She comes to believe she has no choice.
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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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Because marriage, for most of human history, has been a gross violation of human rights—economic and bodily exploitation; coercion.
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Because gross harm and exploitation is not *incidental* to domestic labor, labor coded as motherly love.
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Tizon's love for Lola, and Lola's love for him, were not *incidental* to the violations of her rights, of her enslavement.
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That bond, and the caregiving, were the basis, the cause, the reason of her exploitation. It was also one of her joys [so she says, to him].
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That is *fucked.*
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I really appreciated @jaycaspiankang writing about this—Tizon's article dredged up pieces of my familial history toohttps://medium.com/kang-blog/alex-tizon-rip-again-518c197db57 …
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My grandmother was sixteen years old when she married my grandfather, who had two small children and had already been widowed twice.
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She was his neighbor's daughter. He liked the look of her. He needed someone to take care of the house, to take care of the children.
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My grandmother is dead. In her lifetime, other grandchildren tried to get her to tell her life story, but it was too painful to relive.
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Based on the bare facts alone, I know something was wrong with the relationship between my grandparents. I will never know everything.
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There is horrific exploitation embedded in the chains of our familial ties through centuries. No exceptions for any of us.
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For someone, somewhere down the line, our existence—our familial tie—is the basis and rationale for their grief
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We are poison to our own mothers.
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Does Tizon quite get there? Not really, kind of, maybe. But I got there after reading. That's why his article will linger with me.
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