Dear Beekeeper,
I have hardly spoken to my mother this year.
Not since she, after everything she has witnessed over the last decade, decided to vote for our current president in Nov of 2024. After all the p*&&y grabbing, the disparaging women, the cheating on wives, the Epstein files, Jan 6, the promise to hold the largest mass deportation ever, the threats, the name calling, on and on.
And she does it BECAUSE she's a Christian. Because the border was the source of all of her problems, because Kamala supports abortion even though she had an abortion and her mother had an abortion- but it's all done in secret and shame because they are Conservative Christians.
I have no respect left for her and I struggle, oh I struggle with how to love her as a Christian, a progressive christian myself. She wants nothing more than relationship with me but sees I let "politics" get in the way of our relationship.
I don't like the distance. I am heartbroken. I don't want to fight over all of these things because one thing I have learned after the fights with conservative evangelical white Christians is they won't change because they don't want to.
They are happy with so much of what is happening because "God" and "Christianity" is coming back to America (which is basically saying that Queer people aren't part of Christianity and they are trying to criminalize abortion).
Those topics are one and two. But she doesn't want to change. She doesn't want to understand. She just wants to love her daughter and have a good relationship. And I don't know how to do that anymore.
I know God is a God of reconciling relationship- but I don't even know what the "Christian" response is.
I'm supposed to love all people right? It's what I preach. How do I do that when I feel utter rage and disappointment that is growing with each day as things get worse for the marginalized and the least of these?
Thanks for providing this space. I don't say this stuff out loud.
-MAGA is my family
Dear MAGA-is-my-family,
Oh, honey, I can hear the pain in your writing, and the yearning for belonging and relationship with your family, and your mom, especially. It hurts that they aren’t who you thought they were, and that they are unable to see YOU in who you have become. Let’s hold that grief together for a moment.
You know, in a honeybee hive, it’s really hard to make it through the cold, wet, winter. Honeybees, in a symbiotic relationship with humans, can prep a hive with enough food, enough protection from mites, moisture control, and a wee bit of insulation, and do everything technically right…. and yet still the hive still can collapse or shrink to the barest of clusters attending to the queen.
As the honeybees each individually near the end of their natural lifespan, they die. Some leave the hive, some continue to seek food in the combs and stay frozen in a mirror of the aching within them. The organism of the hive, made up of the whole of individual worker bees, the queen, the drones, the ecosystem of possibility— the hive as a whole has a chance of survival.
Sometimes I wonder how the individuals of the hive “think” or consider their connections, or lack thereof. Yet, I know that this is a total projection of human emotion on insects that attune to the hum of survival and work ahead. I think both can exist at the same time: the hive as it actually is, and my perception of it layered with my own experience and emotion.
Same with your mom, dear one.
How Christianity functions for you, in the midst of an abundant God, radically welcoming and inclusive, pouring empathy on each and every human in all our bodily autonomy and choice… that doesn’t need to change. Keep holding that Truth close.
At the same time, you mom is projecting her assumption that the only way to the Way, Truth, and Light, is through border control and the control of bodies capable of carrying children, wrapped in shame… all of that she is projecting upon you.
I’m not saying that one or ‘tother needs to leave the metaphorical hive. I am saying that perhaps the best way to love her is from a distance, with the occasional baseline touch point. This does not preclude the real impact that her vote and ideologies have had on real people; and I hear your deep wrestling of responsibility for that harm caused.
If you’ve attempted these conversations of redirection before, she already knows how you think and feel. To whatever degree you choose to stay connected, you have moments of signaling that in microways that allow her the choice of ignoring it. (Yeah, wear those rainbow earrings! Paint your nails! Park backwards in the drive so your bumper sticker is really clear!)
And you know where she is, and can probably point to her own passive aggressive displays of politic.
I think the work here is the long game, should you choose to stay in it. When people begin to crack at the edges of a cult, they look towards places where they feel safe enough to have questions. That won’t be the place where there is argument and shame-tools of “you should have known.”
It will be the low, slow, simmering relationship—to whatever degree and depth it remains.
One year, I remember standing next to the hive in April, ready to open it up and see them lost, yet again. I lifted the lid and inner cover, and began pulling out frames.
There, at the bottom, the barest hum of life. A queen surrounded by a handful of bees, still buzzing. Tiny, humming, hopebeats. A possibility of renewal, even though all seemed lost.
Change, for your mom, isn’t going to come in a conversation that points to the scripture. Change, for your relationship with her, is a choice of engagement. It’s okay to love her from afar, and in contained ways; or to choose connection with informed consent (for you and yours) of what that connection may entail.
It doesn’t make you any less of a Christian, or Christ follower, to choose distance and pre-printed cards as a line of connection. YOU get to choose, and be loved abundantly by God, in that choice. And all of this can exist at the same time— the hive as it actually is, and the projections we place upon each other full of assumption, hope, love, history, aching, pain, trauma, and more.
You can love her AND be estranged. You can be a preacher of reconciliation AND not know how to walk back into that relationship yet. You can grieve who she is AND refuse to pretend she is someone else.
Doing the work isn’t coming in with a hammer to knock at the doors of her understanding with scriptures and source texts, in this case. It’s the accompaniment of a lifetime, to whatever degree feels right to you; demonstrating in a Christian way that love is still happening: near, far, and all in between.
I’ll end by saying: I think that where we can’t show up, God does. I’m assuming that you, or your chosen family, is full of abundant queer joy, or the yearning thereof. If that precludes you from direct relationship with your mother, that’s okay, MAGA-is-my-family. God is bigger than one relationship, individual to each other. God is all of us, in relationship to the world we build for our great-great-granddaughters.
When we can do that work well, we show up across these differences with love and attention even when we are not related. To me, that says there are worker-bees near her who are ALSO doing this. Someone else is also showing up for her. In the the same way that you might be able to hold a little more grace for the MAGAs in your neighborhood because of the distance of relationship, some one else is holding just a little more grace for your mom because of the proximity of presence. God shows up through them, too.
My prayer for you is the buzz of the hive. The hope in the possibility. The long, slow, collective work of hive care that is beyond the individual, and even beyond an individual hive, pulling us into an apiary of belonging that is so, so much bigger than just me or you. It’s both/and/and beyond, pointing towards the future full of milk and honey: one where all people have enough… enough food, enough care, enough home, enough belonging, enough love.
P.S. Dear Reader— yes you! Are you holding something close for which you might need a little honey? Then write in and and join alongside this ever-growing hive of hope and care! 🐝