Normally I try to keep certain aspects of my personal life out of my writing, but I’m at a point where I feel like I can’t really speak to just anyone about the things going on in my head over the span of the last 12+ months and the journey I’ve been enduring, and writing to nobody seems like a better alternative to unloading a metric fuckton of baggage onto just anyone because frankly I don’t know anyone in their right mind who would want to hear it and nobody probably needs to hear some of the negativity that’s manifested in my thoughts.

This includes my own immediate family, my wife and my closest friends, I don’t feel I can really do much beyond vent some surface level things without encroaching into a realm of dark and frustrated thoughts without risking bringing people who don’t really need to be brought down, down.  And although I know many people who have endured their own episodes of family bullshit, there really aren’t that many that I know who are in the entirely relatable situation of dealing with immigrant parents with severe language barriers fucking shit up on top of all the other typical bullshit that dealing with aging parents entails.

I’m not trying to deliberately separate myself from everyone else, or even insinuate that I’m going through a very specific and very unique scenario, obviously there are millions of xennial children of today who are dealing with this exact scenario, it’s just that I don’t really know any whom I can commiserate with.

Real talk is that I’m moving my dad down to Georgia, so he can come live out the remainder of his life, closer to one of his kids, instead of being on an island up in Virginia, where he basically has no real friends, and the military buddies he has don’t really include him in anything anymore these days on account of his rapidly declining mobility and basically inability to transport himself to wherever they gather and fraternize.  So he’s basically been living a life of solitary confinement for the better part of the last few years, and it’s doing no favors to his general state of mental wellbeing, and his memory has started to rapidly decline and whether it’s early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s I don’t fucking know, but it’s wreaking havoc on, life, as a whole.  His, mine, my sister’s, and by proxy the ones in our individual lives, because I have family obligation to give a shit about my dad’s well-being.

However, it’s been a colossal pain in the ass, because my dad has been indecisive and has numerously changed his mind on relocating or staying, with it becoming more and more frustrating each ensuing time.  I got him to come down for Thanksgiving to try out the home I found for him, and in typical fashion, he didn’t hate it, but he also was in no rush to move.  Unfortunately, shortly after Thanksgiving, his cognitive abilities began falling off of a cliff and my sister and I were rudely awakened to the fact that he seemingly couldn’t recall that he had any grandchildren, and that I even lived in Georgia.  Our spouses were completely forgotten, and if not for the fact that he has family photos in his home, he wouldn’t know that we were both parents in our own right.

Such really chaps my ass, because we’re at the stage of where my sister and I are basically flexing our power of attorney over our dad and low-key forcing him to relocate now, as opposed to him coming on his own volition, no matter just how much sense we were trying to talk into him.  Nobody can make another person do something they’re not willing to do without things getting uncomfortable in some manner.  Had he transitioned a year ago when I first found the home, or even six, eight or ten months ago, when his wits and memory weren’t an issue, he could already have had one foot in the door and begun his twilight years cognitively competent, and not basically being moved for no other reason than his own safety and need to be close to one of this kids because we’re the only people on the planet who give a fuck about him.

It goes without saying that I’m full of resentment and frustration with my dad for not fucking listening to me, or my sister, about relocating sooner.  He can’t live alone anymore, and shouldn’t really have been over the last year and change, but neither of us could make him help himself without his willingness to be on board with changes, and now we’ve crossed the point where it’s not a choice based on logic and mutual acceptance, but one out of necessity and for the sake of safety.

After basically flexing power of attorney on him, I deliberately left two weeks on the clock, so we could have a little buffer for any last minute issues that may or may not come up, as well as to arrange travel without having to rush or pay for rush charges.  Unsurprisingly, the last two weeks have been agonizing from the standpoint that my dad’s been blowing up my phone on a daily basis, having forgotten everything we talked about the day previously, requiring me to say the same shit and explain the exact same stuff that I’d been discussing with him for multiple days at this point.  No amount of demanding he write shit down works, because he’s either lying or being lazy or both, because if he were, then he wouldn’t be needing to call me six times every fucking day.

I snapped at my dad, telling him how frustrated I was that I had to keep doing this, and he uncharacteristically grew a little defensive and clapped back a little bit, citing that if he couldn’t ask questions to his own children, then who could he ask questions to?  I explained that he’s forgetting things on a daily basis and to write things down to a degree where he wouldn’t have to ask the same questions every day, and that he needed to also consider my position of where I have to say the same crap every single day because he won’t help me help himself by writing down the important things. 

He forgets, I can’t.  No matter how much I’d love to, and then chalk everything up to being forgetful.  My angst, frustration and pain compounds daily, while he gets to forget about it, and ask the same bullshit questions that could’ve been avoided two, four, six or twelve fucking months ago had he just listened to his own goddamn kids.

And on top of it all is the motherfucking language barrier that eternally exists between us.  And I will never not resent my parents for not learning more English after 50 years in this country, or pushing me to become more proficient in Korean.  It takes a difficult situation and ramps the difficulty up tenfold, with neither of us really being able to say the things we really want to say, and actually have the other fully understand it. 

I’m sick of having to sit in front of my computer with Google Translate open, or having to say hold on, while I swipe out of the phone and into a browser so I can do the same thing.

I swear on my life that I will never put my kids in this situation that my parents put me in.  We will never have a language barrier between us, and I hope everyone out there who doesn’t have one with their parents know just how fucking lucky they are, especially those of immigrants, who ended up on the same page to have a common tongue between parents and children.

To top things off, is this rumbling of the blizzard of the century that’s supposedly about to bombard the east coast.  My dad’s official travel day to Georgia is coming up, and I’m going to go apoplectic if the weather comes into play and completely cockblocks everything.  It buys time for my dad to try to back out yet again, and frankly the waiting for moving day has been way too long as it is, and I just want it to be here, so I can get him settled and hopefully started on a better life where he’s closer to me, will be surrounded by other human beings, and perhaps get the mental stimulation that he’s sorely needed.

Of all the things I don’t need, is the weather to come into play and ruin our plans.*  But considering the general nature of bad luck, fortunate and everything else that has delayed things to this point, I feel like it’s kind of a lock to happen.

*actually came up with an adult idea and paid to moved up his arrival date as to avoid the proposed start time of the so called blizzard of the century

The point of all this rambling is that I may not talk about it a lot in my writing, or even in person, but I am going through a metric fuck ton of stuff right now.  My life is pretty overloaded with parenting, a really currently mid-feeling job that has me churning a lot, being the general hard carry of my home, and then I have all of my dad’s bullshit that I’m having to run point on because nobody else is willing or able to do so, and I’m in a pretty precarious state of being.

Once my dad is settled and hopefully on the right track of existence, I need a fucking break.**

**I put this in writing a few times a year, but it basically never actually happens

I also need everyone to respect my time.

I also need people to stop questioning everything I do.

I also need everyone to stop being so reliant on me.

I also need to not have to be the hard carry in every facet of my life.