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liquish's blog: "Allsorts"

created on 12/14/2008  |  http://fubar.com/allsorts/b265702

Boiling over

I drove to my parents' house this morning. My brother's birthday is today. Happy birthday, bro. He and his wife and his two awesome labs came to visit, I drove in from the Land of Cleave. Wonderful time--laughing, eating, drinking, a nice evening walk on a beautiful country road. Then my father and sister-in-law get into it. My dad, 82 in March, only recently became an old man. He's slowed down quite a bit in the last year or so. Even so, this past summer, he finished building--all by his lonesome--a house that he and my mom now live in. Suffice to say he is a good man, but a more stubborn, opinionated person I have never met. Enter my sister in law. 10 years older than my brother (58), she is a force of nature, about as opinionated as my dad but much more volatile (she gets PISSED really easily). Politically, she (a raging liberal) and my dad (a crazy conservative) reside at opposite ends of the spectrum. He, at my mother's insistence, doesn't engage. She takes advantage of this, it seems to me, and often speaks to him patronizingly. He grits his dentures and says nothing. For years, this has been a smoldering relationship, an uneasy truce. A powder keg. The DMZ in Korea. The Kashmir. The Texas/Oklahoma border. Unstable, ready to blow at any time. Tonight, it blew. The story goes: a man whom my sister-in-law dated when she was 16, who suddenly disappeared from her life without a word, called her out of the blue a few weeks ago. He was in her neighborhood, and wanted to come by and talk to her, to explain why he disappeared. He came over, my brother busied himself in another room, and they had a very nice chat, a reconciliation. This old boyfriend had been married 32 years, happily, with 2 children. He just wanted to apologize, apparently. My father is old school. In his day, this day, if any man, especially an old boyfriend, talked to his girl, he'd punch him in the nose. The snotlocker, as he'd put it. 40 years later or not. He expressed his opinion--old boyfriend comes sniffing around he's after one thing. My SIL said, tongue in cheek (but patronizingly), this is one of the few times you're wrong. My dad said "Don't give me that bullshit." He NEVER swears. I've heard him swear maybe 2x in my life. Seriously. He's PISSED. I listened for a bit, then went to get more whiskey. And came upstairs to write. I have no role here. All I can do is be uncomfortable. And I've had too much to drink to drive home (5 hours). Honestly, for years my dad tried to keep the peace, stay quiet. (He did that with my ex, too--after we split, he felt it necessary to tell me how much she pissed him off, how he hated her, and how he was so distraught knowing that I was so unhappy. Thanks for that--not like I could have used that information during those 17 miserable years of marriage). And staying quiet allowed his resentment, his anger, his shame, his hurt pride, fester. So tonight, my SIL, unwittingly and insensitively, created a spark. And my dad, with all that anger unreleased, exploded. So I'm going to sober up. Have some coffee. And head home. I don't need to be here. Don't want to be here. If I wanted to live in a shitstorm, I'd have stayed married.
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