But Then I Talked To My Father Today, And Everything Seems To Be Better

I resolved not to have dinner either tonight or tomorrow night (before heading out to St. Louis for the weekend) after my Father yelled at me uncontrollably last night. What I usually do -- and I've done this a lot after my Father has yelled at my uncontrollably -- is that I leave well before they're supposed to come home, even though I often don't have anything to do.

I leave at around 3:30. I see one door of the side gate, the one where the van is, open. I have to talk to Father about this, I said, if only to give me an excuse to yell at him. (And sucks for it to be true, but he had to know.) And so I call him on his cell and I don't so much as yell at him as explain that I saw the door open as loudly at him as I can. And ... he was actually calm. He said to check around the back yard to see if anything hinky was there, and to make sure nothing was stolen, but that was it. It was as if he didn't even remember yelling at me last night.

He is like that some times, and it pisses me off that he won't back up his anger by being agitated with me if I speak to him about something after threatening me. It's also weird to think that he may really not remember yelling at me last night. In my last post I accused him of having male PMS. If he is calm as he sounded over the phone, that very well may be the case.

Moreover, I am as confounded in my reaction to his reaction as I am in his reaction to my call. I was in an angry, threatened, prickly and paranoid mood for the past 24 hours, but after my dad "treated" me so gently, my mood changed 180 degrees. I may not be as sunny as the weather outside, but a burden has been lifted from shoulders. And it shouldn't. Well, the bottom line is it shouldn't've been on my shoulders in the first place. But all my life we've been going through this endless cycle of him yelling at me, me seething, him acting like nothing happened, me happy, me do something that somehow pisses him off, him yelling at me, etc. I can bear a lot of bullshit, but as I go through certain points of the cycle again and again, even I start to grow weary. Sometimes I wish he'd just stick to his guns and stay mad.

Just to get back at him, I put all the Medicare information he wanted me to look over for him in front of his desktop, as if to say, I ain't readin' this shit for you anymore. That's all the courage I have to respond to him: passive-aggressively. I know, pathetic.