Friday, December 25, 2020

i have to do this every once in a while because people forget or get confused or whatever.

my mother is supposedly of irish-norse-scottish background, and yet was raised in an anglican household. but, the person who her mother claimed was her father almost certainly isn't, an obvious observational fact that led to much violence in my mother's life, as he was able to figure that out when my mother was still very young. my mother is quite visibly clearly of plains indian extraction on her biological father's side, and indisputably of norse/irish background on her mother's side. my grandmother was married at 15 and had two children by the time she was 17 - a normal fact of life on the canadian prairies, at the time. she has refused elaboration on the point, and what consent would have meant to a girl her age at that place and time is hard to fathom, equally regarding the person she was married to and the person that impregnated her.

my mother was not raised religious and is best described as a levayan satanist in terms of belief systems, even if she would reject that in favour of vague expressions of deism or spirituality. she has (repeatedly) been through 12-step programs with both alcohol and heroin, and that would be the closest thing to organized religion over the course of her life.

both of my father's parents were roman catholics. his mother was an adopted italian woman, whose parents appear to have died in a mob hit. my oldest aunt was able to find a newspaper clipping of them being hit by a train after being tied to railroad tracks. my paternal grandmother had no relationship with her birth parents, but she was a practicing catholic. his father was a relatively dark-skinned and apparently extremely evasive man who died in his 50s of a heart attack; he smoked too much, drank too much and gambled too much on his way to having seven (known) children. but, he went to church every week, apparently. i have almost no recollection of him. my family does not know his ancestry, and it's not clear that he knew his own ancestry in much detail, either. however, it's generally understood that he was some mix of jewish, quebecois, native american and potentially subsaharan african. he inherited his catholicism from his very white quebecois mother. my father had a rare, austronesian blood type that only exists in south asia or madagascar, and a malagasy ancestry has been hypothesized for that reason. but, he looked not dissimilar to noam chomsky. actually. whatever the background was, the jewish was the most visible phenotypic expression of it.

my father's religion was hockey; he may have been vaguely deist, but he cared little for religion and did not attend services. when my stepmother found religion later in life, he did not find it with her and expressed a lot of disdain about it to me.

i was not raised in a faith. my mother did not want me to be baptized, but i was eventually baptized at the age of four in order to attend junior kindegarten. at the time, the catholic school system started at age 4 and the public school system started at age 5. i had been attending pre-school from the age of 2. so, in order to not skip a year, i was baptized and sent to a catholic school.

while i never developed any sort of catholic faith, and was broadly seen as a jew by the other students, i never had a good reason to switch to public school and stayed in the catholic school system until graduation - which i technically didn't do, because i refused to participate in the community service requirements under the argument that it was unpaid labour.

so, i'm of mixed ancestry, have been an atheist since birth, was baptized (but not confirmed) and have been generally seen as jewish.

i identify as an atheist of mixed ancestry.