I’m watching this movie Absent on Netflix instant view. It is making me think of a bunch of things and for no particular reason I decided to share with you ladies. I think I miss getting out.

The movie is a documentary about absent fathers and what that has done to American culture over the past century or so. It is incredibly heterosexual and gender essentialist in its presentation. Holy moly with the gender assumptions–I’ll just say in advance. I am doing my best to flinch only a little and instead substitute “parent by choice” for a lot of the rhetoric. Studies have proven beyond any possible doubt that children of same sex couples do as well or better than children of heterosexual couples… blah blah. Ok, end introduction. 🙂

So my dad wasn’t really in my life. When he was he was a source of horror. I’ve had an interesting journey working on my “Daddy issues”. Watching this movie is personally quite painful. I’m not even done with it. I’m not honestly sure I can handle finishing it today. It’s too hard. I do want to see where they are going with some of this.

I don’t agree with gender essentialism even slightly. But I’m very interested in some of his ideas about aggression (women have hunted throughout all of history too, jerk) and having a kind of balance of personalities between the parents. I am significantly more aggressive than my husband in the vast majority of life.

The movie talks about how little girls look to their parent-by-choice (because children trust their mother’s love in a different way) for validation of their right to exist. That’s something I’m going to have to sit with really hard.

I’m half an hour into the movie. Err, if anyone wants to watch the movie and talk about it I would love to have a conversation. I probably won’t continue babbling if no one responds because I will feel stupid. 🙂

This whole truckload of issues massively impacts my parenting. I over-think life because every model I have in my head is massively dysfunctional. I feel like I never get to coast. I never get to relax and just do what my impulse says because I bloody know my impulses are bad.

I find it interesting that 3/4 of my long-term partners have come from intact families. All of their families have rejected me. Sometimes I think I smell like a homewrecker because I’ve never been part of a home.

(This is where I decided I couldn’t actually handle sharing this with the women in my home schooling group. Originally I started typing this up in their discussion forum. I’m not there to make friends. I’m not there to make friends. I’m not there to make friends. Can’t alienate people. Can’t alienate people. Can’t alienate people. Thank you blogger.)