Tag: angst

Dad Brog (#177): The martyr complex

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, #1 has been in this insufferable stage where everything in the world is inadequate, she doesn’t want to do anything that is asked of her, and just about asking her to do anything resorts in complaining, screaming and fighting.

Whereas for a while, #1 was the chill kid who was amenable and open minded, I wouldn’t say the roles have necessarily reversed and #2 is the zen chill child now, but it’s like I’ve got two strong-willed little girls apt to put up the Great Wall of China-level resistance at a moment’s notice if they simply feel like it.

The good thing is that the kids seem content to keep the crazy for when they’re at home, and after parent-teacher conference week, I’m at least happy to learn that both of them are rather good students, with #2 turning in the equivalent of a straight-A report card in her first try.  They’re good to their peers and good to their teachers, but it’s when they come home does the insufferable whining really begin.

Complaining to me, complaining to mom, complaining to the au pair, it’s really quite endless at times, and unless she’s doing precisely what she wants to be doing, there’s usually some whining going on.  Unfortunately, what a lot of what she wants to be doing usually involves being lazy slugs in front of televisions or iPads or Switches and vegging out to some screen, and yeah no, that’s not going to fly with me at this juncture of their lives.

However, whenever I sit down with #1 and try to actually speak with her and try to get the bottom of where all this angst is coming from, more often than not, I’ve been getting a lot of:

I feel like you like/love/want to do X with/care more with sissy than me

And no matter of explanation of how incorrect such an opinion is doesn’t seem to matter, because once she gets this idea in her head that she is less favored than her little sister, it’s effectively over and absolutely nothing is going to bring her out of the funk except a little time and maybe going to bed for the night.

Where this defeatist, martyr complex came from, I have no idea, but there’s a lot of things that she’s seemingly picked up in short order this school year that has me no real other choice to believe than things she’s picking up from other students, because I try my absolute best to be fair and equal to both my kids, and I try to be cognizant over the attention I give each my kids because I know this is always inevitably bound to happen.  And frankly if I’m being honest, I probably spend more time with #1 than I do my younger child, mostly because she’s the elder, and there are some things that we do together that her little sister isn’t capable of doing just yet, like reading more complex books, practicing reading and math together, and other things that separate a six-year old from a five-year old.

Doesn’t matter though, for whatever reason, #1 has gotten into this martyr complex phase where woe is me, nobody likes her, she lives in a home completely devoid of love and care, and as a result is just blowing up at everyone all the time if she hears one thing that doesn’t jive with her at that very moment.

Fun times in dad land.

Dad Brog (#176): the importance of culture

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve probably brogged about this in the past, but growing up, I wasn’t really much in tune with my Korean heritage.  I mean, I learned the language, went to Korean language school, but really didn’t learn much about Korean culture.  The holidays, the customs, why we wear hanboks on special occasions, and the reasons for holidays that didn’t line up with the Western world I grew up in.

My parents and family didn’t really do much for us American-born kids in educating us, as proud as they might have been of their culture, they didn’t go out of their way to expand it or adhere to it whilst living in America.  And it wasn’t until I was much older, and wanted to learn more on my own, did I actually start to learn more stuff about Korean culture.

As a parent myself now, I’ve always felt it important that my kids learn a little bit more about their Korean heritage than I did growing up.  And as my kids have gotten older and to the ages of where they’re in school and have shown the capability to learn, I’ve always felt priority to expose them to Korean culture, whenever it’s possible.

This past weekend was Chuseok (추석) aka Korean Thanksgiving.  It’s not like Thanksgiving in the west, where white people stuff their faces with turkey, potatoes and green beans, it’s most of a celebration of the harvest moon, and to give thanks to a (hopefully) successful harvest season.

Since moving my dad down here to Georgia, one of the cool things is that he lives in a pretty concentrated Korean area, and they’re very in-tune with the culture, which is a refreshing change considering how little of it there was when I was growing up.  That being said, there was a Chuseok event up where he was, and I was excited to bring my kids to it, so they could see and experience some Korean culture, like folk singing, dancing, and to keep up with the times, stuff like a kids choir and K-pop dancing demonstration were on the agenda, as well as the availability of Korean snacks and consumables.

I planned on making a day of it, mostly so that my kids and I could spend some time with my dad, and we had done things like Kids Workshop at the local Home Depot, since my kids do enjoy creating things, banging nails in with hammers and painting wooden projects, get a nice lunch together, and go to the park if the weather cooperated.

And everything was going well, and the kids weren’t being too big of pills with the litany of random things they decide to complain about at any given point of the day.

But when 2pm rolled around, and it was time for the Chuseok activities to begin, my kids suddenly decided that they wanted nothing to do with anything at this little exhibition, and the complaints started coming in rapid-fire, and killing a little bit of my soul with each successive whine.

“I don’t want to be here”
“I can’t understand anything”
“Can we leave yet”
“Why do we have to just sit here”
“Why do we always have to do what you want us to do”
“We never get to do anything that we want to do”
“We’re only half Korean”

That last one really stung, but I was determined to show a modicum of respect for the people who put this little shindig together, and try to stick around at least 30 minutes of the two hours that they had been scheduled for.  Now in my opinion, had they started with something like kids choir, or the K-pop dance demonstration, it probably would’ve been more engaging to kids like mine, but I get it, this wasn’t for my kids, it was for an entire community, and they had the right to line things up the way they wanted to.

Needless to say, we only made it 30 minutes on the dot, and I was already over my kids, already over parenting, and I didn’t want to risk them causing any sort of scene or being any more disruptive than I thought they were going to be.  Extremely disappointed, I took my kids and my dad out of the event, and prepped them to go home.  Hopefully, my dad went back to the gig afterward and perhaps at least got some good traditional Korean snacks for the trouble.

Up to this point, it’s debatable on whether or not I’ve ever been more upset with my kids than I had been that afternoon.   All I could feel on the long, quiet (I refused to let them have their iPads) drive home was that my kids behaved like ungrateful little shits, I felt like I was failing them as a parent if they were that against anything that was a part of their Korean heritage, or behaving so poorly when they had been treated so well up to that point of the day.

Nothing I said or have already said seemed to get through how much importance I put in them being aware of the Korean heritage that is half theirs, and it really bummed me out just how inconvenienced they felt at being exposed to some of it.  They complained about not being able to understand the Korean that was spoken by the hosts, but at the same time, they complain and pitch a fit at the thought of being sent to Korean language school.  They showed zero appreciation or understanding of people who played instruments or sang in front of a small crowd, regardless of how many years of dance and ballet classes they’ve already done.

*it’s going to happen, they’re going to hate it, but hopefully, like me, they’ll get over it, and one day be appreciative to have done it, much like my own personal journey

I get that they’re “just” kids, and maybe they shouldn’t be held to the same expectations that I was held to when I was their age.  But my mom definitely made me go to things I didn’t want to go to when I was little, and sit through all sorts of things that bored the ever living hell out of me, but I still remember the exposure to Korean things whenever the opportunity was presented to me.

Their behavior ruined my day, most of my weekend, and was a bigger cause for depression than Virginia Tech’s first loss of the season to Pitt.  God forbid I want my children to have a little bit of culture in their lives, and for them to take a golden opportunity and ruin it with their impatience and unwillingness to have an open mind at that juncture of their lives really saddened me and tanked my mood for the entire rest of the weekend.

Like almost all facets of life, I want my kids to be better than I was at everything, including getting taught and learning more about Korean culture than I was at their ages, and it really saddened me that they resisted so much.  I don’t want my kids to be as white-washed as I was growing up, and to be able to be proud of their Korean side, and be able to know a little something about it too.

Feeling despair, vol. #1,256

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, my kids have both decided that they really like the lullaby tune playing on their Hatches while they go to sleep.  It’s the sweetest tune that everyone knows, but when I listen to it playing on the monitor coming from both their rooms, it takes me back to the days when they were but little nuggets of babies, and it absolutely melts my heart, reminiscing of those days.  I do not deny the feeling of tears welling up from time to time when I think about it.

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately, and I’m having a hard time getting out of it.  Times like this, there’s really little else but for me to try to put it down in writing to see if it helps me process and figure things out which sometimes happens when I put it all into actual words.

Also, it’s because I don’t really feel like there’s anyone I can speak with much these days, because everyone is understandably busy with their own lives and matters and everyone’s time is important to them, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I feel so utterly alone these days, but at the same time I’m so absolutely over feeling like I have to be the initiator of every single human interaction, be it with my own parents, my wife, colleagues or anyone else, that lately I just want to be left the fuck alone after all and not have to do absolutely anything.

But I guess that’s really what depression kind of is at the very root of things, feeling down about anything and everything, hoping someone will notice and offer to help out, but subsequently not wanting to deal with other people and their own personalized bullshit, so it’s just this kind of negative swirl in the brain where you think you know what you want until you realize it comes with some variables attached to them, things that you don’t want, so it’s maybe for the best that I’m just left alone, and then it just regurgitates over and over again until it’s time to go to bed and hope that you wake up not feeling so shitty about things.

What it all amounts to is a version of me that’s kind of going through the motions, where the mundane is the easiest part of the day in the sense that I don’t have to think about things too much, because my job is monotonous and obnoxiously busy, but I get to go to the gym there and I don’t know what things would be like for me if I didn’t exercise as much as I do.

I come home and try to make the absolute best of time I have with my kids, reading books, playing with Legos and other building toys, occasionally watching some television together, and both girls are currently in the midst of reading Harry Potter books, and they both seem to really like them, so it’s been a pleasure reading some long-form stories to them on a nightly basis.

They go to bed, begrudgingly, and not without tremendous resistance, and then dad-mode disengages, but then my house is a fucking disaster zone because everyone treats my home like a storage facility where nobody knows how to throw anything away and shit continues to accumulate within my walls, and bringing it up to anyone results in snappy rebuttals and nothing gets done, but I try to do my best at being really the only one who puts forth any fucking effort at straightening the place up, because I no longer have an office or any dedicated space to call my own where I can hide in and decompress, so I’m constantly trying to make the public areas of my home more to my liking, but that eats into the time I have available to me to not be dad.

I feel underappreciated and taken for granted by just about everyone in my life these days, and my kids are the only ones who really get a pass because they’re still just kids and don’t really understand such complexities of human behavior yet.  But whether I’m at home, or at work, I just feel very underappreciated and taken for granted, and it feeds into the perpetual cycle of being down on a daily basis, probably getting worse.

My medium at work is oft-overlooked and not at all taken into consideration by the decision makers of the company who are all so easily distracted by all things shiny and digital, but when the day is over, our retail locations would sure look like shit if they didn’t have people like me who put forth the work to give them any sort of visual identity.  Just this week, I’ve heard colleagues absent-mindedly proclaim their general ignorance for the work that my team and I do, and I’m just like, great, good to know that you’re not as qualified for the job you have despite probably saying you were, good times.

At home, I feel like a glorified housekeeper, seeing as how I’m the one who does the vast majority of any sort of house work, but the difference is that I’m not getting paid to do it, and in fact, my credit card debt is actually only getting worse after an expensive trip to Asia where I’m shouldering the brunt of the financial lift, and any sort of recompense is going to be slow, small, and generally inconsequential to the fact that I’m the one eating the interest on any balances carried over month to month.

Nobody respects my time, which makes me feel like nobody respects me, and with as limited time I have in order to do anything remotely close to being for myself, dwindles with every 5-10 minutes chunk that is burned by my kids not listening, or anyone else just not respecting me or my time.  Almost nothing in the world is a bigger pet peeve than my time getting wasted, I state it as clear as day, and people either ignore it, or consciously choose to not give a fuck, with neither being a particularly respectful decision.

Subsequently, my temper has been short, probably more than usual, because it just feels like nothing is easy, and nothing is really good right now.  The littlest tasks end up going tits up real fast, because wanting to do A, requires B, C and D to happen, but not before you move E, F and G out of the way so that H could be gotten.  I usually snap and curse the sheer amount of unnecessary crap that exists in my house, and my wife just assumes I have anger issues when she, or anyone else doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck enough about my state of being to try and find out what the problems are to see if they could possibly help.

No amount of break, trip or escape would be close to helping me out when I’m in this state of mind, because I know that if I were to be away from my house for even the smallest amount of time means coming home to a disaster zone, which is usually what happens whenever I do go away for like a weekend.  And then it’s usually worse than before I started because now I have to retroactively clean other peoples’ shit, which just ends up being a lose-all scenario.

My wife suggested I come down to a day of Dragon-con this weekend, and I don’t think I could have possibly shot that idea down any faster.  I have no ill-will towards the convention, or any of my friends or acquaintances that are looking forward to going.  But it is not something that I am at all interested in anymore at this juncture in my life, and I definitely am not remotely close to being in a mental state to where I could even fake it for a few hours, even if it means not seeing a lot of people that I think fondly of.

The con is just so different than it used to be, and I understand that that’s a me problem and not the con’s problem, but it’s no longer an event I can go to without an agenda, and wing it.  I used to say about conventions in the past, let the con come to you, but that’s a dated mentality that isn’t valid at conventions today, because everyone comes in with plans, agendas, and schedules, and old fucks like me without are usually left to just aimlessly wander, and hang out and hope to run into people they know, who usually can’t stop for more than a minute because they’ve got shit to do.

I’ve never felt lonelier at an event boasting 50,000+ people than I had at the last two Dragon-cons I’d been to.  I don’t really want to feel that way again any time soon, or spend the $2,000 that usually comes along with room, food, parking and booze.

Mythical wife has a purpose this year, and actual tasks to do, and perhaps that’s something I could consider in the future if I ever felt the itch to ever go back to any convention ever again, but for this year, hard pass on Dragon-con.

Well, I can’t really say that feel that much better putting all of these thoughts down into text.  I don’t think I really have any true takeaways from all this swill that can help me process the depression I’m dealing with right now.  I’m trying to eat better and working in a two-a-day workout, usually some sort of 30-35 minute in the evenings that I’m sacrificing out of my scarce free time, in the sake of improving my health.

But I can appreciate myself in doing it at all, instead of intending on doing it, not doing it, and then getting anxious and upset about not doing it, to which it then becomes an Inception-like layer of angst in which to fuel a future rant.  And I guess that in itself is somewhat of a pyrrhic W, and these days I have to take any wins that I can get.

Revisionist history is fun not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I get set off so easily by news from the airline industry.  Maybe it’s because I’m constantly frustrated by the endlessly elevating cost of travel, compounded by all of the traveling I wish I’ve done that I struggle to try and make reality.  Maybe it’s because the industry is so full of bullshit that’s so easy to sniff out, where companies are getting richer by the second while consumers have long been left in the dust at being able to keep up with rising costs.  Maybe it’s because of years of having flight privileges and then not has me with some resentful shell shock at what it costs for the rest of the world to travel and it manifests as vitriol toward in the industry.

Maybe it’s just all of the above to varying degrees.

Anyway, I read this article about how airline travel costs aren’t coming down in spite of the plunging costs of jet fuel, and this is one of those situations where an explanation isn’t needed at all; most of us in the world know and accept that the airline industry is just a bunch of greedy fucks who will continue to increase and increase costs and that going backward is absolutely not an option.  But an explanation is given, courtesy of Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian, and naturally all it does is incite anger and frustration to anyone like me, stupid enough to read it.

However, the worst part is that from the time I originally read it, to the time I’m taking the time to write about it, the original post as well as all links, feeds and summaries about the original post have all been since edited, to make Bastian look like not quite the disgusting money-grubbing corporate asshole, because there was a quote originally that basically blamed the rich for why fares will indefinitely remain high, because the affluent don’t want to run the risk of the poors getting on their hallowed Delta jets.

It really was a sight to behold, a masterclass of white man CEO-ing, where Bastian completely dodged accountability, threw his richest customers under a speeding bus, acknowledged the class disparity in the world by also blaming the poors for existing, all while not even trying to stop spinning bullshit about the dollars and cents that make Delta and all the other airlines are grubbing for with every ounce of energy they have.

Revisionist history truly is an incredible thing.  Clearly, smarter people than Bastian quickly realized the disgusting horror of his original words and cashed in a whole lot of favors for them to be able to scrub the entire fucking internet so quickly to revise his words to not necessarily stop blaming the rich, but to soften the accusations that the poors are why the rich are the reason why fares remain high.

The funniest (ironically) thing about this whole thing is that it was wholly unnecessary for Bastian or any CEO to even pipe up about this whole thing.  It’s one of those things most people already know and have begrudgingly accepted the fact that airline costs will never, ever, ever come down because the industry, much like all other corporations, really like money, and when they get used to seeing how much of it comes in on account of a hike, they would rather eat their young before bringing it back down, regardless of if the reason for the increase swings back downward or goes away outright.

Not only did anyone not have to say anything about this, no airline really even has to do anything in order to try and placate airline travelers.  Like, Delta tries to justify keeping their airfare costs astronomical by introducing the most minimal of perks, like a discount or reduction of bag fees, or a tweak to boarding process – but only for those in first or business class, and possibly the less pleeb-ey pleebs in economy plus.  With absolutely zero consideration for the economy and Spirit basic class, whose nickels and dimes are the real reason why the company makes a gozillion dollars a year.

Yeah, Delta doesn’t even have to do that, because the whole airline industry is full of collusion, and if all carriers agree to the same uniform set of draconian in-flight privileges, then nobody is required to deviate from the status quo.  In fact, the fact that Delta is doing such is only going to piss off the people operating United, American and any of the other carriers that will most likely have to tweak their operations in order to fight for the five passengers per flight who are fickle enough to pick one over the other on account of such trite perks.

And then of course, these too will disappear in the future, regurgitating and recycling the droll state of airline traveling for consumers, and then the whole thing will restart itself in 12-18 months, but with fares another $40 higher across the board.  Because of inflation, fuel costs, too many poors getting on, etc.

God bless ‘Murica

Seoul Searching, circa 2026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like there’s got to be an industry for creating end-of-vacation travel packages that help mitigate the downward emotional connotation of a conclusion to a trip.  Not sure how it would entirely entail, but stuff like low-stress return travel, not having to do death marches at inconvenient times, and any methods of help reduce the strain of time changes and logistics.

Of course, this is a hypothetical thought that comes to mind while mythical wife and I are en route home after two weeks without kids, as we’ve traversed through Seoul, Singapore, the ambiguous open seas somewhere between Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and wherever else, before a crash course through Hong Kong, and on our way back to ‘Murica, while trying to fight the feelings of dread of returning to normal life although we’re both looking forward to seeing the girls again.

This was, for all intents and purposes, the first true adults-only vacation that we’ve been on, since, our honeymoon, due to the unintentional expediency in which our kids came into the picture, as well as a fucking pandemic.  Not necessarily by design, during the course of our trip, a lot of shit happened, noteworthy to me, like the Knicks winning the NBA championship while we were in the air, missing ALL of the World Cup group stage, while trying to catch some action while hilariously on the other side of the planet, Father’s Day, and our anniversary, where we entered year 8 of marriage dear god where has the time gone

But, in true autist fashion, of course I jotted down notes and blurbs of things and thoughts that came to mind during travels because of course it’s got to become shit for me to write about in the brog that nobody reads except for me.

The last time I was in Korea was nine years ago, when I came with mythical wife on what was her first-ever visit to the Motherland. She has since been back a few times without me because she hates traveling with me, but I was excited to return because it has been quite some time since I’d been.

I didn’t think that much would be different since my last visit, but I suppose it was naive of me to think that, because it was almost culture shock to count all the ways things had changed since my last time out here.  If I had to try to nail the reasons, I would say that it’s probably a combination of boy band BTS going globally mainstream, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the general mass popularization of Korean culture on a global scale, because for the most part, Seoul was absolutely crawling with foreign tourists.

Naturally, this is me saying that it was at times, uncomfortably and inconveniently crowded at times, and I’d be lying if I didn’t think to myself thoughts about how Thanos Was Right and other nihilistic things that stem from my general aversion to crowds.

Continue reading “Seoul Searching, circa 2026” →

The black sheep (family) of the family

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All while growing up, I often thought to myself that I was the obvious black sheep of my family.  Not just because I was a little edgelord growing up, but just the fact that just in general I was always kind of off from the general consensus of everyone else, primarily my cousins, for whom it was like our entire generation was always measured and compared amongst one another, in a very typical Korean way.

For starters, I’m the youngest among all of my cousins and my sister, and the age difference from me to the eldest in the generation was around 20 years.  My mom is the youngest of five sisters, which means I was the youngest kid from the youngest member of the generation before, not that age is the only thing that really matters.

Unlike some of the older cousins of mine, I wasn’t born and had lived some time in Korea, and it’s clear there’s a lot of Korean-isms that I just didn’t adopt as fervently as some others did in the family.  I grew up entirely American, with video games and comic books, and developed defiance and the want to be contrarian and just generally being a smartass.  I still had respect for my elders and most of the time looked up to my older cousins, but it was primarily because they all treated me well, and did not feel an automatic obligation to give them respect and reverence for no other reason than their age.

But it was clear that I was the weirdo of the family as I entered adolescence, with my pierced ears, colored hair, typical various 90s fashions.  All at time where many of my cousins were finishing college, some were already married, the next generation impending.

Eventually, I would not finish college, I’d move far the fuck away from my immediate family, and my choice in women was decidedly not Korean.  I still maintained decent relationships with those in my family, but it was distant, and not just in a physical sense.

Today, I still have good relationships with everyone, but it’s clear just how different of a position I am from everyone else.  Lots of their kids have just begun to graduate college or are basically young adults across the board.  My niece and nephew are on the younger side of the next generation, but they still have at least 8 years on my kids.

Seeing as how we’re all adults now, I don’t feel quite so black sheep-y around them, but the fact remains that I am very much not like a lot of my family members.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations over the phone with my sister lately, mostly venting about our parents; I have my dad as my third child these days, but my sister has been dealing with a lot of my mom’s own incapabilities these days, and her general reliance on others when it comes to things that adults of my generation are all expected to be able to handle on their own.

Long story short, I came to the realization that perhaps it wasn’t just so much that I’m the black sheep of the family, as much as my immediately family of my parents, my sister and I, are the black sheep family, of the rest of our family.

There are a lot of circumstances that exist solely within our immediate family unit, that don’t exist anywhere else, in either my mom’s side or my dad’s side of the family.  My sister is a widow, I live further away from the rest of my family than anyone else.  My dad has deteriorated into my third kid from a variety of reasons where a lot of my uncles and elder men my family are all still sharp, spry and capable adults.  My parents are the only divorced couple, and my mom is oft-reminding my sister and I that she’s the only mother among the fam whose children don’t live within 15 minutes away.

My dad had a shitty relationship with most of my aunts and uncles, and he’s basically the responsibility to my sister and I, primarily me due to proximity, and despite the fact that for decades, I’ve tried to tell him the importance of making and having friends and people in his life besides just his kids, but he’s so old thinking and set in his ways, that he is where he by no fault of anyone by himself.

My mom is the divorcee that basically got walked all over by my dad, but she was so desperate to get away from him that it was still worth it to her in the end.  But she’s in this awkward position where she’s all along among her sisters, whose own adult children all live within the same county as they are, and is often this odd wheel that I’m sure she feels self-conscious about, but my sister and I aren’t going to pick up our lives and move back to Virginia solely so she can feel good about herself.

As a result, my mom ends up leveraging a lot of assistance from our cousins, and my sister and I feel like we can sense the general annoyance and resentment from them, when they have to help out our mom because they’re close and local, but it’s not like we can always do things from afar.  My mom shoulders some responsibility for needing so much assistance too, because not unlike so many elder Koreans, they simply hit a ceiling in which they stop wanting to learn how to do things and generally function without needing people to hold their hand.

So ultimately, it’s not just me being the weirdo of the family here, because it’s evident when I talk about it and write it all out, that it’s not just me, but my immediate family that all seems to have a lot of baggage that nobody else does.  Why this matters is that my sister and I are often given a lot of unsolicited advice from other family members who can’t relate to our circumstances, and their opinions only hold so much weight.  As is often spoken out there in the world, you just never know what kind of battles every individual is going through, and in the case of my sister and I, nobody in our extended families can really relate to what we’re going through, and not getting any grief for the things they may or may not get drafted into doing in the name of family, would greatly be appreciated.

Ironically, I asked for this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the big selling points I used on my dad when I was arduously trying to talk him to move down to Georgia, other than the fact that everything made sense, was that with him being somewhat in the Metro Atlanta area, not only could I see him with tremendously more regularly than any member of his family had been able to see him over the last 10+ years, he could now participate in things like holidays, events and milestone occasions, like the Pre-K graduation of his granddaughter.

Yes, I know that in the grand spectrum of things, Pre-K graduations are pretty much important only to the parents of the children ‘graduating’ from preschool, but it’s one of those things where I’ve been to enough children’s things over the last six years to understand and have witnessed all sorts of healthy family dynamics where grandparents often show up to events as such, because it’s what family does – show up.

Because graduation day was kind of hectic on account of an altered schedule and in-laws visiting, I didn’t want to have to wake up at like 5 AM to drive the 40 miles to my dad’s facility to pick him up, and then weather the teeth of Atlanta morning traffic to get back 40 miles, I opted to just hail an Uber for my dad, and bring him to my side of town, and then we could go to graduation, and either I drive him back, or I send him home in another Uber. 

We’re adults, and we throw money at obstacles.

I call him at 7 AM, to find out if he’s ready to go, and naturally he doesn’t pick up his phone because communication with my dad is basically a one-way street where he will blow up my phone whenever he wants to ask me a question that I’ve already answered for him at least 15 times previously, but when I need to get in touch with him, he never fucking picks up the phone, and I can usually expect to get a callback in a minute or two, like he’s a fucking ER doctor being paged.

Anyway, when he calls back, I ask him if he’s ready to go, and he says he wants to have breakfast first, which is a fair accommodation, his place has set meal hours, and he’s entitled to get his meals.  I tell him to call me when he’s done eating, and I’ll hail an Uber and let him know the make and color of the car, like we’d been doing for rides to church the last few Sundays, and he gives me an affirmative.

20-25 minutes later, I call him back because now I’m sweating the time, because if he doesn’t get into an Uber soon, he’ll definitely already be in morning traffic, but there would be no guarantee that he’d make it to my side of town in time to make it to the graduation, which I would later discover security was following rules to a T, and basically barring anyone who didn’t check in prior to 10 AM, wasn’t getting in.

My dad basically tells me that he doesn’t want to come, that it’s too far, too long of a car ride, and he actually wasn’t planning on coming.  Immediately, my mind quips that in one hand, I’m actually pretty relieved that he’s bailing, because this means I won’t have to babysit him all morning and afternoon, and seeing as how I was skirting work for the day, I would have my job to tend to, as well as the want to do certain errands, such as vote and go help mythical wife with another errand.

I don’t make a big deal about his abrupt bailing because of the relief at not having to babysit him, but subsequently, my mind started unpacking the underlying messages of his decision, and as pretty much is the case with everything my dad does to me, it began to aggravate the piss out of me.

I had reminded my dad well in advance of this date, and at no point did he ever express any sort of lack of want to come to my daughter’s graduation.  I made him write it down on his white board in his own handwriting, because I believe that even those with deteriorating recollection, if they see things written in their own hand, they’re more apt to be able to recall it.  So it’s not like he didn’t know this was coming, and he waited until the eleventh hour and 59th minute to bail on me, which in most cases, wars have been started for less offensive acts.

Continue reading “Ironically, I asked for this” →