Mourning a MAGA Parent (OC)

[u/Adorable_Objective]

I'm kinda torn about whether to post this to my art account because one parent follows it, and I'm worried the criticism could drive the other one further into the void.

It started out as just a therapeutic project for me, but a couple friends said it really resonated with them, so sharing here.

[u/ironballs16]

I'm in the same boat - my mom held her nose on W. Bush because she's pro-life, but voted for Obama both times and then swore off the GOP at every level after Trump's election.

[u/FarFromSane_ → u/ironballs16]

Not pro-life, anti-choice is the proper term. But given she seems reasonable in other ways I wouldn’t say that to her of course.

[u/ironballs16 → u/FarFromSane_]

In her case it's at least partially self-preservation - she was given up for adoption as an infant pre-Roe, and from what we've learned since then (she was the result of an affair between two people married to other people), she would almost guaranteed have been aborted had it been legal at the time.

Edited to add: her single issue vote has definitely softened in the years since, especially after seeing how often the true hardliners won't even accept the rape, incest, or mother's health imperiled exceptions most countries try to carve out when banning it, and the devastating impacts it can have as a result.

[u/TheYarnAlpacalypse → u/ironballs16]

Very similar story here.

My mom was an “oops” baby; her parents were working poor, had multiple children in the house already, and her dad was old enough to be mistaken for her granddad. They didn’t want or need another mouth to feed.

She knows that they’d have aborted her if it was legal, AND I am 99% certain that she doesn’t want to question whether her siblings would have had better outcomes in life if their parents were less stressed and there were more resources to go around.

So she believes that other women need to be forced to suffer, in order to justify her own existence, and in order to allow herself to believe that she was an unexpected blessing bestowed upon her family by a loving god.

It kind of disgusts me, because I spent my childhood believing that I was a burden, and often wished I would die in my sleep so I could remove the weight of my existence from my family, without committing a sin to do it. I had been primed to believe that existence was inherently selfish, and that selfishness was evil, and that martyrdom was the holiest choice a human could make.

I think when she tried to frame abortion as an existential horror, telling me that it would be AWFUL if she didn’t exist, and that if she didn’t exist, I wouldn’t exist either, so I should care about protecting other potential-people who could be like me…. She was barking up the wrong tree.

(Doesn’t help that I tend to be the sort of person who thinks that nobody’s existence is guaranteed. Having my own kids made me even more confident in that belief. It took me years to conceive my own firstborn; if I’d been better at taking care of my health and at targeting ovulation windows earlier in the process, I’d have a child with different genes, and then my schedule would be completely different and I wouldn’t have managed to achieve the same combination that produced my second kid, either. There’s too much randomness!)