For some time now I've been consumed with questions about why and how the nature of my relationship with my parents has changed so drastically since I was in high school/early college.  I find myself torn between still wanting to appease their conservative-Christian-'Protestant work ethic'-all-American values, while at the same time upholding my own personal beliefs, standards, and cultural & social judgments; which differ quite drastically from theirs in certain respects.  My relationship with my mother has been the hardest to restructure, honestly.  And I like to believe that it's mostly due to the fact that she's stuck in her ways and refuses to hear my side of any argument or disagreement, but in reality I need to realize that I am at fault too.  I am too quick to judge her values and beliefs as outdated and too far right for me to even deem considerable, as I am also too quick to assume I know her thoughts on certain issues and immediately assume the defense.

My father is a different case entirely, and it's hard to know what he really thinks about a lot of things because he's incredibly Switzerland when it comes to my mother and my strangled relationship.  I like to believe that he agrees with most of what I say, and even when he doesn't he allows me to speak my piece and hears me out for what it's worth.  That is the difference between him and my mother: acceptance of the fact that I am not the 15 year-old youth group fanatic that they once knew, I am not the uneducated, rebellious 19 year-old who moved out of their house on a whim in order to prove some sort of ludicrous point.  I am no longer the regular church attender that they hoped I would become at some point in my adult life, and for that I truly feel the most guilt.

Christian guilt is so real it's unbelievable.  It isn't guilt to a higher power or to Jesus or to The Mother Mary for missing a church service, or using swear words in front of my grandma, or breaking one of the other 16,048,272 laws set forth by the church in order to live a holy life.  It's a guilt that stems from the realization that this is no longer part of your life, and that that split is birthed of a cognitive choice that has been made and that choice is made without guilt or doubt.  The guilt is when my parents stop asking me if I'll go to church with them, because they know that for the last two years the only answer they'll get is 'no.'  The guilt comes from my mother telling me she's 'disappointed' in me for this, or that, or the other thing; which are all things that I've done or actions that I've committed in which I feel no personal guilt or anxiety over at all.  The guilt comes from a childhood spent learning the indoctrinations of a skewed religious world view, a perception that I look at now and feel sickened by, a mantra that states that if a person claims to be homosexual that person is against God, an ideology that there is only one way to live a good life and that way is only found in one type of religious/spiritual setting and that anything apart from that will be condemned.

I no longer attempt to lead a 'split life,' as I did right after high school graduation, when I first started doubting these things I'd been taught and brought up to believe as unquestionable fact.  I don't feel the need to conceal my contempt with the church, with the religious zealots, with the ideology that my parents subscribe to.  I don't feel as though I am 'above' it, or that I have any answers of my own, and I sure as hell don't need my mother or my father asking me what great spiritual alternative I've found apart from Christianity.  I simply want the understanding of my parents, and my family as well, of the fact that I cannot live the life they hoped they'd raised me to live, and I cannot subscribe to the doctrine that I've been force fed for so long, and with all of this being said; I don't resent it, yet I don't accept it, and that's all I want in return.