Things were a little tense last week.  And no, not because I told my parents about leaving my job (I haven’t).  I think seven months of living together has started to wear me down.  I’m starting to…revolt.  I use that word in particular because I’m in the middle of reading The Hunger Games trilogy, which only serves to make me more annoyed with the “authority figures” in my life.

It started a couple of Tuesdays ago, Dad and I were watching “The Biggest Loser.”  We don’t see it every week, but tune in when we happen to catch it channel surfing.  And I admit, there’s a lot of crying involved in this show (more than “The Bachelor”, less than “Extreme Home Makeover”), but that’s par for the course in reality shows; emotions bring in viewers!  Anyway, Dad doesn’t do well with emotions, in person or on the television.  And it annoyed him to to extreme, when everyone started tearing up at the end of the episode.  In a shocking turn of events, a certain teenage boy is being eliminated from the show.  His father, who is also on the show, starts freaking out.  He pleads to take his son’s place, insisting that he’s much better off, physically, than his son and therefore his son should stay.  Everyone’s a mess – no one saw it coming.  And the son’s going on about how he couldn’t live with himself if his father took his place.  Yeah, it’s dramatic and cheesy.  But it was moving because you know that his son needs this more.  The son is in much worse shape than the father – looks like he could have a heart attack at any point.

My Dad, however, could not be more disgusted with the situation.  His voice reflecting real hate, seeing these people cry.

God, do they pay these people to cry??  Look at him, grown man.  It’s disgusting.

And my god, it just pissed me off when he said that.  Something triggered – Dad’s always been pessimistic, sarcastic, negative, but I was just fed up with it.  Because he’s an adult – just like that man who was crying on the TV – and I shouldn’t excuse him from his reactions, like I had done most of my life.  Also, because I thought he should understand what the father was going through better than anyone else.  If it had been me or my brother on that show with him, you can bet your life he would have cried like a baby and tried to take our place, knowing that we need it, far more than he did.

So I called him an asshole.  Now, I don’t know if you know a lot about my relationship with my parents, but we don’t swear around each other – not jokingly, not in any way.  And we certainly don’t express ourselves like this – we don’t tell each other to shut up or anything harsh.  I can clearly recall telling my mother to shut up, just once, when I was 13, and boy did the shit hit the fan (not that I ever said “shit.”).

But there’s a freedom that comes with age and distance.  Being away from him, from them, for nine years had let me lead a relatively normal life.  To be around adults and families that didn’t have all this pent-up negativity, it was very refreshing and good for me.  So being tossed back in this “situation,” well, I was bound to react at some point.

Why do you have to be an asshole?  No really, why do you have to be an ass about it?

He laughed it off at first – a sort of nervous fake laugh, indicating that he was trying to make light of how shitty he was acting. “What?  It’s true!”  Because the thing about my father is, he knows he has these problems.  He knows how bad he can get.  And he feels bad  about it afterwards (which is more than I can say for my mom and me, but I’ll get to that in a minute).  I ended up watching the last few minutes of the show in silence, and then headed off to bed.  Not another word was said about it.  Which is strange – when I do come close to swearing, or god forbid say something like “damn” around him, my dad always reacts the same way:

Don’t talk like that, it’s not nice.

He didn’t say anything that night, I think he knew how mad I was.

Then, a few days later, I made my Mom angry.  It isn’t hard to tell when she’s mad at you – she’s incapable of hiding it.  I was sitting on the couch, watching TV, and she was rocking in the recliner.  She was complaining about something, I’m not sure what because I tend to drown her out after awhile.  My Mom is one of those people that needs to talk it out.  When something annoys her, she cannot let it go – she has to keep bringing it up, over and over and over again.

Yeah, that’s not annoying or anything.

She calls my name, trying to get me to weigh in on whatever petty little thing she’s fixated on.  And I tell her, in a mainly joking voice:

Mom!  Why do you have to talk ALL THE TIME?  Really!  You go on and on, yapping like a little dog!

And that did it.  That right there, comparing her to a dog.  I might as well have spit on her grave.

There are certain things you don’t do in the Thai culture, things that are “customs.”  I’ve heard them all my life.  For example, you are never to sit on a pillow, especially one that your elder has used.  In fact, touching an elder’s head is strictly off limits.  It indicates disrespect, a level of informality you shouldn’t use with your elders.

Adding to this list – never compare a person to an animal.   She tells me this, looking hurt and angry.  I mean, really, how dare I?  But I definitely know how – because she’s done it to me my whole life!

I can’t tell you the number of times she’s compared me (and my friends) to animals.  Pigs, cows, water buffalos (very common in Thailand) – we eat, look, walk like them.  We’re too loud, too big, too rough around the edges – we are animals!

So I told her as much, comparing what I said to what she’s said.  But she was having none of it, saying that in those instances she had said them as little “pet names,” if you will.  Well, I never.  All these years of telling me I was chubby and overweight and ate like a pig – all with love!!

Yeah, I’m not feeling the sympathy there.  So I walk off, not willing to be apart of this nonsense.

And for several day it’s very tense around the house.  Not a lot of talking, people keeping to themselves.   Which was actually quite nice at first 🙂

With my Dad, I really expected him to apologize that first night.  Because that’s what he does.  He always apologizes when he thinks he’s hurt my feeling – which I indicate by giving him the silent treatment.  Growing up, this only happened a few times.  But each time, he would stop by my room a little later and apologize for whatever part he had in upsetting me.  Dad’s like that.  Overly apologetic, even when things aren’t his fault really.

Mom, on the other hand, I can’t think of one single time she’s apologized to me.  For anything hurtful she’s said.  And let’s be honest, she has a tendency to say the craziest shit – call it the foreign factor.  At first, you chalked it up to living in a different culture.  In Thailand, people are pretty direct and blunt (at least that’s been my experience with my Mom).  If it look and quacks like a duck…call it a duck.  So if you smell, she’ll tell you.  If  you are fat, she’ll tell you.  In front of company, strangers, the world.  We’ve told her repeatedly, through the years, that Americans don’t work that way.  That telling people such “truths” it’s against our “custom,” and is seen as pretty rude.  And she’s learned to tone it done – mostly just out of range of strangers.  It’s progress.

Dad didn’t end up apologizing.  We went through a good week where I didn’t talk much, but I didn’t shut him off completely.  I don’t know, maybe he thought I wasn’t that mad?  Maybe he felt he didn’t need to state an apology, that I should someone know he felt bad for what he did?  Or perhaps he didn’t feel bad about it at all.  Beth seems to think that he acted that way as a defense mechanism, because the situation hit a little too close to home for him.  A parent watching their child struggle with obesity, the same obesity they struggle with and perhaps feel responsible for.  She is probably right.

I didn’t apologize to Mom.  At first, I didn’t think she was that mad.  However, a couple of days later when I started chatting with her like everything was normal, she made it real apparent, real quick, that it wasn’t.  She said that I hadn’t apologized for hurting her feelings, for being mean to her.  To which I responded, “are you seriously still on that?  You have GOT to be kidding me,” and walked away.

It might have looked like me being prideful (or an asshole), but that certainly wasn’t the bulk of it.  It was the idea that a grown woman, who has never apologized for her actions, felt that I should apologize for mine.  And I thought long and hard – she’s never apologized to me or to Dad (that I know of, and I could bet a million on that one).  She once got angry at me while she was washing dishes and threw a plate at my foot.  I moved my foot in time – but the plate shattered all around me.  Apologies?  Not from her,  you can bet that much.  And that’s somewhat our fault, because we excused her out of so much of her behavior.  She not from here, she’s a little different in her thinking (and she is), she doesn’t understand the effect her words have – all excuses that allowed her to believe she could act this way.

But I’m done with giving her permission.  Because at some point, we are all responsible and accountable for our own actions.  And everyone has to apologize at some point in their lives – to their parents, children, spouses, friends.  No one gets excused from this custom.  At least, not all the time.

I will add this – growing up, my Mom probably had no idea when she said things that hurt me.  No, really.  My defense mechanism was to look un-phased, to show no change in emotion.  I would have rather cut my foot off than admit she hurt me.  So maybe that’s the difference between us.  She’s more than willing to tell you when she’s hurt.

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LIZ:  Jenna stop.  I just want to get past this.  What do you need me to do?

JENNA:  Well you can start by saying you’re sorry.

LIZ:  Fine.  I am sorry that I assumed other people would hate the movie just because I hate it.  That was wrong.

JENNA:  That’s it?  That’s your apology?

LIZ:  Yeah.  Are we good?

JENNA:  We’re good.

“The Rural Juror” – Season 1, Episode 10