Honestly I'm convinced 3/4 of you who are opining about the Tizon piece didn't finish reading it
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She is the parent that gets hit, screamed at, forced to do all the domestic work and childcare while the other parent[s] works outside.
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Her immigration status is precarious, she is purposefully cut off from family and friends, she is not allowed to have a life of her own.
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She is not given an opportunity to read, to better her English, to find work outside the home. She is given no choice.
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She comes to believe she has no choice.
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The children love her. She loves the children. The bio-mother comes to believe that Lola has "stolen" the children from her.
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The children are terrified when they watch Lola get abused. For the most part, they do not intervene. When they do, they are afraid.
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Tizon, as a child, chooses not to "break up" his family and get everyone deported by blowing the whistle on what's happening to Lola.
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This... is a familiar choice to children of abusive parents?
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The piece isn't about the conflicting emotions of a slave-owner, it's about how much Tizon hates himself and how much he loves Lola.
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Maybe he should have hated himself more. I don't know how to measure that.
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Over the 12 years that she lives with him, he tries to get her to tell him her story.
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He says that these attempts are like playing 20 questions, over the course of days and weeks.
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At this point in time, most of her family is now dead. By the end of the article, he meets with her niece.
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In short, the subject of a potential purely reported piece died without wishing to be interviewed, and other interviewees were also dead.
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The essay from Lola's perspective that you want? It doesn't exist. It can't exist. Lola didn't want to write it.
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Does that make for an inherent flaw in the story? Maybe so, but it doesn't make for preventable erasure.
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Many sons have written about their feelings grappling with watching their mothers beaten by their father.
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Tizon's fear and self-loathing and desire to forget and compartmentalize Lola are not exotic.
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When I first read the article, I came away convinced of this: that Tizon died not understanding Lola was his real mother.
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When his bio-mother dies, he reads her diaries and is somewhat surprised by the care and love for her children in them.
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When Lola dies, he goes through her things and is not surprised by the clippings of his old news articles, the childhood art, etc
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His bio-father and bio-mother took on the roles of distant parents who did not partake in domestic labor, who did not know their children
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So Tizon writes this article where "Mom" and "Dad" are... that. A shitty distant parent. Repugnant, even, because of what they do to Lola.
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In the article he describes a moment in which he viscerally *hates* his bio-mother. And Jesus, he writes her as monstrous.
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The most negative he feels about Lola is annoyance that she 1) tells him to wear a sweater 2) gripes about Dad & Ivan 3) hoards containers
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This... is how you feel about an aged parent who comes to live with you.
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Lola is his mother and I don't know if he ever realized it.
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Because you know what? I think he looked at his relatively distant parents and thought, "that's what parents are"—
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...and looked at Lola's feminized labor and emotional labor—things coded in our society as motherly love— and thought, "that is servitude."
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But is he really wrong there?
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