Confused Clone

I am writing this very stream of conscious because I am so confused and have no place I feel is a safe outlet.

My mom is very abusive. She would scream at me until I sobbed then scream at me to stop crying. She’d accuse me of “giving her attitude” and then demand I stop defending myself when I tried to explain my side of her accusation. She called me a “fucking idiot,” “moron,” “asshole,” and other names. She would tell me that everyone thinks I’m an awful child and even my godmother– who I am very close with– thought I was ungrateful, rude, and abusive. She cut our maternal family out of our lives. She cut off anyone who she got close with, leaving just me and her alone in a house of abuse.

No one ever believed me. I didn’t even really know what was happening or how to explain it. I just knew I was in a lot of pain and that I hated her so much. In high school, I used to say “the only bully I still have in my life is my mom.”

I hurt myself because of her. I have a very low pain tolerance and a fear of blood, so it was never very drastic. But I fantasized about cutting myself. Since I was single-digits in age, I’d rip my hair out and pound my fists into my head and pound my head into walls. I’d destroy things when I got overwhelmed by pain and anger. I one time took her phone and slammed it on the ground. I’d destroy my own stuff then sob afterward because, duh, it was my own stuff. I broke the computer mouse. I broke her glasses. I threw pens and other small things under desks and into closets since I knew it would annoy her, but she wouldn’t be able to pin it on me.

I lived in constant fear of what she would do or say. I never knew if I was getting loving and fun mom or terrifying and angry mom.

She rarely let me go on sleepovers and never wanted other kids over because they were “too loud.” She hated that I was loud. She hated that I was a child who was sometimes loud. But her voice was always the loudest.

She has threatened to abandon me more times than she has ever apologized to me. When I was 13, we visited Washington DC. At one point she felt I was “giving her attitude” (which in reality was me just being tired and quiet in 100-degree heat) and told me I was a fucking asshole and to find my own fucking way home. And then she walked away and disappeared into a large crowd. I scrambled up some steps of a nearby museum, crying and panicked, desperately trying to locate her. Then she comes marching up the steps, grabs me by the neck, her unclipped nails dig into and tear my skin, and she cusses at me while dragging me away.

There’s a lot more that happened. I can barely remember anything from ages 3-18, it’s all so distant. Like trying to recall an episode of a TV show you watched once. My memories feel like someone else’s and their life sucked.

I don’t understand why my mom had me. I keep being told the shtick about “oh well she LOVED you and she WANTED you and you need to be GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE because she DID HER BEST and you need to FORGIVE HER and MOVE ON.”

I think my mom cloned herself. She was 45, single, alone, narcissistic, unstable, unhealthy, repressing her own childhood trauma, didn’t like kids (I have never once seen her interact with a child who wasn’t me), and wanted to be loved without having to really give love.

So she waited until the last second of her biological clock to create her offspring. She found a way she could pay to Build-a-Human that would be required to love her. She picked out a donor who looked JUST like her and had the EXACT SAME ancestry as her. I’ve seen his donor profile sheet. His answers to the donor questions are the most depressingly uninspired writings for someone trying to be a Jewish Genghis Khan. Under his “interests” section, he put “not artistic, not athletic.” That is abysmal. My mom obviously did not care about his personality, she just needed to cook up a baby that was the exact spitting image of her and no one else. She doesn’t like sharing.

I will give her credit where credit is due- she did tell me I was donor conceived from a young age. As a single mother, though, she didn’t really have any options. I don’t even fully remember what she told me. But I do know that she would manipulate me into agreeing that I was fine and that I didn’t wish I had a dad and then I shouldn’t be bothered by being donor conceived or have any questions. She let her insecurities dictate what feelings I had the right to explore.

But I’ve worked with young kids. You can manipulate their beliefs so easily, even when they know they believe something else. And the funny thing is, they’re not kids forever. They grow up. They ask more questions. They change their mind. But when you repress their thoughts from such an early age, you stifle their development. You gaslight them into modes of thinking that their inner-self doesn’t agree with and then they have no idea what to believe. I don’t understand what’s happened to me or why. I don’t know what I really believe, think, or feel.

My identity is so fractured and the pieces don’t seem to fit together. I feel so alone and I don’t know how to get the pain to stop. Some days I don’t even know if my pain is real– is it all in my head? Was my mom really THAT abusive? Am I being abusive? Is it actually much, much worse than I think it is? Was I actually severely abused and my brain is in survival-repression mode?

When I look at the facts, it’s hard to spell out a different story than “my mom decided to custom order a clone-child that she could torment every day of its life and still demand that it love her…or else.”

I found my donor-father. I asked why he donated. He said he did it for the money and because he wanted to “contribute to the gene pool without being a parent.” I have no other father to turn to or love. He is the only dad I have. And he never cared about me. I spent my whole life fantasizing about him, imagining the father-son bonding we’d do, desperate to know him, desperate for a parent to save me, desperate for guidance on how to be a male. I taught myself to use a urinal. I taught myself to shave. I had to teach myself what it meant to be male because I had no one to help me understand my own body.

After 22 years of dreams, it turns out the truth was worse than a nightmare. The truth is that I was better off in my dreams since at least my Imaginary Dad cared about me. At least Imaginary Dad didn’t want to profit off of my very existence. At least Imaginary Dad would care about the life he created and helped bring into the world. Imaginary Dad didn’t mass-produce offspring in a twisted Game of Mass-Breeding, trying to scratch the itch of his genetic God complex.

I am so turned around. I didn’t realize one could literally get lost in their own mind. I hate my body. I hate my cells. I hate my DNA. I wish I could take out every bit of DNA from the two narcissists who manipulated, abandoned, and oppressed me and give it back to them. But I can’t. They put all their dysfunction and narcissism into me and I will never be able to take it out. I will never be able to undo what’s happened to me. I will carry everyone else’s shit with me for my entire life. I am the living repercussion of everyone else’s selfishness and genetic manipulation. And all these trained medical professionals just sat back and let it happen.

I don’t know what’s coming for me in life because my biological father can barely write a full sentence to any question I ask. Every time I write to him, I feel worse and more disgusted by his actions. I am scared to date because I don’t want to have sex with one of my maybe-50-maybe-more-maybe-fewer half-siblings. I am scared to have kids because they might face the same situation I do. It is already too late to reverse the genetic bottlenecking that mass -producing humans has done.

I feel like a sick eugenics experiment gone horribly wrong. And unfortunately, all of my worst fears are true. Intentional or not, donor conception has created a rampant eugenics/dysgenics problem, allowed my bio parents to use my existence for their own darkly selfish desires, taken away my identity, stolen my heritage of the entire chain of life that I’m connected to on this Earth, and left me with invisible wounds so deep in my mind and body that I can’t even find them to heal them. There isn’t a pickaxe sharp enough to crack into the deepest layers of my trauma.

My pain from being a donor-conceived person is also that no one can really help me. Non-DC people can’t help, they just aren’t capable of understanding what this feels like. Other DC people validate my feelings, which brings relief but also deepens my pain. All my worst fears are true and the best help I can get is “yeah, actually, you’re right about this dystopian science fiction hell you’re experiencing.” I wish I was wrong. I would love for all these extreme thoughts and feelings to be my own self-indulgent hysterics. I wish so badly that I was making all this up. But I’m not. And that freaks me out so much my body and soul clamp up and shake, and shake, and shake.

Our two biggest sources of pain and trauma are our body and mind. They’re also the only two things we can never escape. Where am I supposed to go when my deepest trauma is in the very building blocks of who I am?

I understand every human spends their life healing from the ongoing trauma of existence. But this one is so horrific because it’s never even happened before in human history. Science fiction is the closest thing to a textbook that I have. But at this point, to me, it’s not even fiction anymore.

In my first Facebook post speaking out on these issues, I wrote this as my ending line: “This isn’t science fiction. This is right now. Get educated.” And through all the ups and downs of this inhumane system, through all my constant confusion and self-doubt, through all of the trauma that clouds my reality, those words still ring true.

I am not going to play this game anymore. I don’t care about the law or about “parent’s rights.” We are playing God, we are playing Universe, we are playing The Sims with sentient Human Beings. And it needs to end. Now.