The first thing that struck me is that I did not first think the yellow short woman was eggy. She actually seems to look more like my Aunt Sojna (no blood relation to eggy). Or maybe my cousin Debbie who was roughly her age, I think.
I think there are a couple of reasons I have trouble recognizing her. One being, is that woman has almost no similarity in my mind to what I know of her now. Even her interests...she used to play softball, we used to hike in the mountains, and I did feel loved at this age by both eggy and spermy. I am probably six in this photo, maybe even five. The physical exercise stuff she pretty much hates now, and may have even hated then. It is hard to fit the perception of her by my six year old self, to my perception of her as my 40 year old self. I can pick out things that hinted at what I understand her to be now, but taken as a one time thing could have just been anyone having a bad day or making a bad choice. Looking back on days like this (I don't remember the exact one, but I remember days like this in the Cape) I see two people that I have not seen since (in spermy's case) age 9 and (in my mother's case) around age 16 or 17. Though I would say I knew something was not right around Junior High, but the real realizations started to trickle in around 16 to my 20s.
It strikes me how captive young children can be into their parents "situation". There is nothing a daughter can do if their father dislikes women. You can not keep yourself, for instance, from becoming a woman instead of a cute toddler girl who thinks her father is right in everything before learning to think for herself. In third grade, I loved my teacher Mr Sullivan. Not in a romantic kind of way, he was just fun, interesting, and into teaching his students. He made everyone in his class feel special. One day I came home enthusiastic about a lesson or idea that Mr Sullivan had taught us that day. I was met with a lot of hostility from Spermy. I look back on that day as the day the guy in the picture above became deceased as far as my perception of him. It was not that little incident understand, it is every incident that snowballed after that. I never felt loved or cherished by spermy pretty much since that day. I did not understand why. I did not even really understand what was happening. It was not until reflecting the course of our relationship later on, that I could pick out what seems to be a pivotal moment when perhaps both of our opinions about each other changed drastically.
It is clear now that spermy was threatened by my interest in my teacher vs my compliance in agreeing with him instead of forming my own opinions. I was brought up correctly so to believe racism and sexism is bad. However, I found later, that these were not the ideals of my donors inner most thoughts, and sometimes public verbal thoughts. I know that eggy thought she was a feminist, and that she was independent. However, much of what she writes is about the dependence she has on people viewing her a certain way. Part of that is narcissist but part of that is also not understanding that you need to take the reigns of your own destiny. And that is not representative of a strong or independent woman.
When those things start to diverge for me, I realized that my donors were pretty much strangers. Through other events and things that happened, they ended up being strangers that I did not like at all.
It's so weird to see a photo like this for this reason. It's like looking into an alternate universe. A bizzaro world where these people grew together, were close, and lived happily ever after as the loving family they appear to be.
I guess it troubles me that I had no control, and have no control of how the story of that family turns out.
