So It's Been, Like, Forever...
Yeah, I've been all silent for a while now. I've been busy and all sorts of abnormal and shit. Longness to come... get a cup of tea or coffee.
So, I'll start off with something a little sad. I was watching TV this morning, around 3-ish AM. It was an old TV show called Talk Radio. It was basically a show about the office of a talk radio station. Several wonderful characters and running jokes, some of which were fun and others.... not so much. Now, this show had a character that was snobbish, rude, and full of himself. Think Fraiser except Fraiser was a person of intelligence and some refinement, if not a big overly narcissistic. Well, this character on Talk Radio was like that only he wasn't really smart enough to be an intellectual. He was more of just an ass. However, the character wasn't an insufferable ass. It's more that he knew he was an ass, everyone knew he was an ass, and while he was frustration, you were meant to laugh him off. The character's name was Bill. The actor who played this character of Bill was an American actor named Phil Hartman. For those who are international or too young to know him, Phil Hartman gained fame as a cast member on a show called Saturday Night Live. It's been a very long running show. Well, this morning I watched the episode of Talk Radio in which the character of Bill had died and the cast was saying goodbye without breaking the 4th wall. You see, Phil Hartman's real life wife had been physically abusing him for many, many years. Eventually, she killed him one night. It wasn't released to the news about the physical abuse that he suffered at the hands of his wife until after he was dead. I'm glad that there is a greater awareness of violent crimes against men that is done to them by their male or female significant other these days. I'm just sad that this awareness didn't come soon enough to keep Phil Hartman, myself, and so many others. Now, I wasn't killed by my abusers, like Mr. Hartman was... I've been sitting here for a few minutes trying to figure out if Mr. Hartman is lucky that he's dead because he can't be hurt anymore and I'm unlucky because I have something that'll follow me for my entire life OR if Mr. Hartman is unlucky because he must have been so frightened for so many years and knew that eventually that she was going to kill him knowing that he wouldn't be listened to if he said anything and I'm the lucky one because I survived sexual abuse at the hands of those who were older than me and various other types of mental and emotional abusive relationships with people who said they loved me and I, at least, have a chance to deal with it and live a full life. I honestly can't say which would be the worse position to be in. So that made me cry this morning. Which I needed because I've been harboring a lot of anger recently, which I shall go into shortly.
Now, my sleep schedule, as some of you know, is... abnormal. There were 5 different occasions that I didn't sleep for about 40 hours straight during January. When my parents went to visit my brother, his wife, and their infant February 3-9 I didn't go to sleep on the 2nd and was up until the early evening of the 6th. All told, I was awake for about 74 hours straight with no sleep. Never got tired. Never took a nap. I didn't have a nervous breakdown. My mind was just full and processing my life and my biological family's lives and didn't shut down for that time. But in that time I came to a certain understanding of reality that I had been keep from myself. First, a little background.
As you should all know by now, my father has only ever been a sperm donor and money to live on. He never showed an interest in any of his children's lives. He didn't really talk to us unless we broke a rule in the house or if we'd done something wrong and he was telling us what our punishment was. This was all he was during our childhoods. He ruled the house through fear and intimidation. There was never any love from him. My mother was strictly non-openly-confrontational. That doesn't mean that she and my father didn't have arguments, but they went into their bedroom and talked in non-shouting tones about whatever my mother was putting her foot down about. Growing up, I never saw my parents fight, show affection to each other, or interact very much at all really. My mother showed us kids affection but none of us got attention, love, respect, or anything remotely emotionally positive from our father. Now, no child escapes childhood without being damaged in some way by their parents. No parent is perfect. They're just human, of course.
Now, for us kids: my sister (half-sister, we share a common mother but not father, biologically speaking), brother, and myself... My sister moved out the house at 18 and in with her high school boyfriend because our father basically refused to let her make her own life choices while she was living under 'his roof.' So she moved out when I was 9 years old. At that time, I really didn't know her very well because she spent every hour that she was home, except 30 minutes for dinner, in her room, and I didn't know why she had moved out. Of course, her boyfriend was very manipulative, controlling, and abusive. This is the ex-husband that I'm mentioned before. Honestly, she didn't see a way to make it on her own (she was never an academic and never went to college) and our father was always distant and controlling, too. So why should she have thought it was anything out the ordinary in her boyfriend? Now, they, of course, got married, had 2 kids with him, and he filed for divorce 2 weeks after she had filed for divorce but he begged her not to do it and that he'd change and things would be better. He emptied out the joint bank accounts and took her off as an authorized user of the joint credit cards before she was served. He bullied her into giving him anything he wanted just to get out of the divorce. Which has caused no end to issues. He still calls her to 'see how she's doing' and asks her questions about her life that are none of his business anymore. He created a fake Facebook profile and posed as an old high school friend of hers in order to get access to what she posted on her wall. He still tries to control her and intimidate her... sound much like our father, doesn't it?
Now, since she's been divorced, she hasn't spent more than a 4 month stretch without a boyfriend. She even ended up married to one by a Common Law Marriage. There have been 3 men so far. 1 didn't have a steady job. He was a pipeline inspector but this was during the whole Bush Era fuckery when he cut funds to thinks like highway extensions and repairs and bridge repair. This meant that the government wasn't running pipelines down highways from town to town. He eventually went to jail for 3 years for 5 DWI (Driving with Intoxicated, aka drunk driving). My sister divorced him and sold off everything of his that she could, let his truck get repossessed (hurting his credit rating), and gave the rest of his stuff away.
The 2nd one was a janitor at the chemical plant that our father worked at before he retired. He had 5 kids (4 girls and 1 boy), with 3 different baby mommas. He was married to the last baby momma after they found out she got pregnant. But, smart woman that she was, she divorced his sorry ass. When my sister got with him and moved him in with her (*sigh*) he had his youngest, the boy, who was 7 or 8 years old, had ADHD. This guy couldn't afford his son's medication all the time, so the son learned that he could act out and not listen to anyone and he'd never get in any real trouble. I can remember one birthday for my niece that he keep filling up a water balloon with the intention of throwing it at... someone... and my mother told him 5 times in half an hour to empty out the water balloon, that he wasn't to fill it up again, and that there would be no throwing the water balloon at anyone. Every time my mother told him this he just had a goofy smile on his face, emptied the balloon, and ran off, eventually attempting to do whatever it was he wanted to do because he knew he had a free pass. Now, how much was ADHD and how much just him knowing that because of this that he could act out any way he wanted to and never have any consequences because it's a mental illness, I don't know. Well, this guy had his son but when his ex-wife divorced him there was no custody settlement reached. She didn't want to reminded of him and didn't want to be tired down with a kid so she just never tried to get him. All those years later, this guy was supposedly trying to get his ex-wife to sign over full custody of their son officially. My sister read the emails he was sending to his ex-wife and it was more about trying to get back with her than it was about get custody of their kid. Now, he had 4 daughters that he was paying child support on and the expenses of his son.
He was living with my sister without paying any bills, expecting her to have dinner on the table every night, for her to pay the Boys & Girls Club to watch his kid while he was at work, and then go and pick his son up after she got off work and watch his son. He was your typical macho Latino male who had a sense of entitlement. He was over $20k behind on child support on his 4 daughters and his wages were being garnished by the government to pay the child support plus a little extra each month to pay down the back child support he owed. He only brought home about $350/month after all that was taken out. He was into MMA (Mixed Martial Arts, the extreme "sport" where people beat the shit out of each other using a mix of different martial arts disciplines). Every week there was a match on the weekend. But it cost $50 per fight to be able to watch it at home. So $200 of the $350 went to watching 4 fights every month. Leaving him with only $150... which did not cover the price of his son's medication every month. My sister's kids didn't like him. They liked his son even less. He destroyed the Lego sets that my nephew had built and then lied about having broken them. They'd be fine when my sister's kids went to their father's house and the next day one or more would be broken. At one point, he was lying on my nephew's bedroom floor watching my nephew play one of the Call of Duty games and just rolled over 10 or so not-small Lego models. When my nephew yelled at him, he just said, "I didn't know they were there." None of us liked this guy. When my sister finally kicked him out, he came over after work a few days later all in a panic asking my sister had picked up his son. She told him that she was through with him and his son and had no reason to pick up someone she never wanted to take care of in the first place. Turns out that his ex-wife had found out, through their emailing, that their son went to the Boys & Girls Club after school. She decided that she was going to pick him up from there and take her home with her. She lived about a 3 hours drive away. Since not custody agreement had been reached, the boy was just as much his father's as his mother's. She had remarried and had a couple of kids with her husband. She took him to court and, of course, won full custody of their son because she and her husband had a much more stable home environment and could afford to pay for his medication every month. So, at that point, he was having to pay child support for 5 kids.
Now, her current boyfriend is a guy who lives in the apartment complex that she's the assistant manager of. Guess how she met him and guess what he does for a living... yep, just like the last guy, she met him because she's the one who processed all the housing/apartments payments and he's a janitor. Now, he's a janitor at the nuclear power plant, which means that he's much better paid than your average janitor (as are all the employees there) as a deterrent against being paid enough money to do something illegal, steal stuff, or sneak something (like a bomb). He has his own apartment and lives alone. He's never been married. He has no kids. Sounds so much better than any of the others, right!? Well... my sister is 42 years old. Her boyfriend, who she swears isn't her boyfriend but she brought him over for her daughter's birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, and Christmas dinner at my parent's house, (like we're stupid and don't know who he really is, like her kids don't talk) well, he's 21 years old. Yep... my sister's a cougar (slang for an older woman who is into young men). He's exactly 1/2 her age. Her boyfriend is 6 years older than her oldest, teenage, child. So yeah, the guys legal and all, it's her life and she can do whatever she wants to with it, but I just don't see how she could see a future with this guy.
So because our father withheld any love and affection, my sister seeks out a boyfriend to give her those things as a surrogate for her own father not giving her those things. She's been through bad relationship after bad relationship and been dragging her kids through all of it.
My brother dated one girl in high school (for years) and one girl in college (for a few weeks) until he was 34 years old. He only had sex with the one in college. So... in 34 years of life he'd slept with only one woman and they'd slept together only a handful of times during those few weeks. He was on eHarmony for 3 years and everyone they matched him up with had something seriously wrong with them. One wanted to go on a date with him after they had emailed back and forth for a few weeks. He had to drive about 2 hours to get to her and after about 30 minutes she was talking about moving in with him, getting married as soon as possible, how many kids they were going to have, and that she wanted him to have no contact with his family or any friends because she was all he needed and he was all she needed. Another straight up just said that she wanted to move out of her father's house and be taken care of. However, he did his wife on eHarmony. He'd been on there for 3 years (and that ain't cheap) and she had been on it for 3 weeks before they were matched up and started talking. He had to drive about 6 hours to go on dates with her. She was 26 and hadn't lived anywhere but with her parents. However, like my brother, she is a teacher. She teaches junior high math and he was teaching high school math and science at the time. Now he is a professor at a college and they have a baby girl. She's a bit controlling for my tastes, but she is a pleasant person none-the-less. She'd only dated a few guys before my brother. So neither of them have much experience with dating and the dynamics of people when it comes to romantic relationships. She's 28 now and she's at that stage in life/relationship experience where she thinks that you can change your significant other. You take them however they come to you and you accept every part of them or they're not the right person for you. There is no changing someone. If you want someone to change to fit you then you don't really want that person. If you try to change to be what the other person wants you to be then you're not being your authentic self. (At least in vanilla relationship. Even in kinky power exchange dynamic relationships, the submissive shouldn't be a blank slate just waiting to be molded into whom the Dominant wants the submissive to be. Because otherwise, it's not the submissive person that I care about. I'm just building someone into being who I want them to be. That's not how things really work. Someone may be submissive to one Dominant, but that doesn't mean that they're submissive to everyone. I want someone who fits me and compliments me, not someone completely dependent on me to know how to act and what to do.)
Our brother has spent the most time not living in the same town as our parents. He's had the least exposure to our father's behavior. He's done that by choice, too. He didn't want to listen to our father tell him how to live his life, so he's stayed away.
Now, me... well, I don't think that a person can be completely objective about themselves. We're all bias about ourselves: our behaviors, our thoughts, our reasons for why we do certain things, etc. I can tell you that because I never had a male who showed me or told me that they loved me that I have a hard time expressing my feelings. That because I was expected to just know what is right and do what needs to be done in order to make that happen, without ever being encouraged to do so, that I'm very big on doing things myself, without help, without outside input, without caring what others think, etc. This makes me come off as a cold and emotionally distant person. I'm actually a very loving person. I just don't know what the appropriate time is to express my pride in someone or my love for someone (platonic to romantic). In the past, it has lead me to not taking anyone else's opinion into account. So people felt like I don't listen to them or trust them, which they have every reason to think that. I certainly acted like that's the case.
It also lends me to being super hard on myself when I don't succeed to the extent that I feel like I should. It's not a matter of being a perfectionist. I care about functionality not ascetics, or more simply put, I only care if something yields the results that I want, not what it looks like/have to have things follow the exact steps I want them to. I don't care how you get from one point to another... I just want you to get the destination point. However you do it, whatever steps or detours you take to get there don't matter to me. However, if I do the same thing as someone else and it doesn't yield the results that I find acceptable and someone else gets the same results... I am very hard on myself and see myself as a failure, while at the same time feeling that the other person should be proud of whatever progress that they have made. So, if I and another person start at Point A and the acceptable end result is to be at Point D and we both end up at Point C, then I tell myself that I'm a miserable failure and worthless while telling the other person that they should proud of the progress they've made toward reaching Point D.
Those are the things I have done in the past, and sometimes still find myself doing in the present, because of my father's lack of caring and showing of emotion. They only reason I express any emotion at all is because my mother showed me how to do so. I still struggle with figuring out how to express my emotions in the way I intend them to be understood and when the right time is for me to do it. I am more of a person who shows through my actions that care and love someone. I'll be honest... I'm afraid of trusting my heart to anyone again. I'm afraid to put all my hopes, my dreams, my passions, my interests, my love, my insecurities, and my vulnerabilities in someone else's hands and saying, "This is me. All of me. I trust you with it. I trust that you know what to do with it. I trust that you will treat it with kindness and love." I'm more afraid that someone will give me themselves in the same way, because I'm afraid that I'll hurt them because I'm unsure of how to care for something so precious and that I'm not worthy of being entrusted with such a wondrous thing.
Now, that's all the background you need, and then some, in order to understand more comprehensively the following...
Classwork has become much more labor intensive, time consuming, and voluminous. It's senior level courses, so it's really to be expected. One assignment from the first class of the semester (I'm in week 2 of the second class) took me 9.5 straight hours of research and work to do the assignment, and it wasn't even the mid-term project or the final project. So, really, this was the original source of staying up later and later and going to bed later and later in the early to mid morning hours. Well, now I'm at the point of going to bed between 8 AM - 12 PM (noon) and sleeping until 6 PM - 8 PM. I'd still be going to bed at about 4 AM if I hadn't figured something out. I found that since my mother goes to bed at 8 PM - 10 PM and my father goes to bed at 11:30 PM, that I only leave my room when I get up is to pee and get water, then head straight back to my room, and do the classwork that needs doing for that time. So I don't really come out of my room until everyone is in bed. I have found this advantageous in many ways.
See, before, by the time I gotten my classwork done, checked and responded to email, and caught up on the YouTube channels that I am subscribed to my parents would be in front of the TV for the evening until it was past my bedtime. So I had many hours of many shows backed up on the DVR that I never got to watch because my parents were in front of the TV. Now, my father is on his iPad Mini and my mother is on her iPad 2 and paying no attention to the TV but my father goes absolutely ape shit if I take the remote and change the channel because he and my mother are "watching that show." Which is complete and utter bullshit. When I was on their sleep schedule, I would go in to the living room on Thursday nights and watch The Big Bang Theory, and my father had gotten into the habit of watching YouTube videos on his iPad Mini with the sound up loud enough so that he could hear it over the TV and Mom not noticing because she's busy trying to put together a puzzle with an app on her iPad 2. So, in the middle of watching TBBT, all the sudden my father would start playing a video with the sound up loud so that it was hard to filter it out from the sounds coming from the TV. So there was just no use in trying to watch it anymore. So I spent my whole day in my room. Other than using the restroom and getting water (and sometimes food) I didn't leave my room from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. But since I don't leave my room until after Mom and Dad have gone to bed, that means that TV with the DVR wasn't being used. I could catch up on my shows! At first, it took a week of staying up until 8 AM to catch up on my TV shows. Then I realized that I didn't have to deal with Dad anymore. More than that, with my new sleep schedule, I was asleep while my parents were out for the day and awake when they were in the house. Yes, they are asleep, but if something happens, they're there while I'm awake. Before I was just left alone all day. I had no backup if something happened. I'd have to think to call Mom and wait for her to get home, all the while I'm having some crisis and alone. So there was the added bonus of being unconscious when they we're gone and awake when they're home. Even if they're asleep, they're right there! All I have to do is wake one of them up! Which is just a comforting thing to me, as odd as it may sound.
Now, I've been sleeping from 8 AM - noon until 6 PM - 8 PM for two weeks before my parents went to see... well, really they went to see their newest grandchild. My brother and sister-in-law just so happen to be there, too. About the same time (two weeks before my parents left) my mother told me that she and my father were going up to Abilene for a week. After the last time they left and I wrote Mom that whole 6 page long letter about how she doesn't see or understand how not having anyone around and being responsible for my niece, nephew, sister, and Grandma as well as Dakota and myself was just something I couldn't keep doing anymore. I couldn't take care of myself very well without my main support structure (my mother) and to be responsible for so many others, too was just too much. I'm supposed to check up on everyone else but no one checks up on me. That the last time they left it was for just shy of a month. They never called to tell me that they'd arrived at their destination, any of the time they were gone, or even when they were heading back. For all I knew, they could have died during that time, and I was so scared that was the case that I became too anxious and scared to pick up the phone to call her to see if they were alive or not because I couldn't handle it if they weren't alive.
So this last time they left, Mom called every morning or evening, when she knew I'd be winding down my morning before bed or would have been awake for at least an hour that evening. Now, my mother's boss (who she worked with when they were both teachers at the child care center they both work at now, but in the office instead of the classroom) called me once to check on me because Mom asked her to. I've known her boss since I was a small child, too, so I know she cares about me and worried about me once Mom showed her the 6 page letter I wrote last time. Of course, that was the first day they were gone. She didn't call any of the following days to see how I was because she had talked to my sister and my sister lied (as my sister does about so many things) and told my mom's boss that she (my sister) was calling me every day and checking up on me. She never called once. Not that we can expect her to do anything but lie, say what will make her look best, and then when she gets caught it does no good to confront her because she'll just stick to her lie no matter how much evidence is put in front of her.
Now, 2 weeks before they left, both Mom and Dad knew what my sleeping/waking hours were. So Mom asked her boss to pick up the niece and nephew from school and drop them off at their mother's apartment. I walk out into the living room at 7:30 PM, just after I've woken up, after having peed and was on my way to the kitchen to get water and my father stops me and says, "You know your mother and I leave tomorrow for your brother's, right?" I told him that I did know because Mom told me 2 weeks ago. He then said, "The kids need to be picked up from school, taken to their mothers, then Khole (the nephew) needs to be taken to Driver's Ed at 5 PM, his mom will be off work and pick him up from Driver's Ed, and Grandma has her Thursday afternoon lunch out and hair appointment." This is his way of letting me know what he expects me to do. It didn't matter that I have more classwork to do every day. It didn't matter that I have a life of my own that I'm living. He felt completely justified in living his life any way he wanted to and leaving his responsibilities behind, expecting me to do those things for him. He didn't even ask if I would mind or if I could do it. He can live his life any way he wants but I am not afforded that same courtesy. As far as he's concerned, I'm here for/at his convenience. He didn't even tell me about this planned trip when he knew about it 2 weeks previous to the day they were leaving, which was the next morning, so that I could juggle my schedule to take on his responsibilities, because he just expects that I'll do it because it's what he wants.
So I said, "Uh, Dad... you do realize that I'm asleep during those hours, right?" He responded with getting an angry look on his face and raising his voice (his usual fear and intimidation tactics) and says, "So does that mean that you're saying that you won't do those things." I replied with, "I'm not saying anything to you if you're going to get angry and pissy at me." His response was, "Well, when you spring something like this on me the night before the day your mother and I are leaving, I'm sure you can understand why I'm going to be angry and pissy." I said, "I'm springing this on you!? Dad, you've known for at least 2 weeks about this trip and you know that I'm asleep during those hours. This is not new information to you. You waited until the night before you're going to leave to tell me about all the things you just expect me to do because it's convenient for you to have me do those things. You're springing this on me, not the other way around." He got even louder, "So what's supposed to happen then!? Because it's not convenient for you, what... your mother and I have to cancel our trip?" I said, "You're confused. This has nothing to do with inconveniencing me. You wouldn't expect anyone else to completely flip their sleep schedule, on 12 hours notice, unless it's me. I don't know what makes you think that you have the right to live your life any way you want and pretend that I don't have a life of my own or that you expect me to do whatever you want, whenever you want like you are entitled to run my life. And just so you know, when Mom told me, 2 weeks ago, that you two were going up to Abilene and made arrangements with her boss to get the kids after school. The fact that you didn't have the foresight to make other arrangements for Grandma, because of some misappropriated sense of entitlement and privilege, is not my fault. That's all on you. Have you even thought about what you're going to have to do once I graduate, find a job, and move away? What the hell are you going to do about Grandma then!? There won't be any family members around who don't have their own lives and shit to do that will be able to take over with just a moment's notice. And speaking to that; I do have my own life and shit to do. I've done this shit for you in the past because I didn't want to listen to you yell and it's not the kids or Grandma's fault that you feel like you can drop off your responsibilities on me anytime you want to, so I saw no reason to punish them for your arrogance."
Then he started yelling for Mom to wake up because, "We have a problem. It's too inconvenient for Justin to get the kids and Grandma so we're going to have to figure something out." And he said "inconvenient" in that tone that expresses 'that word is such a false burden to him but a real burden to me and I'm saying it like I'm a spoiled child because that's how I perceive him and am trying to shame him and make him feel bad' instead of admitting that he's treated me like a robot that he can activate when he needs it and then put it away when he comes back or that he did something wrong at all. Never in his life has he ever admitted that he's been wrong without insinuating that it's because he thought he could count on that person to do something and they couldn't or wouldn't do it. You know... "I thought you weren't so immature and that I could count on you. I guess I was wrong about that." Never admitting any fault in his actions. He tried to intimidate and bully me into doing what he wanted, again, when he saw me head into the bathroom to brush my teeth and pee before bed.
We haven't really spoken since they left and have come back. Which is just fine with me. I'm not here for his convenience. I never have been. I'd just been conditioned to give in to whatever Dad wants because Mom was almost completely non-confrontational with him the entire time I was growing up. When she was confrontational, which was rare, it was behind the closed door of their bedroom where I couldn't hear it. I was just so galled at his nerve to expect me to not just juggle around the time I did classwork but to also expect me to just wake up after a few hours of sleep or not go to sleep until 6 hours after my bedtime, too.
Here's what I figured out about his actions throughout my life and the effects it's had on his family and others. He never admits that he's wrong. He never takes responsibility for taking a joke too far or saying something that he knows will hurt someone else's feelings. To him, "It was just a joke./I can't help the way they took what I said. That's their problem, not mine."
He's never had anything to do with his children on a personal level. By that I mean that he doesn't know any of us in a meaningful way. Everything that he knows about my sister is because of what my sister tells Mom and Mom tells him. He's never called my sister, even though she's never lived more than 20 miles away from him in her whole life, to chat with her and get to know about her.
In the 4 years that my brother was at UT Austin, Dad went up to see my brother graduate, otherwise Dad never saw or spoke to my brother. My brother didn't come back home during the summers. He talked Mom into forcing Dad to co-sign a lease and pay for an apartment. Since my brother has graduated, he has not lived in the same small town as Dad, except for the first year after he got married, because my brother got a job at a nearby high school, while going to Grad school to be his Masters in Math, and Bay City was the closest city with apartment complexes to that out-of-town high school. My brother has spent his entire adult life avoiding being anywhere near our father, except on holidays, and then that's just for Mom's benefit, not for Dad's. Not once in all the time since my brother graduated from UT Austin has my father picked up the phone to talk to my brother about my brother's life. The few times Dad called was when Dad needed to know something that my brother knew.
Dad's done this my entire life, but it has become so blatantly clear in the past 5 years that I've lived here. He has never asked me how my day is. He's never asked what I was up to. He's never expressed any interest in my life. There are 3 instances in which he gets off the couch and comes to my room to see me. 1) To tell me that the dog wants to go potty, 2) to tell me what responsibilities he's dropping in my lap when he and Mom want to leave town, and 3) to ask me how school's going but no matter what my response he immediately follows up with, "So, how many classes do you have left until you graduate?" (For those of you who need that last question translated, it's him saying, "I want to know how many classes you have left so that I know how long it will be until you graduate, so you can find a job, and move out of my house.")
I understand what I'd been trying to do for the last 6 months of last year. I would read something in the newspaper, online, watch a YouTube video, or share with him a TV show that I like. I realize now why I was doing it. I thought it was because I had no friends to talk about these things with and he's the only one in the house who has a chance of understanding most of my technological interests. What I was really doing was telling him about something I enjoy in the hopes that he'd enjoy it as well and we'd have something in common OR that he'd share something that he enjoys with me. I was hoping that after learning about some of my hobbies and interests that if he saw something that he thinks I might like to read or see that he'd come share that with me. It's like we're on two opposite sides of a fast moving river. I keep building half a bridge out towards him in the hopes that he'll build the other half of the bridge and connection the two pieces into a whole bridge. But every time I build my half, he shows no interest, doesn't even pretend to make an attempt to start building his half of the bridge, and without the support of his half of the bridge, my half of the bridge falls into the river and is swept away. And how many times do I have to be shown that he doesn't care before I stop trying? He's never going to be the kind of dad that I wish he were. It's just not who he is. What's the definition of "crazy?" That's when you repeat the same action over and over again but expect a different result. I've tried. I really have. It's just not going to happen.
In fact, he's never shown any interest in getting to know any of his children, ever. My sister is 42 years old and he still sometimes calls her, after Mom has told him about my sister's situation, to tell her exactly how to handle the situation. When she doesn't do what he said to do and does whatever she decided to do, he still gets mad because, to him, she's not doing the right thing. When she lived next door to my parents, the were one time that he went over to tell her what to do in a very aggressive way and when my sister didn't say that she would do what he expected her to do he got extremely angry, started yelling at her, and she said, "Dad, I'm 40 years old. I can make my own decisions. Get out and until you can treat me respect in my own house, don't come back." He was mad for a good solid week after that. Any little thing that wasn't in the place he thought it should be in the house, he'd fly off the handle and yell at Mom that whatever the object was it was in his way and she needed to put it away. Then at one point I was at my Mom's place of work, which is part of a church where he volunteered to be the interim-maintenance man until they found someone to take the job permanently. Mom and I would go out to eat for lunch a couple of time a week. We had just gotten back and he comes storming into my mother's office and asks where we went to eat. We told him and he demanded to know why we didn't invite him. I told him that every time we invite him to go with us to that place that he always says no and goes to the same hamburger restaurant for lunch that he always does. Just piddly little things pissed him off. He tried to tell one of my old therapists that he never gets upset about anything. Which, I called him on in front of the therapist and cited several examples. At which point he got upset and said, "This isn't about me. This is about you." (Redirection/Deflection)
I realized that, to Dad, we're not adults. No matter what life experiences we have or how old we get, we'll always be children who need him to tell them what to do. It's because he doesn't know anything of any depth about any of us. He has no clue what our lives have been like or what things we've experienced and understand because he's never gotten to know us. He knows little to nothing about our pasts. So he can't help but see us as naive children who need his guidance. And what's more; that's never going to change. He's never going to want to get to know any us. He doesn't see anything wrong with what he's done or what he's doing. To him, he's got life figured out and he couldn't possibly learn anything from his children. I mean, to him, his children are silly and make mistakes all the time. The things he doesn't know about or doesn't want to know about, he'll just stick his head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. The ways in which the world is changing scare him because he doesn't understand them, and instead of trying to understand them, he pretends that it has nothing to do with him and will never have any effect on his life.
And really, he oozes privilege. He's in the generation that is the highest population in the US ("The Baby Boomers"; those who were born after WWII ended and the men returned home to their wives and had many many children), he's Caucasian, he's male, he worked at the same job his entire post-graduation career (which has always been a male dominated field), he's middle class, he's Christian, and he's a cis heterosexual who's married with children. He has no clue what it's like to be a part of a minority and he doesn't want to. He doesn't know anything but privilege. As long as the status quo is kept, he's got no reason to learn anything about any minority or their struggles to be treated as equals and human. He doesn't know what it's like to have something about him that someone hates just because it's a part of who he is that he has no choice about. Yes, there are Muslim extremists who would like nothing more than to see him and everyone like him dead, but he's never actually been assaulted, attacked, beaten up, almost blown up, or almost killed. He has no frame of reference to minorities. He can just pretend they don't exist because, by and large, they have no effect on his life. It's not like he votes Democrat because he has a gay son and wants for him to be treated as an equal and be able to marry the person that he loves. He's always voted Democrat. If his gay son can get married, it doesn't change anything for him. If his gay son can't get married, it doesn't change anything for him. He's never had to fight to be considered a human being that's worthy of respect or equal treatment.
He honestly expects one of us to take him into our home when he get old and too weak to take care of himself. And none of us are going to. We all know that he's just going to become more belligerent, rude, and demanding as he gets older. My sister doesn't want to take care of her (step-)father who needs the attention of a child once her children leave the house. My brother (and sister-in-law) doesn't want him in their house. By the time Dad's can't take care of himself alone, their child will be in high school or college. It'll finally be time for them to be alone with each other again without having to keep a constant eye on their child. Neither of them want to put up with Dad's behavior or to have to take care of their father-who-is-now-a-child.
As far as me... HA! If he calls and tells me that he at the point in his life where he needs me to take him in and take care of him (because I'll be the child who makes and has the most money, assuming I don't get married and have/adopt a child with my future husband) I'll tell him to call one of his other two children and see if one of them will take him in. He'll have already called them because he knows that I want nothing to do with him. He'll tell me that I'm his last resort, that he knows we haven't always gotten along, but he's my father. To which I'll tell him that he's been a virtual stranger my entire life, he's never tried to get to know the real me, we have nothing in common but a few shared genetic markers which does not make us family, that when Mom died (which she's got so many health problems that, unless Dad's killed in an accident, she'll die first) the last remaining thing we had in common was gone, I'm not even willing to help him and my siblings pick out a nursing home for him, and not to call back again even when he's on his death bed because I have nothing more to say to him. Harsh? Sure. But he's toxic and poisonous to me. I refuse to subject myself to that kind of thing willingly if I don't absolutely have to. I've tried over and over and over again to have a meaningful relationship with him. Every time I've tried, he's made no effort to make the connection.
I'm done trying. It's never going to change and that's his loss. Unfortunately, that's also a loss for his wife and grandchildren. Hell, both of his biological parents are still alive! He's never known death to touch him (or, actually, someone he was intimately close to). His ignorance is staggering. I pity him. He's lost so much that he's never even had because he never tried in the first place.
So, I'll start off with something a little sad. I was watching TV this morning, around 3-ish AM. It was an old TV show called Talk Radio. It was basically a show about the office of a talk radio station. Several wonderful characters and running jokes, some of which were fun and others.... not so much. Now, this show had a character that was snobbish, rude, and full of himself. Think Fraiser except Fraiser was a person of intelligence and some refinement, if not a big overly narcissistic. Well, this character on Talk Radio was like that only he wasn't really smart enough to be an intellectual. He was more of just an ass. However, the character wasn't an insufferable ass. It's more that he knew he was an ass, everyone knew he was an ass, and while he was frustration, you were meant to laugh him off. The character's name was Bill. The actor who played this character of Bill was an American actor named Phil Hartman. For those who are international or too young to know him, Phil Hartman gained fame as a cast member on a show called Saturday Night Live. It's been a very long running show. Well, this morning I watched the episode of Talk Radio in which the character of Bill had died and the cast was saying goodbye without breaking the 4th wall. You see, Phil Hartman's real life wife had been physically abusing him for many, many years. Eventually, she killed him one night. It wasn't released to the news about the physical abuse that he suffered at the hands of his wife until after he was dead. I'm glad that there is a greater awareness of violent crimes against men that is done to them by their male or female significant other these days. I'm just sad that this awareness didn't come soon enough to keep Phil Hartman, myself, and so many others. Now, I wasn't killed by my abusers, like Mr. Hartman was... I've been sitting here for a few minutes trying to figure out if Mr. Hartman is lucky that he's dead because he can't be hurt anymore and I'm unlucky because I have something that'll follow me for my entire life OR if Mr. Hartman is unlucky because he must have been so frightened for so many years and knew that eventually that she was going to kill him knowing that he wouldn't be listened to if he said anything and I'm the lucky one because I survived sexual abuse at the hands of those who were older than me and various other types of mental and emotional abusive relationships with people who said they loved me and I, at least, have a chance to deal with it and live a full life. I honestly can't say which would be the worse position to be in. So that made me cry this morning. Which I needed because I've been harboring a lot of anger recently, which I shall go into shortly.
Now, my sleep schedule, as some of you know, is... abnormal. There were 5 different occasions that I didn't sleep for about 40 hours straight during January. When my parents went to visit my brother, his wife, and their infant February 3-9 I didn't go to sleep on the 2nd and was up until the early evening of the 6th. All told, I was awake for about 74 hours straight with no sleep. Never got tired. Never took a nap. I didn't have a nervous breakdown. My mind was just full and processing my life and my biological family's lives and didn't shut down for that time. But in that time I came to a certain understanding of reality that I had been keep from myself. First, a little background.
As you should all know by now, my father has only ever been a sperm donor and money to live on. He never showed an interest in any of his children's lives. He didn't really talk to us unless we broke a rule in the house or if we'd done something wrong and he was telling us what our punishment was. This was all he was during our childhoods. He ruled the house through fear and intimidation. There was never any love from him. My mother was strictly non-openly-confrontational. That doesn't mean that she and my father didn't have arguments, but they went into their bedroom and talked in non-shouting tones about whatever my mother was putting her foot down about. Growing up, I never saw my parents fight, show affection to each other, or interact very much at all really. My mother showed us kids affection but none of us got attention, love, respect, or anything remotely emotionally positive from our father. Now, no child escapes childhood without being damaged in some way by their parents. No parent is perfect. They're just human, of course.
Now, for us kids: my sister (half-sister, we share a common mother but not father, biologically speaking), brother, and myself... My sister moved out the house at 18 and in with her high school boyfriend because our father basically refused to let her make her own life choices while she was living under 'his roof.' So she moved out when I was 9 years old. At that time, I really didn't know her very well because she spent every hour that she was home, except 30 minutes for dinner, in her room, and I didn't know why she had moved out. Of course, her boyfriend was very manipulative, controlling, and abusive. This is the ex-husband that I'm mentioned before. Honestly, she didn't see a way to make it on her own (she was never an academic and never went to college) and our father was always distant and controlling, too. So why should she have thought it was anything out the ordinary in her boyfriend? Now, they, of course, got married, had 2 kids with him, and he filed for divorce 2 weeks after she had filed for divorce but he begged her not to do it and that he'd change and things would be better. He emptied out the joint bank accounts and took her off as an authorized user of the joint credit cards before she was served. He bullied her into giving him anything he wanted just to get out of the divorce. Which has caused no end to issues. He still calls her to 'see how she's doing' and asks her questions about her life that are none of his business anymore. He created a fake Facebook profile and posed as an old high school friend of hers in order to get access to what she posted on her wall. He still tries to control her and intimidate her... sound much like our father, doesn't it?
Now, since she's been divorced, she hasn't spent more than a 4 month stretch without a boyfriend. She even ended up married to one by a Common Law Marriage. There have been 3 men so far. 1 didn't have a steady job. He was a pipeline inspector but this was during the whole Bush Era fuckery when he cut funds to thinks like highway extensions and repairs and bridge repair. This meant that the government wasn't running pipelines down highways from town to town. He eventually went to jail for 3 years for 5 DWI (Driving with Intoxicated, aka drunk driving). My sister divorced him and sold off everything of his that she could, let his truck get repossessed (hurting his credit rating), and gave the rest of his stuff away.
The 2nd one was a janitor at the chemical plant that our father worked at before he retired. He had 5 kids (4 girls and 1 boy), with 3 different baby mommas. He was married to the last baby momma after they found out she got pregnant. But, smart woman that she was, she divorced his sorry ass. When my sister got with him and moved him in with her (*sigh*) he had his youngest, the boy, who was 7 or 8 years old, had ADHD. This guy couldn't afford his son's medication all the time, so the son learned that he could act out and not listen to anyone and he'd never get in any real trouble. I can remember one birthday for my niece that he keep filling up a water balloon with the intention of throwing it at... someone... and my mother told him 5 times in half an hour to empty out the water balloon, that he wasn't to fill it up again, and that there would be no throwing the water balloon at anyone. Every time my mother told him this he just had a goofy smile on his face, emptied the balloon, and ran off, eventually attempting to do whatever it was he wanted to do because he knew he had a free pass. Now, how much was ADHD and how much just him knowing that because of this that he could act out any way he wanted to and never have any consequences because it's a mental illness, I don't know. Well, this guy had his son but when his ex-wife divorced him there was no custody settlement reached. She didn't want to reminded of him and didn't want to be tired down with a kid so she just never tried to get him. All those years later, this guy was supposedly trying to get his ex-wife to sign over full custody of their son officially. My sister read the emails he was sending to his ex-wife and it was more about trying to get back with her than it was about get custody of their kid. Now, he had 4 daughters that he was paying child support on and the expenses of his son.
He was living with my sister without paying any bills, expecting her to have dinner on the table every night, for her to pay the Boys & Girls Club to watch his kid while he was at work, and then go and pick his son up after she got off work and watch his son. He was your typical macho Latino male who had a sense of entitlement. He was over $20k behind on child support on his 4 daughters and his wages were being garnished by the government to pay the child support plus a little extra each month to pay down the back child support he owed. He only brought home about $350/month after all that was taken out. He was into MMA (Mixed Martial Arts, the extreme "sport" where people beat the shit out of each other using a mix of different martial arts disciplines). Every week there was a match on the weekend. But it cost $50 per fight to be able to watch it at home. So $200 of the $350 went to watching 4 fights every month. Leaving him with only $150... which did not cover the price of his son's medication every month. My sister's kids didn't like him. They liked his son even less. He destroyed the Lego sets that my nephew had built and then lied about having broken them. They'd be fine when my sister's kids went to their father's house and the next day one or more would be broken. At one point, he was lying on my nephew's bedroom floor watching my nephew play one of the Call of Duty games and just rolled over 10 or so not-small Lego models. When my nephew yelled at him, he just said, "I didn't know they were there." None of us liked this guy. When my sister finally kicked him out, he came over after work a few days later all in a panic asking my sister had picked up his son. She told him that she was through with him and his son and had no reason to pick up someone she never wanted to take care of in the first place. Turns out that his ex-wife had found out, through their emailing, that their son went to the Boys & Girls Club after school. She decided that she was going to pick him up from there and take her home with her. She lived about a 3 hours drive away. Since not custody agreement had been reached, the boy was just as much his father's as his mother's. She had remarried and had a couple of kids with her husband. She took him to court and, of course, won full custody of their son because she and her husband had a much more stable home environment and could afford to pay for his medication every month. So, at that point, he was having to pay child support for 5 kids.
Now, her current boyfriend is a guy who lives in the apartment complex that she's the assistant manager of. Guess how she met him and guess what he does for a living... yep, just like the last guy, she met him because she's the one who processed all the housing/apartments payments and he's a janitor. Now, he's a janitor at the nuclear power plant, which means that he's much better paid than your average janitor (as are all the employees there) as a deterrent against being paid enough money to do something illegal, steal stuff, or sneak something (like a bomb). He has his own apartment and lives alone. He's never been married. He has no kids. Sounds so much better than any of the others, right!? Well... my sister is 42 years old. Her boyfriend, who she swears isn't her boyfriend but she brought him over for her daughter's birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, and Christmas dinner at my parent's house, (like we're stupid and don't know who he really is, like her kids don't talk) well, he's 21 years old. Yep... my sister's a cougar (slang for an older woman who is into young men). He's exactly 1/2 her age. Her boyfriend is 6 years older than her oldest, teenage, child. So yeah, the guys legal and all, it's her life and she can do whatever she wants to with it, but I just don't see how she could see a future with this guy.
So because our father withheld any love and affection, my sister seeks out a boyfriend to give her those things as a surrogate for her own father not giving her those things. She's been through bad relationship after bad relationship and been dragging her kids through all of it.
My brother dated one girl in high school (for years) and one girl in college (for a few weeks) until he was 34 years old. He only had sex with the one in college. So... in 34 years of life he'd slept with only one woman and they'd slept together only a handful of times during those few weeks. He was on eHarmony for 3 years and everyone they matched him up with had something seriously wrong with them. One wanted to go on a date with him after they had emailed back and forth for a few weeks. He had to drive about 2 hours to get to her and after about 30 minutes she was talking about moving in with him, getting married as soon as possible, how many kids they were going to have, and that she wanted him to have no contact with his family or any friends because she was all he needed and he was all she needed. Another straight up just said that she wanted to move out of her father's house and be taken care of. However, he did his wife on eHarmony. He'd been on there for 3 years (and that ain't cheap) and she had been on it for 3 weeks before they were matched up and started talking. He had to drive about 6 hours to go on dates with her. She was 26 and hadn't lived anywhere but with her parents. However, like my brother, she is a teacher. She teaches junior high math and he was teaching high school math and science at the time. Now he is a professor at a college and they have a baby girl. She's a bit controlling for my tastes, but she is a pleasant person none-the-less. She'd only dated a few guys before my brother. So neither of them have much experience with dating and the dynamics of people when it comes to romantic relationships. She's 28 now and she's at that stage in life/relationship experience where she thinks that you can change your significant other. You take them however they come to you and you accept every part of them or they're not the right person for you. There is no changing someone. If you want someone to change to fit you then you don't really want that person. If you try to change to be what the other person wants you to be then you're not being your authentic self. (At least in vanilla relationship. Even in kinky power exchange dynamic relationships, the submissive shouldn't be a blank slate just waiting to be molded into whom the Dominant wants the submissive to be. Because otherwise, it's not the submissive person that I care about. I'm just building someone into being who I want them to be. That's not how things really work. Someone may be submissive to one Dominant, but that doesn't mean that they're submissive to everyone. I want someone who fits me and compliments me, not someone completely dependent on me to know how to act and what to do.)
Our brother has spent the most time not living in the same town as our parents. He's had the least exposure to our father's behavior. He's done that by choice, too. He didn't want to listen to our father tell him how to live his life, so he's stayed away.
Now, me... well, I don't think that a person can be completely objective about themselves. We're all bias about ourselves: our behaviors, our thoughts, our reasons for why we do certain things, etc. I can tell you that because I never had a male who showed me or told me that they loved me that I have a hard time expressing my feelings. That because I was expected to just know what is right and do what needs to be done in order to make that happen, without ever being encouraged to do so, that I'm very big on doing things myself, without help, without outside input, without caring what others think, etc. This makes me come off as a cold and emotionally distant person. I'm actually a very loving person. I just don't know what the appropriate time is to express my pride in someone or my love for someone (platonic to romantic). In the past, it has lead me to not taking anyone else's opinion into account. So people felt like I don't listen to them or trust them, which they have every reason to think that. I certainly acted like that's the case.
It also lends me to being super hard on myself when I don't succeed to the extent that I feel like I should. It's not a matter of being a perfectionist. I care about functionality not ascetics, or more simply put, I only care if something yields the results that I want, not what it looks like/have to have things follow the exact steps I want them to. I don't care how you get from one point to another... I just want you to get the destination point. However you do it, whatever steps or detours you take to get there don't matter to me. However, if I do the same thing as someone else and it doesn't yield the results that I find acceptable and someone else gets the same results... I am very hard on myself and see myself as a failure, while at the same time feeling that the other person should be proud of whatever progress that they have made. So, if I and another person start at Point A and the acceptable end result is to be at Point D and we both end up at Point C, then I tell myself that I'm a miserable failure and worthless while telling the other person that they should proud of the progress they've made toward reaching Point D.
Those are the things I have done in the past, and sometimes still find myself doing in the present, because of my father's lack of caring and showing of emotion. They only reason I express any emotion at all is because my mother showed me how to do so. I still struggle with figuring out how to express my emotions in the way I intend them to be understood and when the right time is for me to do it. I am more of a person who shows through my actions that care and love someone. I'll be honest... I'm afraid of trusting my heart to anyone again. I'm afraid to put all my hopes, my dreams, my passions, my interests, my love, my insecurities, and my vulnerabilities in someone else's hands and saying, "This is me. All of me. I trust you with it. I trust that you know what to do with it. I trust that you will treat it with kindness and love." I'm more afraid that someone will give me themselves in the same way, because I'm afraid that I'll hurt them because I'm unsure of how to care for something so precious and that I'm not worthy of being entrusted with such a wondrous thing.
Now, that's all the background you need, and then some, in order to understand more comprehensively the following...
Classwork has become much more labor intensive, time consuming, and voluminous. It's senior level courses, so it's really to be expected. One assignment from the first class of the semester (I'm in week 2 of the second class) took me 9.5 straight hours of research and work to do the assignment, and it wasn't even the mid-term project or the final project. So, really, this was the original source of staying up later and later and going to bed later and later in the early to mid morning hours. Well, now I'm at the point of going to bed between 8 AM - 12 PM (noon) and sleeping until 6 PM - 8 PM. I'd still be going to bed at about 4 AM if I hadn't figured something out. I found that since my mother goes to bed at 8 PM - 10 PM and my father goes to bed at 11:30 PM, that I only leave my room when I get up is to pee and get water, then head straight back to my room, and do the classwork that needs doing for that time. So I don't really come out of my room until everyone is in bed. I have found this advantageous in many ways.
See, before, by the time I gotten my classwork done, checked and responded to email, and caught up on the YouTube channels that I am subscribed to my parents would be in front of the TV for the evening until it was past my bedtime. So I had many hours of many shows backed up on the DVR that I never got to watch because my parents were in front of the TV. Now, my father is on his iPad Mini and my mother is on her iPad 2 and paying no attention to the TV but my father goes absolutely ape shit if I take the remote and change the channel because he and my mother are "watching that show." Which is complete and utter bullshit. When I was on their sleep schedule, I would go in to the living room on Thursday nights and watch The Big Bang Theory, and my father had gotten into the habit of watching YouTube videos on his iPad Mini with the sound up loud enough so that he could hear it over the TV and Mom not noticing because she's busy trying to put together a puzzle with an app on her iPad 2. So, in the middle of watching TBBT, all the sudden my father would start playing a video with the sound up loud so that it was hard to filter it out from the sounds coming from the TV. So there was just no use in trying to watch it anymore. So I spent my whole day in my room. Other than using the restroom and getting water (and sometimes food) I didn't leave my room from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. But since I don't leave my room until after Mom and Dad have gone to bed, that means that TV with the DVR wasn't being used. I could catch up on my shows! At first, it took a week of staying up until 8 AM to catch up on my TV shows. Then I realized that I didn't have to deal with Dad anymore. More than that, with my new sleep schedule, I was asleep while my parents were out for the day and awake when they were in the house. Yes, they are asleep, but if something happens, they're there while I'm awake. Before I was just left alone all day. I had no backup if something happened. I'd have to think to call Mom and wait for her to get home, all the while I'm having some crisis and alone. So there was the added bonus of being unconscious when they we're gone and awake when they're home. Even if they're asleep, they're right there! All I have to do is wake one of them up! Which is just a comforting thing to me, as odd as it may sound.
Now, I've been sleeping from 8 AM - noon until 6 PM - 8 PM for two weeks before my parents went to see... well, really they went to see their newest grandchild. My brother and sister-in-law just so happen to be there, too. About the same time (two weeks before my parents left) my mother told me that she and my father were going up to Abilene for a week. After the last time they left and I wrote Mom that whole 6 page long letter about how she doesn't see or understand how not having anyone around and being responsible for my niece, nephew, sister, and Grandma as well as Dakota and myself was just something I couldn't keep doing anymore. I couldn't take care of myself very well without my main support structure (my mother) and to be responsible for so many others, too was just too much. I'm supposed to check up on everyone else but no one checks up on me. That the last time they left it was for just shy of a month. They never called to tell me that they'd arrived at their destination, any of the time they were gone, or even when they were heading back. For all I knew, they could have died during that time, and I was so scared that was the case that I became too anxious and scared to pick up the phone to call her to see if they were alive or not because I couldn't handle it if they weren't alive.
So this last time they left, Mom called every morning or evening, when she knew I'd be winding down my morning before bed or would have been awake for at least an hour that evening. Now, my mother's boss (who she worked with when they were both teachers at the child care center they both work at now, but in the office instead of the classroom) called me once to check on me because Mom asked her to. I've known her boss since I was a small child, too, so I know she cares about me and worried about me once Mom showed her the 6 page letter I wrote last time. Of course, that was the first day they were gone. She didn't call any of the following days to see how I was because she had talked to my sister and my sister lied (as my sister does about so many things) and told my mom's boss that she (my sister) was calling me every day and checking up on me. She never called once. Not that we can expect her to do anything but lie, say what will make her look best, and then when she gets caught it does no good to confront her because she'll just stick to her lie no matter how much evidence is put in front of her.
Now, 2 weeks before they left, both Mom and Dad knew what my sleeping/waking hours were. So Mom asked her boss to pick up the niece and nephew from school and drop them off at their mother's apartment. I walk out into the living room at 7:30 PM, just after I've woken up, after having peed and was on my way to the kitchen to get water and my father stops me and says, "You know your mother and I leave tomorrow for your brother's, right?" I told him that I did know because Mom told me 2 weeks ago. He then said, "The kids need to be picked up from school, taken to their mothers, then Khole (the nephew) needs to be taken to Driver's Ed at 5 PM, his mom will be off work and pick him up from Driver's Ed, and Grandma has her Thursday afternoon lunch out and hair appointment." This is his way of letting me know what he expects me to do. It didn't matter that I have more classwork to do every day. It didn't matter that I have a life of my own that I'm living. He felt completely justified in living his life any way he wanted to and leaving his responsibilities behind, expecting me to do those things for him. He didn't even ask if I would mind or if I could do it. He can live his life any way he wants but I am not afforded that same courtesy. As far as he's concerned, I'm here for/at his convenience. He didn't even tell me about this planned trip when he knew about it 2 weeks previous to the day they were leaving, which was the next morning, so that I could juggle my schedule to take on his responsibilities, because he just expects that I'll do it because it's what he wants.
So I said, "Uh, Dad... you do realize that I'm asleep during those hours, right?" He responded with getting an angry look on his face and raising his voice (his usual fear and intimidation tactics) and says, "So does that mean that you're saying that you won't do those things." I replied with, "I'm not saying anything to you if you're going to get angry and pissy at me." His response was, "Well, when you spring something like this on me the night before the day your mother and I are leaving, I'm sure you can understand why I'm going to be angry and pissy." I said, "I'm springing this on you!? Dad, you've known for at least 2 weeks about this trip and you know that I'm asleep during those hours. This is not new information to you. You waited until the night before you're going to leave to tell me about all the things you just expect me to do because it's convenient for you to have me do those things. You're springing this on me, not the other way around." He got even louder, "So what's supposed to happen then!? Because it's not convenient for you, what... your mother and I have to cancel our trip?" I said, "You're confused. This has nothing to do with inconveniencing me. You wouldn't expect anyone else to completely flip their sleep schedule, on 12 hours notice, unless it's me. I don't know what makes you think that you have the right to live your life any way you want and pretend that I don't have a life of my own or that you expect me to do whatever you want, whenever you want like you are entitled to run my life. And just so you know, when Mom told me, 2 weeks ago, that you two were going up to Abilene and made arrangements with her boss to get the kids after school. The fact that you didn't have the foresight to make other arrangements for Grandma, because of some misappropriated sense of entitlement and privilege, is not my fault. That's all on you. Have you even thought about what you're going to have to do once I graduate, find a job, and move away? What the hell are you going to do about Grandma then!? There won't be any family members around who don't have their own lives and shit to do that will be able to take over with just a moment's notice. And speaking to that; I do have my own life and shit to do. I've done this shit for you in the past because I didn't want to listen to you yell and it's not the kids or Grandma's fault that you feel like you can drop off your responsibilities on me anytime you want to, so I saw no reason to punish them for your arrogance."
Then he started yelling for Mom to wake up because, "We have a problem. It's too inconvenient for Justin to get the kids and Grandma so we're going to have to figure something out." And he said "inconvenient" in that tone that expresses 'that word is such a false burden to him but a real burden to me and I'm saying it like I'm a spoiled child because that's how I perceive him and am trying to shame him and make him feel bad' instead of admitting that he's treated me like a robot that he can activate when he needs it and then put it away when he comes back or that he did something wrong at all. Never in his life has he ever admitted that he's been wrong without insinuating that it's because he thought he could count on that person to do something and they couldn't or wouldn't do it. You know... "I thought you weren't so immature and that I could count on you. I guess I was wrong about that." Never admitting any fault in his actions. He tried to intimidate and bully me into doing what he wanted, again, when he saw me head into the bathroom to brush my teeth and pee before bed.
We haven't really spoken since they left and have come back. Which is just fine with me. I'm not here for his convenience. I never have been. I'd just been conditioned to give in to whatever Dad wants because Mom was almost completely non-confrontational with him the entire time I was growing up. When she was confrontational, which was rare, it was behind the closed door of their bedroom where I couldn't hear it. I was just so galled at his nerve to expect me to not just juggle around the time I did classwork but to also expect me to just wake up after a few hours of sleep or not go to sleep until 6 hours after my bedtime, too.
Here's what I figured out about his actions throughout my life and the effects it's had on his family and others. He never admits that he's wrong. He never takes responsibility for taking a joke too far or saying something that he knows will hurt someone else's feelings. To him, "It was just a joke./I can't help the way they took what I said. That's their problem, not mine."
He's never had anything to do with his children on a personal level. By that I mean that he doesn't know any of us in a meaningful way. Everything that he knows about my sister is because of what my sister tells Mom and Mom tells him. He's never called my sister, even though she's never lived more than 20 miles away from him in her whole life, to chat with her and get to know about her.
In the 4 years that my brother was at UT Austin, Dad went up to see my brother graduate, otherwise Dad never saw or spoke to my brother. My brother didn't come back home during the summers. He talked Mom into forcing Dad to co-sign a lease and pay for an apartment. Since my brother has graduated, he has not lived in the same small town as Dad, except for the first year after he got married, because my brother got a job at a nearby high school, while going to Grad school to be his Masters in Math, and Bay City was the closest city with apartment complexes to that out-of-town high school. My brother has spent his entire adult life avoiding being anywhere near our father, except on holidays, and then that's just for Mom's benefit, not for Dad's. Not once in all the time since my brother graduated from UT Austin has my father picked up the phone to talk to my brother about my brother's life. The few times Dad called was when Dad needed to know something that my brother knew.
Dad's done this my entire life, but it has become so blatantly clear in the past 5 years that I've lived here. He has never asked me how my day is. He's never asked what I was up to. He's never expressed any interest in my life. There are 3 instances in which he gets off the couch and comes to my room to see me. 1) To tell me that the dog wants to go potty, 2) to tell me what responsibilities he's dropping in my lap when he and Mom want to leave town, and 3) to ask me how school's going but no matter what my response he immediately follows up with, "So, how many classes do you have left until you graduate?" (For those of you who need that last question translated, it's him saying, "I want to know how many classes you have left so that I know how long it will be until you graduate, so you can find a job, and move out of my house.")
I understand what I'd been trying to do for the last 6 months of last year. I would read something in the newspaper, online, watch a YouTube video, or share with him a TV show that I like. I realize now why I was doing it. I thought it was because I had no friends to talk about these things with and he's the only one in the house who has a chance of understanding most of my technological interests. What I was really doing was telling him about something I enjoy in the hopes that he'd enjoy it as well and we'd have something in common OR that he'd share something that he enjoys with me. I was hoping that after learning about some of my hobbies and interests that if he saw something that he thinks I might like to read or see that he'd come share that with me. It's like we're on two opposite sides of a fast moving river. I keep building half a bridge out towards him in the hopes that he'll build the other half of the bridge and connection the two pieces into a whole bridge. But every time I build my half, he shows no interest, doesn't even pretend to make an attempt to start building his half of the bridge, and without the support of his half of the bridge, my half of the bridge falls into the river and is swept away. And how many times do I have to be shown that he doesn't care before I stop trying? He's never going to be the kind of dad that I wish he were. It's just not who he is. What's the definition of "crazy?" That's when you repeat the same action over and over again but expect a different result. I've tried. I really have. It's just not going to happen.
In fact, he's never shown any interest in getting to know any of his children, ever. My sister is 42 years old and he still sometimes calls her, after Mom has told him about my sister's situation, to tell her exactly how to handle the situation. When she doesn't do what he said to do and does whatever she decided to do, he still gets mad because, to him, she's not doing the right thing. When she lived next door to my parents, the were one time that he went over to tell her what to do in a very aggressive way and when my sister didn't say that she would do what he expected her to do he got extremely angry, started yelling at her, and she said, "Dad, I'm 40 years old. I can make my own decisions. Get out and until you can treat me respect in my own house, don't come back." He was mad for a good solid week after that. Any little thing that wasn't in the place he thought it should be in the house, he'd fly off the handle and yell at Mom that whatever the object was it was in his way and she needed to put it away. Then at one point I was at my Mom's place of work, which is part of a church where he volunteered to be the interim-maintenance man until they found someone to take the job permanently. Mom and I would go out to eat for lunch a couple of time a week. We had just gotten back and he comes storming into my mother's office and asks where we went to eat. We told him and he demanded to know why we didn't invite him. I told him that every time we invite him to go with us to that place that he always says no and goes to the same hamburger restaurant for lunch that he always does. Just piddly little things pissed him off. He tried to tell one of my old therapists that he never gets upset about anything. Which, I called him on in front of the therapist and cited several examples. At which point he got upset and said, "This isn't about me. This is about you." (Redirection/Deflection)
I realized that, to Dad, we're not adults. No matter what life experiences we have or how old we get, we'll always be children who need him to tell them what to do. It's because he doesn't know anything of any depth about any of us. He has no clue what our lives have been like or what things we've experienced and understand because he's never gotten to know us. He knows little to nothing about our pasts. So he can't help but see us as naive children who need his guidance. And what's more; that's never going to change. He's never going to want to get to know any us. He doesn't see anything wrong with what he's done or what he's doing. To him, he's got life figured out and he couldn't possibly learn anything from his children. I mean, to him, his children are silly and make mistakes all the time. The things he doesn't know about or doesn't want to know about, he'll just stick his head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. The ways in which the world is changing scare him because he doesn't understand them, and instead of trying to understand them, he pretends that it has nothing to do with him and will never have any effect on his life.
And really, he oozes privilege. He's in the generation that is the highest population in the US ("The Baby Boomers"; those who were born after WWII ended and the men returned home to their wives and had many many children), he's Caucasian, he's male, he worked at the same job his entire post-graduation career (which has always been a male dominated field), he's middle class, he's Christian, and he's a cis heterosexual who's married with children. He has no clue what it's like to be a part of a minority and he doesn't want to. He doesn't know anything but privilege. As long as the status quo is kept, he's got no reason to learn anything about any minority or their struggles to be treated as equals and human. He doesn't know what it's like to have something about him that someone hates just because it's a part of who he is that he has no choice about. Yes, there are Muslim extremists who would like nothing more than to see him and everyone like him dead, but he's never actually been assaulted, attacked, beaten up, almost blown up, or almost killed. He has no frame of reference to minorities. He can just pretend they don't exist because, by and large, they have no effect on his life. It's not like he votes Democrat because he has a gay son and wants for him to be treated as an equal and be able to marry the person that he loves. He's always voted Democrat. If his gay son can get married, it doesn't change anything for him. If his gay son can't get married, it doesn't change anything for him. He's never had to fight to be considered a human being that's worthy of respect or equal treatment.
He honestly expects one of us to take him into our home when he get old and too weak to take care of himself. And none of us are going to. We all know that he's just going to become more belligerent, rude, and demanding as he gets older. My sister doesn't want to take care of her (step-)father who needs the attention of a child once her children leave the house. My brother (and sister-in-law) doesn't want him in their house. By the time Dad's can't take care of himself alone, their child will be in high school or college. It'll finally be time for them to be alone with each other again without having to keep a constant eye on their child. Neither of them want to put up with Dad's behavior or to have to take care of their father-who-is-now-a-child.
As far as me... HA! If he calls and tells me that he at the point in his life where he needs me to take him in and take care of him (because I'll be the child who makes and has the most money, assuming I don't get married and have/adopt a child with my future husband) I'll tell him to call one of his other two children and see if one of them will take him in. He'll have already called them because he knows that I want nothing to do with him. He'll tell me that I'm his last resort, that he knows we haven't always gotten along, but he's my father. To which I'll tell him that he's been a virtual stranger my entire life, he's never tried to get to know the real me, we have nothing in common but a few shared genetic markers which does not make us family, that when Mom died (which she's got so many health problems that, unless Dad's killed in an accident, she'll die first) the last remaining thing we had in common was gone, I'm not even willing to help him and my siblings pick out a nursing home for him, and not to call back again even when he's on his death bed because I have nothing more to say to him. Harsh? Sure. But he's toxic and poisonous to me. I refuse to subject myself to that kind of thing willingly if I don't absolutely have to. I've tried over and over and over again to have a meaningful relationship with him. Every time I've tried, he's made no effort to make the connection.
I'm done trying. It's never going to change and that's his loss. Unfortunately, that's also a loss for his wife and grandchildren. Hell, both of his biological parents are still alive! He's never known death to touch him (or, actually, someone he was intimately close to). His ignorance is staggering. I pity him. He's lost so much that he's never even had because he never tried in the first place.