, they love whatever they think it is they did more than they worry about the safety of you and people more vulnerable than themselves. (Or, according to a lot of anecdotes from people that I respect who are hanging in there with their relatives, they have significant cognitive delay which prevents them from connecting action to consequence.)

If your family is the way mine was, they will do everything they can possibly do to make you miserable around them so that you cut contact. That way, they can be free of you and have the benefit of blaming you for it. Better still that it’s an election year, upon which they shall glom.

On November sixth, a new level of realization I didn’t think was available to me dawned, and even though I know a lot of people are suffering in toxic family spaces or through estrangement, I felt it in my bones.

Despite the heartbreak, I felt so much anger lifting away. I felt so much energy return to my soul.

No more trying to convince people that I’m a human being. If they don’t get that, they don’t get me.

I have enough experience of flinging myself at the mercy of others, trying to matter. I don’t even have an inkling to do that now.

I feel more like me than ever.

And in that sense of self I stand here strong on the other side of the rushing river of Estrangement, waiting for anyone to cross that needs it, standing here, ready to open the door to the secret passage inside yourself that will lead through another secret passage, to the bustling, hopping speakeasy that is life…

After the Estrangement.