For weeks now friends have been telling me that it’s time to just let my parents go. Pull off the band-aide Sure, it’ll hurt, but just for a while. This constant dementor-like soul sucking is what’ll kill you.

“But they’re my parents,” I said. “I’m going to be mature and keep the lines of communication open. They’ll come around, eventually.”

Yet every time I spoke with my father, my heart broke a little more because he just refuses to see me as anything other than “wrong.” And JS had to come home from teaching nights to find me in tears, again, sobbing into a wine glass because “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m just so sad that So-and-So just got voted off Idol and now his friends are crying because they’ll miss him. Oh, and also I called my family again.”

Sure, over the weeks I’ve gotten better, faster, at becoming philosophical about it. I can’t change how my parents will respond. I can’t make them agree with me. I’m not even trying, really, but we’re family. That means we HAVE to love each other. Even if I’m a democrat. If I’m moving in with my boyfriend. Even if they tell me God will never accept me until I repent (because, remember kids, Jesus did NOT love sinners) of my wicked ways. Family is love.

But, of course, it still hurt, no matter how objectively I was able to look at it.

And now, well, now the choice is made.

After nearly a month of not speaking to me, my mom called last night. “This is very hard for me,” she said. I tried to be sympathetic. I want to be open to the fact that we disagree and let them have a chance to share their feelings. So I waited for her to continue. “You’re on a path that I cannot, will not, go down.”

Sounds pretty much like what they’ve already said, but I’m not sure what it all means. So I ask. “It means we’re done.” She said.

I still don’t understand. Because what comes next is something that never, ever, crossed my mind in all of the worst case scenarios I played in my head before falling asleep at night. “Don’t call anymore,” she said.

So I said good-bye and hung up.

Turns out, when someone else rips off the band-aide for you, it hurts a hell of a lot more.

It hurts so much, in fact, that I’m taking an Incomplete for my thesis because I can’t write. I’m trying to focus on breathing, and on fighting the urge to go back to bed for another 8 hours. I’ll have 6 additional months to turn in a draft, my adviser told me graciously. And it won’t affect my GPA or my standing as a student.

I know its not the end of the world; I know it’s the best decision to make right now and that if I did try to push forward, I’d just end up with a really shitty thesis. But still. I feel like I’m failing myself. I feel like I got this close to my goal, to the end, and then someone pulled the rug out from under me.

And in a way, I guess that’s exactly what happened.

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