Exquisite Turmoil

What an awesome weekend this has been with my sister! Honestly, I think this has been the final straw with living here with my parents, and that we aren’t going to be able to take it any longer. I generally try to keep the bashing of my family to a minimum, but I’m so angry right now that I guess it is time to let loose.

First, I’ll start by saying that Dan and I are homebodies. Sure, we like to get out occasionally, but for the most part we are happiest when we’re at home doing whatever it is that we like to do at home (reading, painting, dinking around on the computer or the 360, just sitting around talking since.. you know.. we have a good relationship and people with good relationships actually enjoy.. uh.. speaking with each other about more than just how “our days were”). I believe that we’ve made this quite abundantly clear to my family. Yes, we will get together with them occasionally but they shouldn’t expect that we want to be with them every night, or even necessarily every weekend. And when they want us to come and hang out they should.. ask.

So anyway, my mother decided to book every single freaking summer holiday at a hotel with like.. a buncha pools and a lazy river. All without asking us, mind. This means that Dan and I get not one single long weekend just to hang out and be together (since, as previously stated, we actually enjoy being together). Fine, whatever. We go. My parents spent a lot of money on the room, the kids enjoy being in the pools (at least for a little while.. they actually refused to go this time originally — guess they had their fill when we did this LAST FREAKING MONTH).

So there we are, hanging out at the pools — when everyone gets hungry, we get sent out for food, since everyone else is too lazy to go. Might I add that we can’t all go out and eat food because we have “a spot” where everyone’s shit is parked and god forbid we lose “the spot” and have to find somewhere else to sit our lazy asses under some other fucking umbrella while we all stare at each other since we can’t all go swimming and leave “the spot” unguarded. Or uh, all go out and eat as was the original point of this statement. Fine, Dan and I go out and pick up food. Which we pay for, by the way, for nine people. Whatever, it’s worth it not to starve and not to listen to the kids whine about how hungry they are.

On to whining! And the last straw, I suppose. My father, in all of his assholishness, flips out whenever the kids whine about anything. At all. You know, a kid falls on a knife and cuts their arm off.. it pisses him off that they cry about it, etc. Anyway, Alex starts getting a little bit whiny today and my father goes into full asshole mode in which I’m the most awful mother in the world because I haven’t already dragged him off to bed because.. you know.. he sniffled. So fine, I decide to take Alex back to the room and have him take a nap to placate my father. I must, of course, bring Anya with me because no one but Dan or me is capable of watching her sit on the steps of the pool. They’re all too busy playing dominoes (which infuriates me, since the reason we have been forced to go to the stupid hotel is because of the kids). Everyone lies down for a nap.. 45 minutes later when dominoes are over, my mother comes to fetch Anya since now it is convenient for them to want to spend time with her.

Alex continues sleeping. Dan is bored out of his mind and falls asleep (since we can’t even really talk, or else we’ll wake Alex). I read a book for a while. My mother calls at some point and asks me to come outside and hang out.. fine.. I do. Might I add that they didn’t actually want me to hang out. They wanted me to come out and take Anya away from them, so they can play some more dominoes without having to bother making sure my kid doesn’t drown. (They’re masters of taking the kids whenever they want them and handing them off as soon as they don’t, no matter how inconvenient it may be for Dan or me). Maybe 30-45 minutes later I decide to go wake Dan and Alex up (after, of course, being warned not to take long since they don’t want to watch Anya, even though she’s the reason why I am forced to be at the fucking hotel, as previously stated). So I wake Dan and Alex as quickly as I possibly can. We come back outside and take Anya around the lazy river. Alex stays with my parents since he doesn’t have his bathing suit on, thus no one minds watching him since they don’t actually have to watch him.

While we’re taking Anya around the lazy river, she loses her goggles and is quite upset by this, since they’re her brand new pink and purple goggles with Ariel on them. We go around the river a few times looking for them — my mother even deigns to help. At some point my mother asks my father to take a trip around the river with her to look for the goggles. He starts screaming that he won’t go around even once because it’s 4pm and he hasn’t eaten since 11am and he needs to eat RIGHT NOW and who cares if Anya is crying? So fine, everyone starts gathering up their crap so we can feed my teenage father. As we’re gathering up our stuff, I ask “So, do we have a plan for dinner — like are we all going out, or should Dan and I take the kids and fend for ourselves tonight?” This leads my father to explode at me how ABUSED HE FEELS because Dan and I spent the afternoon in the room and then Dan comes out and says that he is bored. HOW DARE WE? Mind you, Dan did say he was bored, but the conversation went like this.

Dan comes out from being stuck in the hotel room with Alex for like four hours.
Grandma: Hey Dan, you happy to be outside?
Dan: Yes, I was so bored in there.

Clearly, my ungrateful mooch of a husband is disparaging my parents’ legendary hospitality. That bastard. I’m going to divorce him tomorrow, or something.. as soon as I can get the papers filed.

I like to think that while I may have a quick temper, I don’t get truly angry until someone wrongs Dan or my children. To me, this is wronging my Dan. Therefore, I am well and truly angry at this point. This, of course, leads to a fight with my father where I basically tell him that he can blow me since all he can do is interrupt me before I get two words into any sentence (literally) so that he can scream at me in the middle of two-thousand people how it’s impossible to talk to me because I keep walking away from him (you’ll notice that I am not walking away from him.. I am standing in the same spot that I was standing at when he started screaming at me).

So anyway, I told him to think whatever he wanted, took my shit and my family, and went back to our hotel room (which we never asked for, and in fact told my mother last time that we didn’t really want). We pack up all of our shit and prepare to go home and my mother comes by to chat and tell me that she wasn’t trying to sound upset with me when she was yelling, she was upset with my father for not looking for Anya’s goggles. She does, however, think that I should apologize to my father because, afterall, he was only being an asshole because he was drinking and it’ll smooth things over if I apologize. Well sorry, but no — I am not apologizing to someone who is a drunken asshole just because he was drunk. If he was right, fine. But who the fuck is he to talk to me like I’m some kind of leech? I ask them for NOTHING. I pay rent to live here, mind you, when they told me we would never have to. I don’t bitch when they won’t fix my air conditioner, the leaks in my roof, when they store their shit in my house (which already doesn’t have enough storage space, etc).

And you know what? Alcohol is ALWAYS involved with him. He is a drunk. I don’t care how you look at it, he’s a fucking alcoholic. Dan has SEEN him drinking at 5:45 in the fucking morning before he gets on his motorcycle and drives to work. Drinking in the garage and hiding his fucking alcohol.

Anyway, I just can’t take this anymore. Dan and I have been talking on and off since we moved here, basically, about moving out. I’m not going to lie — we pay rent here, but we pay cheap rent and utilities are included. It’s a scary prospect to move somewhere else because our bills will, of course, go up. If we’d known things would be like this, we never would have bought a new car and locked ourselves into a $500 a month car payment.

But money aside, this is untenable. We can’t live like this. As much as Dan doesn’t want to do it, he’s going to look into an NSA or contracting job back in Georgia. It will pay enough to live down there. He, quite obviously, wanted to get out of that field for reasons of mental health.. but this.. I’m sorry, but this is worse for anyone’s mental health than anything he ever had to do during his time in the military. We can not live like this.

Word of the day: Fuck