the blog of a disabled mother who likes to game, and "get in the pit"
I got a lot of pictures of Bub’s first excursion to the park that’s down the road from our house, but this one happened to be my favorite of them all. We’ll probably walk down there more often since he likes it so much.
For a little while, when I was checking my “DNA Story” in Ancestry, it had my ancestral computations as:
“AngloSaxon”
“Celtic”
and “German”.
Just those things. That amused me to bits. I’m not even going to lie.
I thought that they were going to keep things that way, but when I went to check on them the next morning to see if they were going to continue to name things… that way, everything was back to the way it had been. (“England, Wales & Northwestern Europe”, “Ireland & Scotland”, and “Germanic Europe” for me. I wish my DNA Story was a bit more interesting given what I’ve seen other people’s Ancestry results to have been…)
I like to periodically check my computations in both 23andMe and Ancestry to see if anything has changed, because they have been known to change as more research is done as to where genes are most likely to have come from. And it’s still interesting to note that Ancestry thinks that I am a quarter Irish and Scottish, whereas 23andMe is convinced that quarter is Germanic. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my DNA is getting into a fistfight as to where this portion of my ancestry actually comes from, and I stay living for finding out where that portion of my ancestry actually comes from, because it’s amusing to study this, and it’s just as amusing to note the discrepancies between 23andMe and Ancestry. I am that kind of person…
When I was a young child, every adult that lived in my household smoked cigarettes.
I distinctly remember being bullied, and made fun of, because my clothes smelled like cigarette smoke no matter how thoroughly they were washed. Peers of mine that I wanted to be friends with were actually told by their parents that they were not allowed to play with me, or befriend me, because of how… thoroughly I smelled like cigarette smoke. They made sure to let me know this. I knew that I smelled like cigarette smoke because I could smell it on my clothes even after they had been washed. This continued to persist well into high school, although I did manage to make some friends who would associate with me during lunch and while we were on campus together. (I think by that point, people just assumed that I was the one smoking and that was why I smelled like cigarette smoke, rather than the smell being secondhand as a result of the adults that I was living with smoking in the house. I didn’t realize that, or even think about it, until well after I had graduated high school, but it would not surprise me if a large swath of the student body had just begun to assume that I was the one smoking at that point or speculated that I had just picked up the habit myself.)
One of the memories that stands out in my mind was me, as a young child, asking my mother — who was one of the household members that smoked the most — if she would “stop smoking so (that) I could have friends”. It pains me to think about that, let alone the fact that as a young child I felt like I had to ask her this one small thing, something that was, comparatively speaking, reasonable. It wasn’t as though I was asking her for extravagant material possessions. I was just asking her if she would stop smoking so that I could stop going to school smelling like cigarette smoke. Unsurprisingly, her response to me was to refuse, and then to tell me that she too was bullied at school, and to try to console me about being bullied… when she could have helped mitigate the fact I was being bullied, and that students were being told by their parents not to associate with me or to be my friend, because my clothes reeked of the stench of cigarette smoke.
My mother was diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor at the age of fifty-nine stemming from lung cancer, likely brought about from decades of smoking. She died at the age of sixty, a year out from initial diagnosis.
Many of the people that I know, or have known, have been affected by religion in a negative way.
So don’t mind the fact that my perception of it has been… colored by that.
The father of one of my children was raised to be Pagan because his mother rebelled against the way that her own parents raised her, and this was one of the ways that she chose to rebel (if not the primary way)… by raising her children to be Pagan, if not outright instilling a deep dislike of Christian theology in general in them. I can’t speak for her other children, but I can say that she did manage to succeed instilling that in him.
And the pendulum swung the other way with the father of my other child, being raised so devoutly Christian that our son’s birth was probably actually the worst thing to happen because he was conceived and born out of wedlock and I would not “fix the sin of that” by marrying him because we had a child together, something that I chose not to do for a large number of reasons that I continue to stand by to this day. Ultimately, religion was — and is — so important to him and his family that adherence to it took, and takes, absolute precedence, and that is not something that I will ever be comfortable with. That is not how I will ever live my life. I don’t mind what other people believe in or how they choose to worship, but when it involves “me and mine”, there will always be choice. That became a dealbreaker that I began to carry with me going into future relationships. If your significant other has to become the same religion as you, practice your religion with you, or believe the same things that you do, I am not the one for you. (Although sure, if you’re a secular humanist like I am, that’s cool! Just don’t try and make it a requirement that we believe the same things, or even the… lack of those, if that makes sense. I don’t care what you do or don’t believe in.)
My children are also to be afforded complete choice in the matter of exploring religion, full stop.
Another dealbreaker that I made going into subsequent relationships is that I, under absolutely no circumstances, be asked to attend any religious functions with a significant other for any reason. This was how far the pendulum swung in that relationship. Simply put, I will not attend them. I have not changed my mind in as many years as I’ve been on this planet, and I do not see myself changing my mind. I will attend functions or gatherings with other secular humanists, but I will not attend religious functions. The closest I will physically come to a church is if it is a Pokestop because Bub and I are playing Pokemon Go together…
I do not hate religion or those who practice it. Quite the contrary. I feel like I have just been “a potential number” to be recruited (or “three potential numbers”, if you want to get even more technical about it) by people that I should have been able to trust at least a little more than I wound up being able to trust, so I’ve had to lay down some ground rules about how I am to be approached regarding it, especially because I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up thinking that they can evangelize to me about it when I have shut that door.
If I change my mind on the matter, I will let people know. Until then, assume that it is what I say it is.