My dad.
He’s like a crazy puzzle. He is actually pretty crazy himself.
I’ve never known anyone else who needs attention as much or is as selfish as my father. Every conversation with him is a one-sided, him blasting you with information, an old story, or some other dull explanation of a basic thing that you already understand. Or he’s recounting a book or movie in excruciating detail. You can fade in and out during the conversation and not miss anything important. A few well placed “Oh, wow” and “Really?!” is all you need to contribute to make him feel like you’re really listening.
This probably sounds mean, but those who have met him and know him well understand how he is. How he will minimize you in ANY conversation and make you feel like you are stupid. It’s always been hard to explain him to people who don’t know him, but witnessing my wife’s interactions with him has been highly informative. She has an outside perspective that I lack. She didn’t grow up with this behavior. She’s just experiencing it as a fully grown adult and she can’t understand it either. It validates my observations as a child. This world I grew up in was strange and messed up. There were reasons why I didn’t want to go home and why I didn’t bring friends over very often.
He considers her an intellectual equal, someone who shares his love of history too. He wants to impress her and make her like him. So he talks. And talks and talks and talks AT her, never TO her. He knows so little about her because he is incapable of give and take in conversation. On social media, he’s got a story to match every story or event she shares.
“When I was chairman of the department…”
“This makes me remember the time I was in charge of…”
“Back when I was getting my master’s degree…”
It’s exhausting. My mom is still married to him, somehow, but she is not without massive amounts of buried resentment and not so hidden annoyance most of the time. They are opposites and she does not want attention drawn to her. Sometimes he ignores her wishes and draws attention in groups to her. I sometimes think it’s a passive-aggressive way to strike back at her for the negative thoughts she does express to him. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Most of her resentment seethes under the surface, preparing for one red hot eruption at an undetermined moment in the future. I also find this exhausting.
These were the people who stayed with our kids, cats, guinea pig, and leopard gecko while we were gone. We came home to no water for the cats, the normal dry food bowl empty, a super messy kitchen, and a general mess all over the house. There are the same people who hassled me about cleaning my room and my mess around the house on a regular basis. We also bought them all the lunch food they eat every day and have for decades…weird yogurt flavors and canned fruit in heavy syrup. I am not sure that they ate what we had planned for the kids, although there was more than enough for them to eat whatever the menu said.
What was most striking was the way I felt about coming home with them in the house. My entire childhood was spent at friends’ homes or out on my bike in the neighborhood. I never wanted to go home. I remember that distinctly, but not just as a teenager. I never wanted to see them after being gone for awhile because the happy bubble I was in would be popped and real life would set back in. I’d be back at a home where my father felt I needed to be “humbled” as he said a couple of years ago and my mother viewed me as her sarcastic sparring partner before I was 10 years old. I wasn’t ready for her level of mean and petty and the things she said hurt badly.
But that’s where I was. Wishing I didn’t have to come home to my own home AS AN ADULT. I wasn’t afraid to see the kids again, but I didn’t want to see my parents and the carnage that would be left. I saw them in the Ring cameras leaving the house multiple times a day to walk around the neighborhood. Each time I saw their faces, they looked pissed off. I thought about this extensively as I walked around DC alone last week. One of my biggest anxiety triggers is upset faces around me. That’s how so many of my public panic attacks start-people looking pissed off or even just neutral. Anything other than happy, content faces set me off. When I realized that I was studying their faces in the Ring videos, it hit me that this pattern started with them. I learned to read their faces from a very young age to understand what the next few hours might look like.
It makes me sad to think about little me, learning too young that I needed to adjust myself to avoid upsetting people around me. But at the same time, I have a very strong defiant streak and I was always arguing with my parents. How is it that I would read them for signs of trouble while simultaneously causing trouble? I remember being very young, probably around 5 or so, and telling them every day that I hated them. It was always random and not just because I was arguing with them. I feel like my immature brain really hated them because I didn’t have the words to explain who I was on the inside and how they made me feel with their dismissive attitudes and passive-aggressive actions towards me.
And in the midst of all this, I knew intellectually that they were in MY HOUSE, MY home, among MY things. They were guests of mine. I wasn’t a child living in their home so coming home shouldn’t feel like it did in my childhood. But having seen their pissy faces on the Ring cameras, and knowing that they didn’t do everything they were asked to do. Was that intentional? Were they just overwhelmed because there was so much to do? Was this retaliation for some unknown thing I had done? Inside, I felt like a child. I felt like delaying the drive home so that they might be asleep and I wouldn’t have to deal with them.
Then I got home and saw the cat food and water situation, the messy kitchen, the messy living room. And I hurt inside, wondering who they really are that they would not take care of the kids, cats, and house like they would their own. And how both my brother and I don’t want to actually live close to them and haven’t for a long time. They are too much for us. They don’t understand who we are and what we need. They don’t understand how they hurt us in the past and continue to hurt us with their bizarre, passive-aggressiveness.
Leave a Reply