I keep finding myself torn between my mother who is attempting (and unbeknownst to her, failing) to indoctrinate me into Islam, and my father, a spiritualist (essentially a Gnostic but less Christian), who claims to be able to talk to, “higher dimensional beings”, and a reincarnation of Vishnu. Oh, and he’s a misogynist. You can’t make this shit up.

Anyway, my father has these conversations with me in private, that he can’t have in front of my mother; this encompasses things like religion (which he disagrees with), philosophy, and politics (the latter of which I shall get to in a bit). My mother does the same; she tells me stuff that she can’t say in front of my dad, which is mainly Islam. I pretend to agree to both of them, to save myself an argument with them (although both have on occasion said things I agree with).

My mother told me to tell her stuff that my dad talks about to me, which I, to an extent, honour, although I do omit some details.

Politically, my mother has some pretty anti-imperialist tendencies, whereas my father is more or less a crypto-fascist; he’s an anti-communist, an individualist, an anti-Semite, and has said things against illegal immigration, and, as I said earlier, a misogynist, saying that women are, “possessive” in positions of power.

As you can tell, my family dynamics are, complicated, to put it mildly.