I came to Florida to visit my parents. They’re both getting up there and my Mom isn’t doing well.
She calls it a vacation, this is not what I call a vacation. To me a vacation is going someplace that I want to go, and doing stuff that I want to do. Something like hanging out at the beach, or diving a reef, or wandering through a national park.
Her idea of a vacation is having the TV blaring and shouting over it to have a conversation. Her other idea about vacations is stuffing your face all the damn time. As a rule I eat when I’m hungry but that is not allowed here. I think part of the reason I eat only when I’m hungry is because everyone in the family is pretty obese. I do not want to be obese, so I eat in a way that’s dependent on activity. If I’m very active burning a lot of calories, then I’m hungry.
Sitting around blocking out the noise from a TV at 75% volume screaming to have a conversation as if I’m in a bar is taxing but not overly physical.
I’ve not been able to write because if I go into another room to reduce the volume of the TV, then I’m apparently being antisocial. Truth is, I can’t think clearly with the noise, and my stepfather droning on and on about something that is only obliquely related to a question I asked 25 minutes ago. Typically, the question I asked has not been answered, and I’ve forgotten what I asked in the first place.
That being said, I’ve finally come to realize that he’s always been this way, which is why it was so hard for me to get my homework done, and so hard for me to read my schoolbooks when I was a kid living under their roof. I was one of those kids that hated homework, It was a real effort for me to put in the work because I’m easily distracted. So some of this is absolutely on me, but some of it is on them because they didn’t recognize the problem.
They were both quick to tell me I was smart so there was no excuse for me getting poor grades. It became a no win situation so getting through school became increasingly difficult because my logic is, “If there’s no possibility to win, playing the game is pointless.”
By the time I got to my middle years in high school I’d stopped asking him or my mom for help or clarification on assignments because it always devolved into some weird conversation that didn’t answer the question I’d asked and left me completely confused.
This was particularly true in math. Asking if I was doing an algebra equation correctly led to all the ways one could do an algebra equation, and how calculus was better anyway. But because the answer was all over the map, instead of looking at the equation on the page and confirming or correcting my process, I didn’t build up the fundamentals and was never sure if I was right or wrong until I got the quiz back.
All this time, I’ve thought I was simply a moron. This is perhaps why I had very little interest in college.
If you’ve got kids, I beg you. Answer their questions about their homework in a simple straight line fashion. They don’t need to know about all the ways a problem can be solved, binary theory, or the history of the planet, if they’re asking about (a+b)-a*b.
Just a thought.
At the moment they’re at a doctors appointment. I’ve turned off the TV, am doing my laundry, have taken out the trash, and cleaned the place up a bit. I’ve caught up on e-mail,, text messages, and calculated the costs of my trip out here. It’s amazing what I can accomplish if I’m able to hear myself think.
My parents aren’t bad people, they’re just oblivious. My stepfather is a good guy but very self involved. Everything always has to circle back to him and something he’s done or seen.
So everyone in his sphere is minimized and he’s always the most experienced, most intelligent, most wonderful person in the room.
That’s not really good for children who are trying to build a sense of self worth. Sometimes parents need to step back and just acknowledge their children’s accomplishments without comparing them to their own personal accomplishments. Unfortunately that’s now how I was raised when my stepfather came into the picture.
My sister, and my deceased brother who lived in this house much longer than I did are, (or were,) damaged in similar ways.
Like me, my sister has worked very hard at developing her own sense of self and value. I don’t think my deceased brother ever did. I think he might have tried to fill the hole in his heart with sex, (I still don’t know how many times he was married,) I suspect that part of his fantasy world, and substance abuse may have been him self medicating. I don’t know, we didn’t talk and had very little contact through the years.
When they get back, I’ll not be able to write because as soon as I start writing one or both of my parents will want to have a conversation. That’s reasonable since I’m here for a visit. The problem is that it’s kind of the same conversation over and over again.
I’ll hang out until Halloween because it’s one of the holidays that my mom likes, and it will lend itself to family time, the day after halloween I’m probably going to bail. A week of this is enough and I’d like to see my brother in Northern Florida. I can spend a couple of days with him and be in a more normal environment. Then I need to get back to California before Winter really hits.
There’s so much I haven’t gotten done around the house this year. Maybe I’ll be able to do some of those chores before it gets too cold to do them. Then again, maybe we’ll have a warmer year this Winter.
Guess that’s one of the perks of Climate Change…
