mistressofmuses | (no subject)

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I went to breakfast with my dad, which was nice. He's in Colorado for a couple weeks, staying with friends and recording music. It's been a long time since I saw him - he visited briefly back in... November? I think? Time is still fake. At the time we were still being super cautious with distancing, and he'd quarantined in preparation for coming up here, as had the friends he stayed with, so he just came by and we said hi in the parking lot.

He's been double vaxxed for a little while, and so are his friends, and I'm almost to my full protection date. We went our favorite breakfast place, and talked. Then we went by his favorite coffee shop and talked some more, ha.

Stuff with him is going well - he's really excited about the album he's working on right now, and how it fits in with the broader project that it's a part of. He's got a couple songs he's really happy with.

He and Taylor are completely estranged, so there's kind of an awkwardness there. I've been pretty firm about not wanting to be in the middle of it, and that I will not be the middleman to circumvent Taylor's boundaries, and this time he was good about not asking me to.

I came back around noon so I could come along with Alex to his riding lesson. That was set to start at 1:30, and so I just hung out in the car. I finished Fugitive Telemetry, which I really enjoyed!

Unfortunately, the hour lesson somehow turned into us being gone until after 5:30. The "somehow" was just lots of little things adding up, but it's still a constant frustration how something that's supposed to be two hours max gets stretched into more than twice that long, especially when I feel like I have so much to do that I can't ever catch up on.

Bleh. It was still a really pleasant day, I just hate having the feeling of "should be doing all this other stuff" hovering over me the whole time. And then semi-ironically, now that I'm home, I'm so tired that now I don't want to do any of the stuff I should be working on. Sobcry.

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Sounds like you had a good time with your dad, which is awesome. That's good that he's respecting Taylor's boundaries. Maybe that'll go a ways toward healing whatever happened.

And that's definitely not cool that you couldn't get things done that you needed/wanted to because things ran late. :( That always happens when we deal with Joe and Linda. Always. I don't like going anywhere with them when they're driving because then you're on their time. It happens every single time that Kathy goes to do stuff with them and one of the two of them drives. She always winds up stuck with them, eating late, and then coming home way later than she wants. They have no consideration for anyone else when it's everything they want, but of course, they would pitch a fit if it was on the other side of things.

It was a good time! It's been since pre-pandemic that I got to actually sit down with him, or give him a hug. And we had more time this time, too, since usually either we're meeting before I go to work, or when he has a meeting to get to.

I don't know if anything will fix the estrangement, and it sucks to be in the middle. I will always take Taylor's side, because they're my best friend and I love them more than anything. Their grievances are legitimate cases of emotional abuse from my dad's family, as well as his unwillingness to take it seriously, as well as persistent disrespect of their boundaries even when they tried to bring it up. He can be extremely dismissive of things he doesn't want to deal with.
But Taylor went zero contact with no additional warnings. My dad DID brush it off when they tried to talk about their issues, but there was no final warning or ultimatum or anything, and so he still says he has no idea why they cut off contact. (He should. But I know he didn't realize how much it hurt Taylor that he didn't care about the things they brought up.)
And I see how much it hurts him. One of his songs on this album is about it. He's drunk-texted me begging me to tell him what happened, and he posts a lot about how much he misses Taylor.

I love them both, so I hate to see him hurting. But I fully respect and support Taylor's right to enforce their boundaries, and not be in contact with someone who hurt them.

But UGH, yes, I HATE that. "How long will this take" is a very important thing for me, because I plan my whole day around blocks of time. (This is the most effective way I know of to kind of rein in my ADHD and anxiety.) Sometimes there are delays, and I get that. But when things drag on for no good reason it drives me crazy.
"Hey, I just need to run into the store real fast." *spends 45 minutes looking for coupons online* *gets a facebook notification and spends 30 minutes reading a comment thread* "Just one quick thing on my game" *half an hour later...*

I know this is a struggle between different ADHD symptoms, as his therapist also suspects he has it, and I don't disagree. I know I can get side tracked and distracted too, so it's not that I don't sympathize. It's just really frustrating to plan my day around "I'll be home by three, and have a couple hours before dinner to work on something" and have it derailed by hours.

But yuck. It sounds like Joe and Linda just plain don't care about anyone else's plans. (Not surprising, from what you've said before.) Or figure that it shouldn't be a big deal if they delay someone else, because spending longer with them is the only thing anyone should want to do, right? *eyeroll*

I'm getting from your comments that Taylor is non-binary/gender non-conforming, and that somehow didn't sit well with your father or he likely made extremely insensitive comments about it? Because yeah, that could be really unforgiveable, esp if asked not to make shitty comments and they kept up. It's not my business, of course, but I'm sorry that the relationship was beyond strained, and it's a shame that your dad is sad about it a little too late. But Taylor absolutely shouldn't put themself in an uncomfortable position just to appease your dad. They have a right to their boundaries, and until they feel entirely respected and safe, they aren't obligated to forgive and make amends.

Yeah, sometimes you might have to just pass on accompanying Alex on things like that if you have stuff you want to do at home and a small window in which to do them. That might be your best option as far as that goes. Of course, when it's like the bookstore thing, that's harder since y'all have just the one car, but Alex might have to learn to compromise his time when there are things you want/need to do as well. Or work things where you two do one day as an "Alex day" and one as a "Katy day." And on Katy days, Alex doesn't get to derail the agenda for "I just want to run in there real quick," when you know that "real quick" can turn into a much longer thing.

Yeah, Joe and Linda aren't real good with other people's boundaries. I love them, as I've said, but I want to shake them a lot. Or hit them. Or scream at them. They get offended by other people's boundaries, as if they're a slight to them. Kathy texted Joe today to find out when they wanted to do something for Kayden's birthday, and Joe texted back that he was exhausted today but "Do you want to do something tomorrow?" (meaning Sunday) Kathy texted back, "We were actually thinking next weekend since his birthday is the 19th," and we both want to just stay in and be lazy tomorrow. But they're supposed to get back to us what they decide to do for it, and I hope like hell that Linda doesn't offer to cook something at the house because Kathy and I *really* don't want to be trapped at their house for a day because of what happened on her birthday (lunch starting late, Joe snapping at the boys). If we go to a restaurant like they did for Jeffrey's then we show up when we all show up, the food will be prompt, and we'll get to leave. LOL We can really cultivate how much time we spend with them.

That's pretty much it. Taylor hasn't yet formally come out as nonbinary to anyone (besides me) in our family, but has never hidden that they're very non-gender conforming, either. And my dad would make comments like "you should grow your hair out" and "you should wear dresses more often" trying to make them "more feminine." He and friends have made shitty transphobic jokes, not realizing that hey, some of those shitty comments directly apply to your kid who is in the room!
(My dad isn't generally transphobic, and one of my step-brother's best friends came out as trans a couple years ago, and my dad has been loudly supportive of him. But... he can take the "don't be so sensitive" stance when it comes to things like shitty jokes. He's angrily liberal, but treats "it was just a joke" as a whole separate thing from his social views.)
He also put a lot of awkward pressure on Taylor about having kids, which IS something both Taylor and I have been very clear we aren't interested in. But my other step-brothers have had kids, and he put weird pressure on Taylor to play with one of the babies, and change diapers, and stuff as "practice", and it was super uncomfortable for them.
While my dad never *intended* to make them uncomfortable, he did, and brushed it off as "just a joke" when Taylor tried to bring it up.
(Also his sister was really emotionally abusive to Taylor as a child, and so was his mom to an extent, but he refused to acknowledge it or even allow Taylor the boundary of "please don't talk about them at my birthday dinner" and such.)

It's true. I think I will just have to skip some days. I know that he likes when I come along, and I DO like taking an interest in what he's doing, but when I don't know if it might eat up my ENTIRE day off, it's hard to be enthusiastic about it. (And I don't want to resent it.)
The stopping into stores is hard to say no to, because it's almost always "I need to get one ingredient for dinner", and since he does almost all of our cooking, I don't want to begrudge him that. But I get frustrated that even a "real quick trip" turns into an hour+ because he got sidetracked on his phone while sitting in the parking lot.
But having "hey, this is our plan, and we AREN'T DEVIATING FROM IT" would be nice for a change, haha.

Joe and Linda's one-sided appreciation of boundaries is EXTREMELY frustrating. I really struggle with people who lack the... empathy, I guess, to see that "hey, I'm doing that thing to you that I don't like!" or "well, I wouldn't want someone to do xyz, so I guess I shouldn't do it to you".
I hope that Kayden's birthday winds up being something fun (and outside of the house.) I know that feeling of not wanting to be stuck for some indefinite length of time, for sure. A restaurant at least gives you an easy out, and a fairly set timeframe that can't be delayed forever!
It seems like one of those "good fences make good neighbors" thing, metaphorically. Carefully curated quality time will be better by far than massive quantities of frustrating time.

Ahhhhh. That 'don't be sensitive'. Yeah. Joe and Linda do that. They're very supportive of LGBTQIA stuff, though they don't "get" non-binary. You saw what I wrote about the 'trap' Linda set for Kas and me (or me by using Kas) back on last Christmas Eve. They 'get' being gay, they 'get' being bi (though pan probably confuses them, and honestly I don't think it's invalid because duh, it's not, but I honestly don't see the difference? And I honestly feel like the people who insist there's a huge difference are always telling me I'm transphobic when I'm not?), they 'get' being trans. They just don't 'get' the between/no genders. My brother reposted something on FB the other day that I really wanted to slam him for because he must have thought it was witty, but instead, I hid the post, and since it came from some guy named 'Larry', I hid all from Larry. But it talked about "Those of you who don't think gender is important, just try to get milk from a bull. God knew what he was doing." I'm so done with that shit, and one of these days, it's going to blow up in his (or Linda's) face because I'm going to blow up. So I understand Taylor's reluctance to deal with y'all's father. They're well within their right to keep distance until they feel comfortable and safe around him again. I've spent a lot of years ensuring Kas that she's not a bad person for cutting her mother out when her mother was the one to cut Kas out first (until Kas apologized for being a lesbian and not a Christian). So I get it.

No, I get that, and Alex needs to be more cognizant of getting distracted on his phone. He needs to be more considerate about your time. But yeah, you might have to start bowing out of going with him sometimes, esp when you specifically have things you want to do and have limited time to do them before you've reached your exhaustion limit.

I really do wish that they'd notice shit like that? I mean, a lot of the time in the past, we'd be meeting them for lunch, and they'd be running late. Almost consistently, we'd have to sit there for a while waiting on them. And one time, we'd all gone to Thorndale. Kathy, Kas, and I (and Aunt Norma) were there first, and Joe and Linda showed up 15 minutes after they said they'd be there, and Linda's son and DIL were going to come, but they were running even more late (as they tend to do), and Linda had the GALL to complain about how late her son and DIL always were. Kathy, Kas, and I just looked at each other. It's supposed to rain most of this week and Saturday and Sunday, so if they did that again where Linda was going to cook and cook outside, I'd be really annoyed because that's what happened on her birthday, and then it was all shades of annoyance. I really think that they need to plan for a restaurant, and even if it's not one in Bastrop like they did for Jeffrey's, they could do others that are convenient for everyone, and then we could just leave when it's over. I've become very much a "good fences make good neighbors" kind of person, esp with Joe and Linda. Only the fences I think will make us the best neighbors are all those states between Texas and NC. I think they should be a sufficient fence. LOL

Yeah, I hate the excuse of "I don't *get* it," especially from the people who say things like "I get xyz identity, but abc identity is going *too far*" or something. And yuck at the "hur dur, god picked your gender and you can't change it" thing. I see that kind of shit a lot (though often reposted to groups that are mocking the attitude, but still) and it always makes me roll my eyes. I've defriended most of the people in my life who post that sort of thing, but there are a couple extended family members or other people I don't want to totally cut off contact with.

(Bi vs. pan discourse is a Whole Thing, and I hate it lmao. I'm not anti-pan, and am a big fan of bi-pan solidarity type stuff. I think the two are extremely similar for most people, but if someone finds that one suits them better than another, I'm good with that, and respect it.
But at least SOME of the definitions of pan that are out there, especially in places that aren't very involved with queer spaces in general, are *super* bi- and transphobic. Like "bi means you like men and women, and pan means you like men, women, and trans people." When that is rarely how bi people or organizations define it, and that definition of pan treats "trans" like some magical third category, instead of just... the gender they are.)

Agreed. Sometimes I'll just have to stay home so I can work on my own stuff. And yes, I do wish he'd be more aware of not getting sidetracked on that sort of thing. I know I'm guilty of similar things sometimes, but I try very hard not to let my distractions inconvenience anyone else.

That is SO frustrating. I've known a lot of people like that, who just really are unable of recognizing that other people may have thoughts and feelings. Like, they know that other people do, of course, but fail to recognize those thoughts or feelings or emotions as equally "real" or important as their own. I know that in psych courses I took we talked about things like the "fundamental attribution error", which treats your own motives and circumstances differently than others. Typically, you give yourself more credit for good things, and less blame for bad things. Like "Oh, if I'm late, it was unavoidable because the thing I was doing was important, but when THEY are late, it's because they should have planned better" or "I did well on this test because I studied really hard, but they did well because they were lucky." It seems like they kind of have that attitude, where it's fine when they do something, but terrible for anyone else.

Lol, I think that kind of distance would be a REALLY GOOD fence, haha.

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