wontmind replied to your post: “it’s really hard for me to be sympathetic to people who try shit like...”:
okay truly! and its such a weird mindset for us to all be so focused on biology, like truly why does it matter so much? like it just makes me think of that post where a mother talked about feeling pressured into having kids and how she expected that she'd love her babies at first sight but just... didn't. like, we really expect child/parent bonds to be so completely based on biology and not actual love and caring
Exactly! Like, birth or genetics don’t guarantee a relationship. There are so many people in the world who refer to their parents--who are genetically attached to them AND raised them--as like “My sperm donor” or whatever because their relationship was so awful they chose to end it. Children get disowned. Relationships go No Contact. And meanwhile “found families” thrive.
Which makes it easy to see that a lot of this isn’t about thinking that, “Oh, if they share half my genes, we’re guaranteed to love each other,” but it’s a much more selfish ideal about control and ownership. It’s about owning someone from before they were even born and feeling entitled to them because even if your relationship goes to shit, they’ll always be tied to you. It’s a no effort bond that can never really be broken. They’ll always be yours.
Instead of fostering love and loving children as individuals who will eventually have their own families and lives separate from their parents, these people just see legacies and mini-me’s. It’s fucked up and sad.
Growing up, my family was somewhat poor. We lived in a duplex and in a neighborhood full of families in the same situation. Families took turns taking in kids when they knew their parents would be busy, some of us spending days or even weeks at a time in other houses until things got sorted out. My childhood best friend--whose mother I called my aunt--was put in foster care and my mother applied to foster her and her brother because they knew us and we loved them and they got put in with their aunt instead because “she’s blood.” They came out traumatized and different.
The Western understanding of family is so fucking toxic and based on ownership instead of love and I guess in some cases that’s simpler (thinking legally) but just... empathy and existing as individuals or community-families just can’t happen in this mode of understanding family.