Oy. I'll put this in an extended entry, so those who don't wish to read it can just skim...
My immediate family pissed me off.
The house is still a disaster, because my dad and sister both expect my mom to do EVERYTHING, she doesn't do much to enforce anything otherwise, and they destroy it faster than she can clean it, because she's furking exhausted. My sister is furking unemployed, with a car loan and insurance that my mom pays because she co-signed the loan and my sister claims she has no money AT ALL, even though she's always buying designer makeup on eBay, and selling things on eBay that don't belong to her. So if the loan doesn't get paid, mom's credit goes down the shitter. And since the car is registered mom's name, she's legally responsible for insuring it. And NYS law requires that a car with a loan HAS to be insured, whether or not it has plates on it, so it's not like she can just garage it to get out of paying the insurance. She won't sell it, because she got a good deal on it and it's a good car ('98 Camry that had under 30,000 miles on it when she bought it). She said the only person she'd consider selling it to is my sister's boyfriend, because his car is crap - personally, I don't think he'd want to get stuck in the middle of the war that would ensue between his girlfriend and her mother if he bought "her" car, but we'll see...
The original arrangement between my parents when they bought the house in 1990 was that she'd take care of the inside of the house and he'd do the outside. But the backyard looks like someone's back alley in the South Bronx, because when it comes time to do something, he's too busy with homework, despite the fact that he's got all the time in the world to go to all of my high school's football games, whether they're at home or at a school an hour away, and a few hours every Saturday BSing with his friends who own the local beverage center. My mom bought a shed 12 years ago that he never put together, for which the box is still leaning up against the back of the house in all of its now-rotted cardboard glory - 12 YEARS later. He does things like that on "his own time," despite the fact that "his own time" can sometimes mean never. My mom wants to rent a dumpster to get rid of the 13 years of crap they've accumulated since moving into the house - the kind that they park in front of your house, that you fill up and then they come take it away and dispose of your crap for you - but my father won't hear of it, because he doesn't want the front of their house looking like they live in the ghetto. He doesn't seem to care about the inside of the house though - and if he does, he certainly doesn't show it, or else maybe he'd take less time for himself and more for his family and their belongings. All of my life growing up, he always told me that chores and the upkeep of the house were things you participated in because you're part of a household and everyone in the household is responsible for it. I guess that doesn't pertain the the adults that live there though. Or maybe it just doesn't pertain to him, since he seems to expect my mom to do it all.
If they have company at all, my mom literally has to take a few days off work to get the house to where it's even mildly presentable, whereas my dad could probably clean up the yard with a few hours of good, hard work and then help my mom with the house. He even promised my mom that he'd help with the room that Bryan and I used while we were there. Nothing doing. Mom finally convinced my sister to do something about the room since it was filled with her crap. She got about 2/3 done, then threw a blanket over a bunch of crap she shoved to one side of the room. Dad? High school sporting events, BSing with friends, homework - in precisely that order.
Heaven knows how I turned out the way I did. I'm at a point in my life now where clutter bothers me, and while I hate cleaning it up, I know that I'm at least 50% responsible for it - because it's OUR HOUSE.
I took my mom to breakfast one morning that we were there, and we were talking about it. She said "and everyone tells me it's partially my fault for allowing it to happen." I looked straigt at her and said "ma, I'm not going to tell you any different." But it doesn't stop me from being pissed off about it. She should know better than to tolerate it, but he should know better than to be that way. I'm about *thisclose* to hiring a cleaning company for her birthday, if there was a way I could afford it.
Posted by beenie at January 2, 2004 09:29 AM