Fuck.

[camwyn]

It wasn't good enough.
I should have known.

I thought it was Dad- "And you didn't bother to get out of bed and CHECK?" "Well, I thought-" "I was banging on that door for twenty-five minutes! And you didn't check?" "No, I thought-" "I was ringing the doorbell! Do you mean you didn't hear that?" "Actually, no, I didn't."

I thought the phone was grandpa- "I called six times! Six! Times! And you didn't bother to answer it!" "I thought maybe-" "SIX TIMES!"

I got out of bed and checked and I saw Dad's car was gone and yours was on the street- "And you didn't bother to open the door then??" "Actually, that WAS when I opened the door-"

"YOU HAVE NO SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY, you know that? None! None whatsoever! You don't think anything matters but YOU and what YOU want and what YOU do in that room of yours!"

I tried one last gasp, one mention of 'I thought if it was an emergency you'd call my line, that's partly why I didn't answer-"

"You know what? You're right. You're ABSOLUTELY right. Everything YOU do is right."

Storms off.

Fuck...


(And you know what? I have this horrible urge to yell back at her "If I have no sense of responsiblity then why did my head almost explode with the conflict over 'someone should go with Grandma' versus 'dear God in Heaven I don't want to!'?")

Comments

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Parents are people.

Most people are not, in fact, full-time assholes. However, almost everyone has moments where they forget they are not assholes, and that was one of them.

I know you well enough to know you do have a sense of personal responsibility. You couldn't work where you do without one, going with your honor instead of for the money. You made a series of reasonable, if incorrect, assumptions for someone who's not quite awake, and if your parents snapped it's as much because of collateral stress as any faux pas on your part.

And I do seem to recall you as a sound sleeper...

Anyway, sorry to hear they were right knobs to you!

-- Lorrie

[talmanes.livejournal.com]

I'm going through a bit of a phase like this with my Grandmother, too. She's flipping out a lot lately about small things, like... a stack of books that I didn't move before the cleaning ladies showed up, or "arguing" with her by stopping her in the middle of haranguing me to say "I don't understand why you're so angry with me." I have no advice to give you other than to tough it out, because every once in a while people like us get picked on because we don't live on our own. That's really it--we don't live on our own for whatever reason, and because we live under the roof of a close relation, it's somehow looked at as less responsible than living in an apartment. I think they just make the assumption that because we spend time on our own, doing our own things, we're somehow shirking responsibility and we're "off in our own little world."

Which is odd, because I don't tell my grandmother she's off doing her own thing irresponsibily when she watches TV, and I don't tell my mothers he's being irresponsible when she reschedules coming to see me for something three times. It really only works when there's some arrangement in your life wherein you are reliant upon one of your elders for some basic need (whether you compensate them for it or not).

I sort of wonder how your parents would act if the situation had been reversed, and they'd done it to you. Somehow I have the feeling that you'd be more mellow about it.