My parents are so unbelievably devout in their dedication to the idea of the heteronormative conservative Southern Baptist nuclear family…..To their utter dismay (and complete denial), I grew up to be a liberal feminist atheist lesbian who is child-free by choice.
Here are a few of the completely bizarre things they did to me that I realized later weren’t actually normal:
1) When I was 18, my stepmother dragged me to a specialist 3 hours away so they could check that I was fertile and my uterus was viable for reproduction.
2) Even after many years of arguing because I never intend to marry or have kids, my parents dragged me into the American Girl doll store and picked out a few hundred dollars’ worth of dolls for my future daughter. These toys now sit in storage.
3) They have a separate (large) savings account for my wedding. When I told them I didn’t want to get married and asked if I could use that money for school, they refused.
4) I argued that if I ever had kids or adopted, I would never push gender roles on my kids. They could play with whatever toys they wanted and dress how they wanted. My parents threw a fit and said if I did have kids, they would fight for custody because I would “mess up” any kid I had with my feminist rhetoric. They also said it was abusive for me to allow a male child to play with dolls if he wanted to.
5) When I refused to date men, sent me to a therapist to “overcome my issues with men.” Later I realized this was probably some form of conversion therapy.
6) When I refused to date men or go to church, they would invite me places that would turn out to be chaperoned blind dates with devout members of their church. I have angrily walked out of a chaperoned ice cream date with a youth pastor…I had to walk home in the summer heat and didn’t even get ice cream out of it.
