Once again my parents are having their monthly blow-up. OME, I can hardly wait until I can afford my own place because I really don’t want to deal with this any more. It started because my mum is having one of her whiney days, and driving dad and I nuts with it. Every little thing annoys her today, and everything has to be in her time no matter what you happen to be doing… including taking my dishes to the kitchen to be washed before I even finished eating breakfast.
Needless to say, she needled dad one too many times and he started yelling back. This of course meant a screaming match ensued with dad swearing and mom crying –and if she starts crying it lasts the rest of the day. One of the things that she threw a fit about is having things on the kitchen table. Now, to me, kitchen tables –when not also used as dinging room tables—are meant to have things on them, they are like a temporary holding place. Dad keeps things there that he takes with him whenever he leaves the house such as keys, cell phone, and pocket notebook; I keep important papers that cannot get lost and need to be dealt with shortly like tax forms and work stubs there; the mail gets put there…
Admittedly, dad has also taken to stacking things on the dishwasher and dining room table, so I can understand that being an aggravation. And I suppose my leaving my work bag on one of the chairs three evenings a week could be an annoyance for her, but she also complains when I take it to my room and the only place to put it is in front of my closet. For some reason she prefers using my full-length mirror than her own, and my bag gets in the way of her doing that.
Anyways, because the things on the table were making her angry, either she or dad threw everything on the table to the floor. My work cheque –which I planned to deposit today hence it being on the table as a reminder—ended up ripped, and something of dad’s ended up broken (though I’m unsure if it was his cell phone or something else that was expensive). I cannot comprehend this, but for some reason my winter coat, hat, and mittens ended up thrown outside onto the driveway with some other things. They were in their place, hung up on the hook behind the door after all.
Due to the new mess upon the kitchen floor, mum ordered me to come clean it up. Joy. So while I’m kneeling on the floor I have mum standing on one side of me and dad on the other, while they scream their heads off. It practically burst my eardrums and I actually had to stop what I was doing to cover my ears… not that it helped much. During this I got thinking how this was a physical representation of my childhood.
Since I had front row seats to this domestic drama, I got to hear some of the delightful things my parents disagreed on. One of them is the fact that Mum hates having a job and just wants to be a housewife, as well as his spending so much time with friends instead of her. This doesn’t quite make sense to be because mum complains about having to do housework, yet she wants to be a housewife? It’s more like she wants to be a pampered wife who doesn’t have to do anything at all except read or watch movies, go running (her new hobby), and take tea with friends.
I understand her frustration at dad spending more time with friends and basically ignoring the rest of us when he’s home –not too loving an experience for little children as they grow up either, I have to say—but maybe he’d want to be home more often if she did something other than complain all the time (I kinda get where he’s coming from as I spent most of my teen years trying to escape the house), but I think the bigger issue is she’s jealous of how many friends he has when she has so few.
As always happens, the argument goes right back to what has been wrong since the beginning of their relationship over thirty years ago. (Which is something that ALWAYS angers me, because I think fights should be about the issue at hand, and NOT about everything you have ever done wrong in your entire life including things that have already been resolved many times over... or so you thought). Basically mom said that if dad wanted to be a single man he should have stayed that way and left her out of it, and I have to say it didn’t feel great to know she regretting my even being born, because if they hadn’t married I wouldn’t exist.
Dad took off outside to shovel the driveway (not because he wanted to do the work, but because it would allow him to leave the house but not leave the premises thus causing her to be even angrier upon his return), and so mum started in on me... which I knew was coming as this happens every single time. To keep things short, I shall sum up her disgruntlement with me: I’m a horrible daughter. Some things were old issues, some were things I cannot comprehend her anger about (ie. my "not telling her things" that I told her so often as a reminder that she told me to stop, then she forgot about), and to top it all off she also lit into me about some things that were her decision. She likes to put the blame on everyone but herself; she throws fits until we do things her way, then throws more fits when she doesn’t want it that way any more.
I have now managed to escape to my room with the hopes of getting the edits for this manuscript finished. My freelance work is one of the many things that mum first encouraged me into, but now hates because it takes up time I could be using to do housework or being screamed at by her. It is like she is so dissatisfied with her life that she needs to make everyone else miserable, too. I cannot quite figure out if making people miserable is something that makes her happy, or if her misery is because she doesn't know how to fix her life. Personally, I think a divorce or scheduling time with dad as well as actually trying to make new friends might help, but suggesting that even when she's in a good mood just sets her off. Yes, I was stupid enough to try back when I was a teen. Now that I have ranted out my frustration, perhaps I can actually concentrate on my job.
SUMR
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