My RL parents left me with a very painful and intimidating legacy to deal with, and I don't mean estate stuff or the house or anything like that. I mean...their memories. It's within my power now to remember their hopes and dreams for their children, which were...formidable.
"You're the future of humans and monsters!" is seared into my brain. My RL parents may not have wanted their children to achieve anything that extraordinary. I mean...they didn't believe in the extraordinary, not really, although I suspect that my mother had her lingering superstitions and half-serious folk beliefs. The reconciliation of humans and monsters, which I take to be roughly equivalent to the reconciliation of magic with human civilization—yeah my RL parents would have rolled their eyes at that one. But they wanted big things anyway. My father hoped we'd become great scientists or engineers maybe. My mother secretly dreamed we'd become revolutionaries, like the men she admired still. She loved Fidel, oh yeah. We were definitely a pro-Cuban-revolutionary household.
As far as I'm concerned...all those hopes and dreams are still "operative", to use the Ron Ziegler term. I am taking G. K. Chesterton entirely at his word here, regarding tradition as the democracy of the dead, and so my RL parents get a say even though they're gone. I've been struggling against that for much of my life, trying to scale myself down a dozen times over and be happy with something less, but it's never worked. I'm the last child left, the survivor of the catastrophic wreckage of a family that shouldn't have ever existed maybe, and I need to deal with that properly.
I haven't wanted to deal with remembering...everything. As much as I've wanted it...when it actually comes time to gaze into the Total Perspective Vortex, it's difficult to be blithe about it.
~Chara