After having to play the tolerance games with my family, I managed to spark a sort of truce. I treat them like I care without really investing, and they leave me alone for the day. It's not hard. Just some small tasks.
I keep noticing a pattern. Whenever anyone other than me has to be held accountable, their choices are dismissed amongst each other and the focus is turned back to me through their life stories — which are merely the fuel for their blame.
What makes it particularly calculated is that it's not just deflection. It's exhaustion. The possibility of reciprocity is not denied outright; it is kept suspended,dangling, as if it is still available, but never fully allowed to arrive. The extended and excessive topic shifts, the life stories, the race and gender tangents — none of it is accidental. It’s structured in a way that wears the listener down until they either lose their own train of thought or give up entirely out of patience fatigue. And just like that, they talk you down into submission, effectively drowning your own voice out.
By the time my egg donor's literal hours of speaking is over, the structure naturally flips into its final stage: the moment when the listener is finally “allowed” to speak arrives only when there is no time, space, or energy left for the conversation to continue. She often signals exhaustion herself at that point, claiming she is tired of talking, despite having maintained uninterrupted control of the conversation for hours. The effect is that the conversation is effectively closed at the exact moment reciprocity is supposed to begin.
There are no apologies in this family. Everything is done with intention and no regrets. What follows damage is never repair — it's damage control. Snacks. Small gifts. Worthless things offered after the fact, as if a bag of chips is meant to stand in for accountability. I can just appease her with a honeybun and she'll get over it. It isn’t an apology. It’s a pacifier that usually only work for pets. A tool used to extend the same dynamic just long enough for things to quiet down in their favor — never to resolve anything, just to buy time until the next incident. I see it for exactly what it is.
The topic of race is brought up regularly. My egg donor in particular likes to turn every conversation into a race conversation no matter what it is. You're a black woman, so know your place. Yet she prizes her husband as a black man. She doesn't respect me as a young black woman but in the same sentence will have me thinking that she is an equal to her husband when she's not. She never was. When he makes the firm rules that even she has to follow, she behaves like a spoiled child who was merely allowed to have an opinion because she's liked. Anyone reading this far will likely understand that this is a power move meant to demean and cut me down. Everything is weaponized against me.
My egg donor also seems to carry a deep resentment toward my generation itself. From her viewpoint, something is inherently wrong with me because I am Gen Z. She treats it like a flaw in character rather than a difference in context. Her generation cannot fully understand mine, and there is little effort to bridge that gap — only judgment from a distance. Gen Z becomes just another category, another excuse, another piece of ammunition to use against me when needed.
My autism is also used against me. Medications I once took for my attention span — for a calming effect, as if I had ADHD. There really was nothing wrong with me. I was always an AB honor roll student. My flaw was not understanding how to communicate socially, which isn’t hard to understand given who I grew up with. I was raised off of the issues of others. That would have an influence on anyone. I had to learn how to communicate properly through the internet because my mother wasn’t a fan of teaching me in person. She made it known on multiple occasions that because I was Gen Z, I needed to research everything online. It was her go-to so many times it started to sound like a catchphrase for whenever she didn’t want to be present.
Naturally, as the youngest and most powerless in my immediate family, my word has always had the least credibility. Once the words were spoken out of her mouth, others quickly followed suit with her framing of events. She has always had the ability to set the narrative in a way that becomes difficult to challenge once it takes hold.
She has consistently framed and repeated things about me over the years that I experienced as untrue, shaping how others responded to me long before I had the ability to challenge it directly. Over time, that created a version of me that existed in other people’s minds before I even entered the conversation. Narratives written in stone before I had a real choice.
Her own current husband once told me that he tried to stand up for me at times because even he recognized what he saw as blatant bullying and distortions in what was being said about me over the phone to relatives i'd barely see. In practice, though, it didn’t change anything in the dynamic. Over time, he appeared to fall back into alignment with her version of events, prioritizing access to the relationship over challenging it. Whatever resistance he initially showed didn’t translate into sustained support. As a man, the woman is more important than what's not his child.
My egg donor was miserable when faced with it's choice in raising her spawn. Thus she needed them to be miserable like her. There were times when moments of peace were met with relatitory conversations or chores under the guise of responsibility. Peace after doing more work was labeled as laziness. A signal that she'd never be satisfied regardless of the the unspoken truths.
Whenever she wronged me badly to the point of my reaction, her immediate explanation would shift away from what happened and toward the idea that I wasn’t taking my medication correctly. It was never framed as a question or a possibility — it was used as a conclusion that replaced accountability. There is no cure for dealing with someone who replaces responsibility with deflection, where every reaction is recast as illness instead of a response to harm.
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