Thank you for your hypocrisy

I'm having a fight with my mother. Unfortunately, she is completely unaware that we are having a fight, because despite the fact that I have repeatedly called her on her bullshit, whenever we fight about this particular subject she resorts to patronizing me and assuming that I will inevitably come around to her point of view. She's extremely talented at completely missing the point.

My mother is convinced that I am going to get married and have kids.

That isn't even why I'm so angry. This happens to me all the time. When I was finishing up at the community college and getting ready to go to England, people kept telling me that I was going to fall in love with someone and not want to leave. It irritated the hell out of me, sure, but I couldn't really be angry with them because they didn't know me and I didn't know them. It annoys me that people are allowed to make assumptions about other people, but ultimately it doesn't matter because I don't care about those people anyway.

The thing is, I do know my mother and she does know me. And I know that she considers herself a feminist. And, as I've said before, the point of feminism is choice. I can choose to be a housewife, which would be a horrible decision, or I can choose to do what I want, which is buy myself a house and a dog and be happy with my own company for the rest of my life. (I am unbelievably grateful that I live in a time where, although there is still societal pressure to get married and spawn, I'm not going to get burned at the stake if I choose to live alone all my life.) And this is what makes me so goddamn angry. Because my mother's continual patronizing insistence that I'm going to get married whether I say I want to or not means that she thinks I don't have a choice, and that, by extension, none of us has a choice. Like our pathetic womanly little brains cannot actually choose anything for themselves because they will be overridden by their own biology. She's basically invalidating feminism by saying that even though we theoretically have choice, it doesn't matter because we're incapable of taking advantage of it. And no matter how many times I point this out to her, she refuses to understand me.

I'm not even saying she's wrong. It's been made extremely clear to me in the last couple of years that you can very easily get sucked down a path you never intended to go near. I can't say with 100% certainty that I will never marry (only 99%. Really, you'd think she'd never met me at all). It's her refusal to admit that she might be wrong, and that I am not predestined to get married and have kids just because I happen to possess a uterus, that makes me so angry.