It Is What It Is

“It is what it is.”

I told my assistant, after spilling everything about why I had been absent,

“Hey, that’s a dismissive statement. You can’t dismiss this. It is not your fault.” He said.

Yesterday I stopped by my parents’ house to help Mom with her Facebook. After about an hour of scrolling through her activity history, and Dad complaining about how three of their specialist doctors were leaving our town for a bigger one, they ended with,

“She owes us an apology.”

I shook my head no.
They didn’t like that.

They insisted they had been wrongly accused. They brushed past the fact that they are still, even after everything, keeping contact with her abuser. Instead, they turned the extra pictures on Facebook into their own story. A story where they were the victims. A story where she had attacked them.

Dad with his angry, silent face.
Mom had her lip pulled in, as if she were bracing for battle.

“Yes, she does,” they sneered.
“Wouldn’t you want an apology if you were accused of something you didn’t do?”

I let out one of those airy laughs. The kind you do when you remember something painful. In my case, it was Dad’s accusatory text. I brushed it off again by saying,

“You have to understand how scared she is.”
And then the conversation was over.

I left feeling like I had failed her and myself.

I have never been good at ‘thinking on my toes’ when I get backed into a corner. And for some reason, my parents have always had the power to back me in that corner. Even as an adult. Even after therapy. Even after years of growth.

I think I have been dismissive of them for years without realizing it. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t want to face the fear I carried of them. A fear I only recently learned to name.

Therapy has helped me draw cleaner lines. It showed me that my anxieties did not begin with my ex-husband. He added to the damage, but he did not build the foundation. My parents did. Their dismissiveness shaped me long before adulthood, long before marriage, long before the trauma that came later.

My dad does not know how to love without control. His love has limits, and those limits end where his control ends.
My mom has always believed the world is against her. So it makes sense she sees her own granddaughter as just one more person out to hurt her.

And for years, I’ve repeated the exact phrase like a mantra.

“It is what it is.”

But now I know that phrase was never peace. It was resignation.
It was the sound of folding into silence.
It was the armor I wore when I didn’t yet have the language to name the wounds.

But I do now.

So no, it’s not “what it is.”

It’s what it was.