I should preface this by saying that my parents don’t pay for my college. They’ve been consistently angry at me over my choices, though. To make a complicated set of circumstances short, I didn’t go to college until I was 22. At the time, I lived in Montana, but didn’t have Montana residency for tuition purposes. My parents (as in, mother and stepfather) lived in Colorado, where I wasn’t willing to live. I was born, raised, and graduated high school in California. I had to choose between an acceptance letter from the University of Montana and $35,000 in education expenses a year, or an offer from my paternal grandmother to live with her in Silicon Valley, where I could go to community college and use AB 540 to waive out of state tuition and get state financial aid. With a BOG waiver and Pell, that meant community college would be free, and my grandmother didn’t want room and board. Add in that she lives 2.5 miles from the best community college ever established, and the fact that I’d originally been wanting to do two years at the University of Montana and then transfer to a California school, and my decision was obvious. This made my parents extremely angry. They wanted me to go to the University of Montana, and they were quite adament that the cost didn’t matter because student loans (I’m not sure if my parents understand that you pay those back.). They thought community college beneath me. They also hate my paternal grandmother’s side of the family. They particularly hate that I set aside my anger at my father for spending my entire teenage years in state prison, because I can actually approach him for emotional support, which I’ve never been able to do with my parents.
It’s been over two years, I’m now studying at a CSU, I’ve moved out of my grandmother’s house (She supported me through community college, but we both agreed I needed to find a place for university), and I have an associate’s degree with magna cum laude on it, and they are still mad. I can barely talk to them without getting criticized, and they don’t tell me things. My mother had a stroke a year ago, and I didn’t know for two weeks. I told my grandmother who told my father, and I got a very angry phone call from my stepdad screaming about how that’s exactly why he doesn’t tell me things. How dare I tell my grandmother, who supported me financially at the time, the truth about why I was so upset. So when my stepgrandfather got diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I didn’t find out for weeks. When my maternal grandmother died this summer (good riddance), I only knew that day because my sister was handling affairs instead of my mother. I don’t do this to them. When my maternal grandmother got rushed to the hospital, I knew before my mother, and I called her right away. This is getting increasingly infuriating. Added to it is that they don’t seem to want me around much. They flew me out to Colorado this summer, so I thought they did, but they mostly avoided me like when I was a teenager the whole time I was there. I hadn’t seen them in two and a half years. If they want help, they call my sister, not me (And let’s not get started on the ridiculous amount of responsibility placed on her.). A couple weeks ago, they visited California for a week and a half. Went from Sacramento to San Jose to see my sister several times. Didn’t come to San Francisco to see me once. They can also be unreasonable about the weirdest things. My parents are fairly liberal, and support transgender rights. I mentioned being transgender on Facebook (which I block non-friends from seeing), and it turns out my stepdad was using my brother’s Facebook to look at my Facebook. He flipped out, not because I’m trans, but because he very firmly believed that my brother was too young to know that trans people exist and that I was being very inappropriate to clue him in. My brother was fourteen when this happened. He had a similar freakout about a gay man’s memoirs being in my room when my brother was twelve. Not to mention that my parents say they support me being trans and always have, but when I was a kid they were very strict about never allowing me to do anything girly (my mother even flat out said she didn’t want her son acting or looking like a girl). Oh, and they still maintain that I made a mistake to go to community college instead of the University of Montana.
It’s hit the point where I need to ask them if I’m even part of this family, if they are still angry and why, and if they’d prefer it if I just stopped talking to them. Problem is, I’ve never really stood up to them before (They weren’t the type to take lip or disagreement from a teenager one bit, and as an adult I maintained the lesson to keep my mouth shut and avoid confrontation), and I don’t know how adults are supposed to handle calling out their parents. Especially parents who have never really been approachable (I can count on one hand the number of times where we discussed things when I was a kid as opposed to yelling and putting feet down). Parents, what would you expect from your kids in this situation? What would make you want to listen?