A while back I posted about this one liberal nutjob that was the mother of a high school friend/ex of mine, and believe me, she’s gone completely out to sea. I was gonna use pseudonyms for this rant, but fuck it, I’m too lazy to censor the screenshots. Recently, she and her kid have unfriended me from Facebook in a blaze of glory so hypocritical that I felt it necessary to explain the backstory in full detail once and for all. While I’m obviously annoyed that people like this exist and inconvenience me, my real problem is that there are cancerous women like Debbie Chaffey that are well within their legal right to manipulate and control their – and other people’s – children, and that someone I was just starting to consider a friend fell victim to her mental problems.
Trigger Warning: This point on contains references to sexual experiences that might be construed as abuse, so read ahead at your own discretion.
It started back in high school. I was seventeen years old, and definitely going through my angst period, compounded by the loss of my first love. I don’t remember quite how I met Justin – through mutual friends, obviously, since he was a year behind me grade-wise, but other than that I can’t quite recall how he got there. I remember my opinion about him at the time was more or less neutral, but he seemed to have an interest in me and wanted to get to know me better, so he started inviting me and the older of my kid brothers over to his place. We met his mom, who seemed welcoming and amicable despite being unfiltered, and we would hang out. After some time, I had a falling out with my brother and I started going to Justin’s place alone, and that’s when it started getting uncomfortable.
Obviously he liked me, and I guess at some point I enjoyed the one-on-one attention I got from him. I was also fond of his mom at the time, as I didn’t have a very good relationship with my own mother back then. The trouble was, back then, I didn’t really understand how to discern between feelings of infatuation (which I didn’t have) and the feeling of wanting to be liked, and more to the point, I did not know how to reject people (part of this had to do with my abusive father, but I don’t want to blame all my problems on daddy issues). I remember he and I took my youngest siblings out for trick-or-treating, and after he dropped us off, he insisted I let him kiss me on the cheek. Lacking in confidence and any real conviction on sexual boundaries, I relented, but then tried to put it out of my mind.
A short time later, we were at his place again and there was tension, so I asked, “Justin, what are we?” (in regard to relationship status), and from there, we decided to be a couple. We ended up kissing, and I enjoyed the sensations at the time, but also felt guilty and dirty for not standing my ground (although I was agnostic at the time, I came from a very Christian background). Later that day I remember going home and Robotripping for the first time, to try and escape the confusion I was feeling. The next day at school, I had the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life. I downed Robitussin again when I was scheduled to see Justin again, and in spite of the fact that he knew I was inebriated, he made out with me anyway, which was a very ungentlemanly thing to do. As the “relationship” progressed so did the sexual experimentation, all of which I had initially objected to and been coerced into being acted upon. Although I remained a virgin – by the accepted social definition of the term – until college, one of the aforementioned experiences resulted in physical damage that I was certain had destroyed my integrity, and I was angry. All of this was made permissible by Debbie – herself a sexual abuse victim – due to her liberal lack of supervision and devil-may-care attitude toward teenage sexuality.
In addition to this, Debbie was the one who gave me my first alcoholic drink – she was one of those types of the mindset that “as long as they only drink/fuck/whatever in my house while I’m there, it’s okay.” Being the lightweight that I am, I got instantly tipsy, but for whatever reason Justin only wanted to play Yu-Gi-Oh! cards that day – I think had he not been struggling with transgenderism (although I would not find out until years later), he probably would have raped me at some point in our involvement. Incidentally, Debbie also told me that she didn’t believe in bisexuality, but boy would she change her tune when her baby came out of the closet and she began to post ad nauseam about trans awareness!
(Heh…Facebook did a thing on my news feed.)
Speaking of bisexuality, when he and I finally broke up (on somewhat mutual terms) I decided to explore an aspect of myself that I had discovered when I was thirteen, and he told me he knew a girl who was interested in possibly being my girlfriend (let’s call her “Jeanette”). Well, the day comes where I finally got to meet Jeanette, after weeks of hype, and it turns out that she has a serious boyfriend – like, someday going to be married serious.
I don’t put the blame entirely on him for things going downhill, though – still being the pussy that I was, I decided to get passive-aggressive revenge by romancing an ex-boyfriend behind Justin’s back for a time, which I’m definitely not proud of considering who said ex was. If I could go back, I would just woman up and stand my ground with him…but alas, hindsight is always 20/20.
Fast-forward to several years in the future. I reconnected with both Justin and Debbie on Facebook, and later found out through the former that he was transitioning to female. Although initially I had my doubts, assuming that Debbie’s Andrea Dworkin-inspired mentality had instilled internalized misandry into him, but then I realized that it was possible that all of Justin’s past aggression was an attempt to present as how a male might be expected to act, and a cover for gender dysphoria. We forgave each other for past transgressions, and I found a new friend in “Rena,” who generally seemed like a nice, average girl. Most of our conversations were about video games, because it’s teh vidya that brings people together, and rarely about serious issues.
Her mother, on the other hand, proves herself batshit insane with the social justice issues – LGBT rights, feminism, bleeding-heart liberal, the whole nine yards. Despite insisting over and over that she’s the most tolerant person in the world, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so easily and unironically offended over fuck everything. Nevertheless, I did my best to tolerate her radicalism because she was the mom of my friend, and she claimed to care for my well-being:
But then I made one innocuous post, and the shit hit the fan.
(The censored name is my BFF, who I won’t drag into this drama. Because she will win every time.)
Notice that this woman was so triggered by a stupid meme that she ended over a decade of perceived family-level friendship. Remember, this woman apparently considered me family:
And yet someone who has repeatedly gone on diatribes about how wrong it is to disown your children for being queer finds nothing wrong with cutting them off for a difference in opinion. No wonder Rena seemed so meek regarding her mother. Speaking of which…
At first I thought there were no hard feelings about the falling out, but apparently once she read my after-the-fact reply (where I pointed out her old lady’s hypocrisy), I got an earful – er, eyeful:
At first I was disappointed that I had unintentionally hurt my friend’s feelings, and I wanted to give her some space until the whole thing blew over. But a couple of days ago, she unfriended me out of the blue, and I couldn’t help if it had to do with me reacting to this Facebook post. Bear in mind, I didn’t laugh at the comic because I found it to be true; I found it to be such an over-the-top exaggeration that was meant to rustle jimmies that I couldn’t help but be amused by it. That’s kind of the point of satire, and you would think someone accustomed to watching Monty Python and Family Guy would get that. But I suppose with that one final blow, I have to accept that I lost yet another friend to toxic parenting.
I hope that one day Rena escapes from her mom’s influence. Right now she lives with and takes care of her mom for a meager living, so God only knows what will happen from there. I know that she thinks that her mom is the only one who has supported her in her troubling and confusing time, and I can respect that. But remember the parable of the bird in the cow pie who was pulled out and eaten by a cat: not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend. And I’ve seen other friends who were victimized by crappy parents as well: I knew one person who was molested by a respected family member and had their mom spoil them their whole life to make up for it, and another who was adopted by two incestuous relatives that treated them more like an equal friend than a ward of their household. There is little more that disgusts me than a permissive parent, because it’s shit like this that creates murderers, rapists, and people who can’t function in society. Permissive, overly-liberal parents are a threat to their own children and to other peoples, and for all the fuckery I can tolerate in this world, I have to draw the line somewhere.
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