Daily div.
19 August 2021 22:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sh1njuk1 Another day in paradise.
Me: Yes, I think I felt the most comfortable yet in the office today. I am starting to get my feet under me at the job! :) Which is great, because I'm more than committed at this point, really...
Situation: I realize that my feelings about the situation are coming in waves. Today I had more sadness come upon me this afternoon, but I managed to make sense of it by the evening. I realized that what's happened to me with my father is actually what happened between me and my mother back in 2018, just repeated with my "more rational" parent.
I have twice now had a parent swear up and down they were ready and willing to do something helpful for me that was their 'traditional' role - childcare for my mother, hosting us in his home by my father (and to his credit my dad has hosted us for over 18 months... nevertheless); they found out quickly that they had overcommitted but did not bother to have a conversation with me about this fact; an excuse popped up that would let them slip out of their vow; they grabbed it like a life-preserver; and while letting me know about this "reason" why they could no longer do what they had promised, they made sure to gratuitously and emotionally blame it all on me as if I had been the real bad guy all along, for ever thinking they would do what they promised me they would do.
My mother claimed, 2 weeks before I was scheduled to return to work with an agreement in place that she would watch my baby, that she needed to keep working at her job instead so that she could afford acupuncture (!), and told me I expected too much of her, that I should have just known she should be caregiving at most half-time (despite this being impossible with my work schedule, and not brought up beforehand). The very moment I got my current job, my father - who had been continually encouraging me to keep slogging through the application the entire previous month, hmm - suddenly "discovered" the threat from the Delta variant like a new religion, put us in an impossible situation with a claim that we were just having a "conversation" about "safety", and then when we let him know we were leaving, patronized me from atop his high horse with how I was "too pregnant to think logically" and how "I hadn't solved the problem" and he "was absolutely not evicting you! You can come back anytime!" But there's been a cautious lightness about him ever since, even as we have been extremely careful about how we talk to each other the few times we've interacted. He's gotten what he wanted. Soon, his house will belong to just him again.
In short, my entire DNA font-source is comprised of worthless shitheads, who somehow failed over the course of senior-citizen-length lives to learn the basics of respectful communication. (My brother is ADD, on legal meth for it, married to a horrible vegan childfree bitch, and on the East Coast. I write him postcards now and again but he does not respond. I don't expect to see him again until one of our parents dies.) Well - there had to be SOME shared basis for their awful marriage, I guess!
The hardest thing is that if my dad had just let me know that he was really struggling with having so much family in his home, and that he wanted to make a solid time-table for us to move out, I would have been upset for like a day (OK, a week) and then - accepted it, and made plans. It's his home, after all. He is an introvert pretending furiously to be an extrovert, always has been. He's given us 18 months, and even slept out in a tent last summer when we didn't have enough rooms for all of us. He really has gone above and beyond. Which, in a way, makes this even more painful. I did not see it coming. I still thought, on some level, that he was the reliable one.
For both my mom and dad, the issue is that they both want to be the type of parent that would, say, provide free childcare for their grandchildren, or let their adult kids in a rough situation crash at their place, no questions asked. But... neither of them are truly capable of what they aspire to. So they've both got a lot of cognitive dissonance about the situation, which finally bursts forth in blaming me for not somehow relieving them from this burden they set themselves up for. Which - yeah nope, I'm trying to raise children in a world implacably hostile to them, and I don't have the time or space to give a shit about Boomer feelings! I can't just pliably adjust myself to them and their whims anymore, as I once did so easily as a non-misbehaving teenager.
Clearly, I'm having a rebellion against my parents at age 35. 0 out of 10, do not recommend! At least when you're a teenager you have all this self-righteousness and energy and inability to understand what a brat you're being. When you're my age, it's more like the grimmest possible slog through a bleak, snow-covered valley. You would never ever choose to do it - unless you have no choice. I went scorched-earth with my mother for a while after she pulled that on me - we only have a relationship nowadays because my mother-in-law and, yes, my father begged me personally to reconcile (and after she completed 100 hours of free babysitting). I suppose I am glad that I gave her a second chance - the babysitting, now that my son is of an age she finds fun, is helpful. And there's no illusions between us as to what she needs to do to maintain our relationship going forward. I don't have the energy or ability to go scorched-earth with my father right now. But... I know what he did. And I think, on some level, he does too. I'm sure he'll spend hours coming up with justifications why he was right. He may even believe them. I guess I hope he does, because that's all he's going to have once this situation wraps up.
We need good relations in place to get all our crap out of his house, that will take several weekends. I'm going to be using his compost bin - will dump on Saturday evening, while he is at work - until I find a better alternative. My son will need a transition period from "old house" to "new house", which will be easier if we can visit this place on the weekends for a while (while my dad is at work). But as soon as these kinks are worked out... I no longer intend to call or communicate with him in any way other than the obligatory Christmas call, for the rest of his life. He can get any "family" urges out by visiting his girlfriend's family, which is much more enjoyable because she does all the emotional labor so he doesn't have to. He'll get his house back - his nice empty house, filled with nothing but his Facebook friends and his girlfriend who mostly exists on his phone nowadays. He should enjoy his golden years! In silence. My mother got fire; he's going to get ice.
We will not return here, once we have left, unless my children cannot eat any other way.
I struggled, but I finally have a worldview that makes sense about this, and am dealing OK.
Anyway... enough therapy writing, I gotta get to sleep.
Outcome: I got a question at the end of the day about "if I had finished all the training videos" from the boss, which means of course, "why are you reading the news during work?" The answer being of course "I do not have more than 4 hour of focused learning capability per day, same as the rest of the human race, yet you have assigned me 8 hours of video." Not that I said that (nor did I spend 4 hours or anything close to it reading the news, for the record). Ugh... but also, oh well. I've gotta find some other task I can break up the videos with and still appear "responsible". This does correlate with my karma, though, because I caused this issue by personally choosing to take breaks, and employers have commented about my apparent lack of focus in the past (it actually helps the quality of my work when I take occasional breaks, but that's hard to tell from the outside). At least it should be (relatively) easy to solve. Just one more day left in this week.
Divination, and bed!
Me: 8 of Diamonds - Comfort achieved through hard work
Situation: Queen of Clubs - optimism, creativity, little one
Outcome: Queen of Spades - oh no not again
Oof... well, I think the Queen of Spades is a marker that I need to be more serious about clearing my karma tomorrow. I NEED this job; I need to take it with absolute seriousness. Other than that, seems like it could be a pretty good day! Let's work towards that.
Me: Yes, I think I felt the most comfortable yet in the office today. I am starting to get my feet under me at the job! :) Which is great, because I'm more than committed at this point, really...
Situation: I realize that my feelings about the situation are coming in waves. Today I had more sadness come upon me this afternoon, but I managed to make sense of it by the evening. I realized that what's happened to me with my father is actually what happened between me and my mother back in 2018, just repeated with my "more rational" parent.
I have twice now had a parent swear up and down they were ready and willing to do something helpful for me that was their 'traditional' role - childcare for my mother, hosting us in his home by my father (and to his credit my dad has hosted us for over 18 months... nevertheless); they found out quickly that they had overcommitted but did not bother to have a conversation with me about this fact; an excuse popped up that would let them slip out of their vow; they grabbed it like a life-preserver; and while letting me know about this "reason" why they could no longer do what they had promised, they made sure to gratuitously and emotionally blame it all on me as if I had been the real bad guy all along, for ever thinking they would do what they promised me they would do.
My mother claimed, 2 weeks before I was scheduled to return to work with an agreement in place that she would watch my baby, that she needed to keep working at her job instead so that she could afford acupuncture (!), and told me I expected too much of her, that I should have just known she should be caregiving at most half-time (despite this being impossible with my work schedule, and not brought up beforehand). The very moment I got my current job, my father - who had been continually encouraging me to keep slogging through the application the entire previous month, hmm - suddenly "discovered" the threat from the Delta variant like a new religion, put us in an impossible situation with a claim that we were just having a "conversation" about "safety", and then when we let him know we were leaving, patronized me from atop his high horse with how I was "too pregnant to think logically" and how "I hadn't solved the problem" and he "was absolutely not evicting you! You can come back anytime!" But there's been a cautious lightness about him ever since, even as we have been extremely careful about how we talk to each other the few times we've interacted. He's gotten what he wanted. Soon, his house will belong to just him again.
In short, my entire DNA font-source is comprised of worthless shitheads, who somehow failed over the course of senior-citizen-length lives to learn the basics of respectful communication. (My brother is ADD, on legal meth for it, married to a horrible vegan childfree bitch, and on the East Coast. I write him postcards now and again but he does not respond. I don't expect to see him again until one of our parents dies.) Well - there had to be SOME shared basis for their awful marriage, I guess!
The hardest thing is that if my dad had just let me know that he was really struggling with having so much family in his home, and that he wanted to make a solid time-table for us to move out, I would have been upset for like a day (OK, a week) and then - accepted it, and made plans. It's his home, after all. He is an introvert pretending furiously to be an extrovert, always has been. He's given us 18 months, and even slept out in a tent last summer when we didn't have enough rooms for all of us. He really has gone above and beyond. Which, in a way, makes this even more painful. I did not see it coming. I still thought, on some level, that he was the reliable one.
For both my mom and dad, the issue is that they both want to be the type of parent that would, say, provide free childcare for their grandchildren, or let their adult kids in a rough situation crash at their place, no questions asked. But... neither of them are truly capable of what they aspire to. So they've both got a lot of cognitive dissonance about the situation, which finally bursts forth in blaming me for not somehow relieving them from this burden they set themselves up for. Which - yeah nope, I'm trying to raise children in a world implacably hostile to them, and I don't have the time or space to give a shit about Boomer feelings! I can't just pliably adjust myself to them and their whims anymore, as I once did so easily as a non-misbehaving teenager.
Clearly, I'm having a rebellion against my parents at age 35. 0 out of 10, do not recommend! At least when you're a teenager you have all this self-righteousness and energy and inability to understand what a brat you're being. When you're my age, it's more like the grimmest possible slog through a bleak, snow-covered valley. You would never ever choose to do it - unless you have no choice. I went scorched-earth with my mother for a while after she pulled that on me - we only have a relationship nowadays because my mother-in-law and, yes, my father begged me personally to reconcile (and after she completed 100 hours of free babysitting). I suppose I am glad that I gave her a second chance - the babysitting, now that my son is of an age she finds fun, is helpful. And there's no illusions between us as to what she needs to do to maintain our relationship going forward. I don't have the energy or ability to go scorched-earth with my father right now. But... I know what he did. And I think, on some level, he does too. I'm sure he'll spend hours coming up with justifications why he was right. He may even believe them. I guess I hope he does, because that's all he's going to have once this situation wraps up.
We need good relations in place to get all our crap out of his house, that will take several weekends. I'm going to be using his compost bin - will dump on Saturday evening, while he is at work - until I find a better alternative. My son will need a transition period from "old house" to "new house", which will be easier if we can visit this place on the weekends for a while (while my dad is at work). But as soon as these kinks are worked out... I no longer intend to call or communicate with him in any way other than the obligatory Christmas call, for the rest of his life. He can get any "family" urges out by visiting his girlfriend's family, which is much more enjoyable because she does all the emotional labor so he doesn't have to. He'll get his house back - his nice empty house, filled with nothing but his Facebook friends and his girlfriend who mostly exists on his phone nowadays. He should enjoy his golden years! In silence. My mother got fire; he's going to get ice.
We will not return here, once we have left, unless my children cannot eat any other way.
I struggled, but I finally have a worldview that makes sense about this, and am dealing OK.
Anyway... enough therapy writing, I gotta get to sleep.
Outcome: I got a question at the end of the day about "if I had finished all the training videos" from the boss, which means of course, "why are you reading the news during work?" The answer being of course "I do not have more than 4 hour of focused learning capability per day, same as the rest of the human race, yet you have assigned me 8 hours of video." Not that I said that (nor did I spend 4 hours or anything close to it reading the news, for the record). Ugh... but also, oh well. I've gotta find some other task I can break up the videos with and still appear "responsible". This does correlate with my karma, though, because I caused this issue by personally choosing to take breaks, and employers have commented about my apparent lack of focus in the past (it actually helps the quality of my work when I take occasional breaks, but that's hard to tell from the outside). At least it should be (relatively) easy to solve. Just one more day left in this week.
Divination, and bed!
Me: 8 of Diamonds - Comfort achieved through hard work
Situation: Queen of Clubs - optimism, creativity, little one
Outcome: Queen of Spades - oh no not again
Oof... well, I think the Queen of Spades is a marker that I need to be more serious about clearing my karma tomorrow. I NEED this job; I need to take it with absolute seriousness. Other than that, seems like it could be a pretty good day! Let's work towards that.