"My mom told me that, if I jumped off a bridge, she wouldn't care."
That's how my friend responded when I asked how his forced spur-of-the-moment weekend visitation with his ultra-conservative parents in California went.
By her logic, sending her gay son to straight camp is the ultimate act of love.
But... I thought that if you love someone, you let them make their own decisions. I thought that love was about giving, not getting. Helping, not hurting. Listening, not shouting. Remember that phrase--"If you truly love someone, you'll let them go"?
Everyone has his or her own parameters of what defines this word, but I think society has perverted the meaning of it. And by society, I mean the collective unit--the general population living under the same sky, breathing the same air, and receiving the same messages from major advertisement companies.
Behind this perversion is the commercialization of love. It's nothing new, in terms of mankind's history of existence. I'm simply expounding on some ancient observation made by Plato or someone like him who recognized this phenomenon way before me. Advertising corporations may try to convince you that love is something you can purchase. Religious groups may try to convince you that love is something you can earn. Scientists may also convince you that love is simply a mixture of chemicals in your brain.
If you agree with any of these ideas, I ain't mad atcha.
But if you think about the times in your life when you have felt most loved, you probably felt free, undeserving, and maybe even a little bit spiritual.
I think we'd all agree that love doesn't hold anyone prisoner. That's precisely the paradox presented in the Frustrated Mother Syndrome: A woman who knows her son to be gay but refuses to accept it feels powerless to change him, so she acts out of fear and ignorance (and promotes such fear and ignorance) by administering a punishment and calling it love.
Let me translate:
"I'm sending you to behavioral therapy" means "I think something is fundamentally wrong about you, so much so that you should change it"
And
"I've done all I can do to help you, but if you refuse to change, I won't know what else to do" means "I don't recognize my own insecurities which cause me to feel angry towards you, so I'm going to abandon you in order to ease my own pain"
But a more precise translation might be,
"I blame myself for this quality in you that I loathe, and I'm too afraid to look past it, so I need a period of solitude in order to remember that you are my son and that a mother would give up her life for her child, as well as a moment to gather the strength I need to accept the things I cannot change about you, push past them, and continue loving you no matter what"
At the end of the day, next week, or even ten years from now, what will have actually mattered in your life? Whatever the answer is, THAT is what deserves your energy.
