Orphaned by choice. Today, I’ve added the majority of my family to the block list on my phone. If they want to contact me, they can reach me through email.

The obvious exception is Gram.

I’ve done this because my interactions with my family have been a negative experience for me for nearly as long as I can remember. There have been benefits, mostly financial, but there have also been detriments mostly to my emotional state and mental health.

They’re in the final stages of moving to Squamish, swapping their living arrangements around. Prior to this, my sister was living as a tenant in my parent’s house, and maintaining it for them while they snowbirded. Now, the house will be hers, and they will be her tenants, when they’re back in Canada.

This arrangement creates a nice buffer. Gram is local, every one else is at least one bridge away.

You may recall I had been looking into heading to Toronto for a while. I had some concerns about not being local for Gram, and this has magnified those concerns.

There is plenty more of this on my mind, but it’ll take me a while to express it.

I feel like if I vent, it’ll be seen as whining & whinging. That by expressing my emotions, I’m somehow being immature about things, despite the fact that the ability to process emotions constructively is sign of maturity.

My parents tend to tell me to grow up, but they have a very odd definition of what being grown up means, I think.

I don’t really understand their values, when I reflect on them. At some point in my development, I rebelled, probably for the usual reasons, and that somehow changed things. Somehow, the post rebellion reconciliation never really solidified. There were attempts at it over the years, which were partially successful, but it was never sustained long enough to develop a permanence. It would get disrupted and pulled apart. Like a shattered bone, never being given enough time to fuse properly, or an object d’art being impatiently restored, with not enough time for the adhesive to harden.

The biggest reason for this is perspective and values. They are so far apart that communication is difficult. What is seen by one side as a minor imposition is a herculean task by the other side, at times. In other instances, both sides will see something as a favour to the other, and then be annoyed at the lack of gratitude.

This lack of common framework, is the source of many of the communication issues.