My Aunt called in Journal

me yesterday. I want to say “out of the blue”, but we had emailed about having a phone conversation last week. It just didn’t work out.
So he called me yesterday evening/afternoon. I felt surprised, I’ll put it that way. I haven’t spoken to my aunt in well.. awhile. She was here a little over a year ago for my brother’s wedding. Before that… it had been about 5 years.
My aunt is very old- she’s my dad’s older sister by about 7 or 8 years. So she’s 70 something now. Maybe close to 80. She started out very pushy. Very insistent- very divisive and defensive.
“Michelle, you cannot be so passive! Your passivity is support for the destruction of our nation!” and she really emphasized my name, every time she said it. It was… annoying.
I could sort of feel the intensity of her inner world pouring out through her words. She was scared, anxious, stressed… but she was putting all that garbage on me.
I disengaged a few times. She kept coming back at me- it was an over hour long conversation- she kept on with the passive stuff. “You cannot afford to be so helpless and hopeless!” she asserted. “I never said that.” I told her evenly. “Well, you sound that way.”
“Okay. But that’s not what I said.”

I told her that your generation, and my dad’s generation, sold me and mine out. You sold me out and now you want to know what it is that I’m doing?? Why am I so passive?
I’m looking forward to a devastated world. She said we’re a rich country- and I said No, we absolutely are not. We are in debt to our eyeballs- “Well your precious Trump didn’t do anything about that, either!” she quipped.
Yeah, okay. Who cares? I don’t care. I really don’t. I don’t give a shit who’s fault in particular it is. Trump or not-Trump or whoever before. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.

You know what the conversation was like? It was sort of like… being born to wealthy parents who had everything handed to them and being kicked out on the streets to live the life of an urchin. And then, they come back after years of hard living, and ask why I’m letting the economy go to shit. “We’re depending on you to take care of us in our old age!” they wail plaintively.
I look at them with raised eyebrows and I’m like. “I don’t care. Go live on the streets.” and they cry and wail. Like little children. Except they’re not! They’re grown ass adults that made the decision in conscious rationality to sell out their own children, and now are complaining that I don’t care about them or their needs.

It wasn’t a totally worthless conversation. My aunt quieted down again when I told her that I didn’t know what my dad or my uncle were thinking, reading, or saying. I have no influence with them or over them, and my own father doesn’t care about me. He hasn’t spoken to me since May.
She seemed a little disturbed by that. She was in disbelief. She did tell me about her own black swan experience. I learned something about my family- well the family that my dad came from. I know so little about all that. He doesn’t talk about it. And he won’t talk to me.
“I just can’t believe that,” she told me (about my dad not loving me) “Do you… Do you think he loved your brother and that’s why?”
“I really don’t… I don’t know. I don’t think so. But he doesn’t talk to me. I really don’t know.”

It’s so sad, you know. When a parent hates you in this way, you never get any real answers. I don’t know anything about my dad’s history, his parents, his life. He would rather keep all that to himself and deprive me of any sort of insight or advantage that information might give me.
My mom, too. I told her as much. They just have no idea the harm that they’ve done to me. That they’re still doing.