Thanks Mom and Dad, couldn't have done it without y'all

I don’t like my parents.

Not in the teenage they just took away my new moon poster kind of way. I really don’t like them. Sometimes I find it very hard to speak to them on the phone, and I never, ever want to take my vacation to visit them.

My mom is a recovering alcoholic. She stopped drinking right after I turned 16. Why you ask? Well, I had to wrestle her to the ground one night when she was plastered and wanted more smokes. She busted my nose with her head. I moved out the next day. I guess she decided it was time to start being a sober mommy after that, she has not drank ethanol since. She smoked and drank while pregnant with my sister and I, and I think that’s where my anger with her began.

My dad…where do I start? He is the reason I have to take pills to keep my brain chemicals in check. He is the reason that I cannot sit still while at home and enjoy a movie or silence without feeling guilty that I am not doing something productive. He is the reason that even when I do really good at something, all I hear is his voice in my head well, do better next time.

Hate did not begin to describe how I felt about them in my early twenties. Counseling helped me bring it to hate. Pills helped me not cry about it all the time. Anti-anxiety meds helped me stop having night terrors about the night my mom took my sister and I to our first movie (age 6 and 7), got wasted at the bar next to the movie theater, and got in a crash with us.

No matter what a counselor says or how many pills I take I cannot find it within myself to forgive them. I am confident the reason that I cannot forgive them is because I don’t want them off the hook. I know I need to lay it out there, everything, let them know how I feel. But I just see no point.

My dad the workaholic manic depressive, my mom the alcoholic unhappy housewife that gave up being a hippie for kids. Their marriage is a joke to me really. Dad yells at mom all the time, mom goes into la-la land and no one every talks about, well, anything. So I don’t call.

I called this past Thanksgiving. Hubs, great man that he is, has not met my parents so he is ignorant. I cannot blame him for chastising me for not wanting to call them. I mean, his parents are normal Southern people. So I call, with him right there to hear the version 2.0 of Hell that is a phone call with them.

I tell them that I am pursuing the dream that I was convinced out of in high school (long story, another post) and changing my major to English and becoming a teacher, eventually a professor. So they said “well, that’s ok we suppose Housewife, we could never see you being a nurse, so we are glad you came around”. Laughter. Evil-flying-monkeys-from-wizard-of-Oz laughter. I held on to the call, because a part of me was hoping that it would be different. Oh no, not this year kids.

Grandma Jane is bedridden and childlike. They don’t think she will make it much longer. Well, thankssomuch for that happy bit of news on THANKSGIVING. So glad I made this call. Yeah, and so you should try to get to California before she goes, she had asked about you awhile ago, we told her you were busy…

I’m sorry, you did WHAT?! (I think I shot a lightning bolt out of my eye into the dashboard of the car, I can't remember) On what planet do you tell a dying woman that her granddaughter (not by blood, again, another long story) that said granddaughter is to busy to come see you. Nice. Really niiiiiice.

Hanging up, I looked over at Hubs (I let him listen via speaker since he wanted this phone call to happen so much) and I give him the “are you fucking happy now?” look. Silence.

“See honey, don’t you feel better now that you called?”

That’s when I turned into a raging demon gorilla and beat him into the dashboard of his Honda.

The Best Decision I have Made...recently

It is a rough road when you realize that your parents lied when they said “You can be anything you want to be”. The dreams of you becoming a world famous doctor who cures AIDS in Africa get dashed when you realize there is NO WAY IN HELL you can afford the school tuition, and no one will give you money to go to school because you have a job. Nurse? Good dream, except that there are not any good night nursing programs around, so you would have to quit your job to work retail. Huh.

I know, I know. You’re thinking “wtf? Duh Housewife, it’s freaking REALITY.” Yeah, well I had dreamed of going to Africa to help out all the starving people. I wanted to be a nurse living in a hut in the middle of a lion pack saving people. I wanted to make a damn difference.

I guess I assumed that whatever person I ended up with would either go with me or merrily watch the children while I whisked off to an exotic destination to pick my way around elephant shit and dirty water. Sounds fun.

When I met hubs, the dream went away. Not that he would not let me go, he would. But, something primal kicked in. Now, I want to have kids and stay here. Be a mom. That phrase would have made me shudder three years ago. Get Married. I still don’t like that term, except the tax deal is ok I guess.

So, doctor aside, nurse is still an option except, frankly, from what I have heard it’s not worth it anymore. So what do I do that will make a difference? Paramedic. TCC has a night program. It is cheaper, I get to go into trauma situations (kind of like elephant shit and dirty water), and I might get to help a kid (heaven forbid I ever meet the person who hurt them).

Once I made the decision everything seemed to fall into place. No funny quirky ending today peeps, just, I dunno, maybe an admission that sometimes when a compromise is made everything works out for the best…or something like that.