Son, I am disappoint.

I guess this is part of the things I should be working on…what with the whole not validating myself through the opinions of others. But I’m not there yet. And as it stands now, I am incredibly affected by the opinions of others. Like my parents.

I think that I’m fortunate for the most part because my parents are pretty chill folks. Nevertheless, some of their disappointment seems to seep through past their chill exterior.

My brother and I have an inside joke in the family about one of us being the favorite and the other being the reject (it’s based on an episode of the Rugrats…honestly!) And every so often when we were growing up, one of us would do something that would put us in bad favor with our parents, so the other would be in…

I don’t remember what my brother did, but he was the Reject. And so, I was the favorite! Good times, good times!

I don’t recall anything having ever changed. I remembered bringing it up to my mom a few months ago, where she pointed out to me,

“You haven’t been on your father’s good side ever since you became an atheist.”

…Well, hmmm…that’s nice to know.

I would point out that I’m probably the one out of the entire family who pays closest attention to issues regarding the church, who engages church issues most often, who listens to General Conference (at least, I did for a couple of sessions while livetweeting it)…but they wouldn’t even understand that. They would be more likely to ask, “Why do you do that as an atheist?” rather than to look at themselves and ask, “Why don’t we do this as believers?”

I want to show them. But really, I have some personal issues to work through that are completely independent of the whole atheism/theism thing and until I get through those, they will never take me seriously elsewhere…

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