A Quick Morning Rant

Ah, taking advantage of the few moments of peace and quiet before the whole house is alive with the raging personalities of those I now live with. Amazingly, everyone is still asleep. That's kind of unusual for a Tuesday morning, or any morning for that matter. Generally, my Mom is buzzing around me, picking up my coffee cup, to put in the sink, before I've finished drinking it or vacuuming under my feet. All the while on the phone or dictating plans for the day, hour, or week. I love my Mom, she is, of course, the woman who gave me my life. But she can be insanely overbearing, over-dramatic, and over-sensitive.

I'm trying to write this post and drink my coffee, just chilling. But I really need to clean up the mess from last night's Birthday dinner for Sam. It's a mountain of plates and platters, water and wine glasses. And I hate the way they load the dishwasher and my Mom will be put out if it's not done and I'm just sitting here writing. She'll say it's fine, she doesn't WANT me to do it, just stay out of the kitchen. But inside she'll be fuming, thinking I'm ungrateful and lazy. So I'm off to do some dishes, and then I'll pop back.....

Okay, finished all the crap that can be put in the dishwasher. We aren't allowed to put real silver, or ceramic painted serving platters in there. I guess they chip, which makes sense. So now I just have about five bowls, three or four pots and pans, some casserole dishes and all the silverware. And of course I know that nobody cares about this. But it's a more or less a permanent way to have proof of the shit I do. Blogger logs the time and date so I can't be accused of lying or tampering with facts. So when I have to defend myself to my Mom because of whatever (most likely because my sister is asserting I did or didn't do this or that), I can pull up this post and say, "See, remember this day, or that day, and remember I did all this work?". And then she can't claim I didn't. We've also begun to video tape my sister when she's being psycho so we can show my Mom when she's not here. And maybe one day we'll show Lily herself so she can see how horrible she looks when she's acting like that. Oh, look at me going on and on..........Listening to Joni Mitchell, and still the house is QUIET, it's a miracle.

Well, I made it pretty far into the morning with some peace and solitude. Except for the animals, but I much prefer animals to people. My brother came downstairs just as I was finishing up the final dishes. Kitchen is finally clean. Now it will probably stay that way for about an hour, if I'm lucky. I wish every morning could be this nice. I suppose that would entail me having to live alone, which I really don't want to do actually. I like living with other people most of the time. It's just that my family is made up of very temperamental people. Everyone has a short temper, including me. Some people here take it out in worse ways than others though. I may lose my temper and snap a bit, but I get over it very quickly and am ready to apologize when I'm wrong. And I only think I'm not as bad as the rest of them anymore because I've lived away from home long enough to learn that you can't act like that in public, in the "real" world. If you bug on the wrong person, you may get hurt. You can't swear at teachers, landlords, bosses, judges, police, neighbors, etc without suffering probable consequences. The rest of my family hasn't learned that because every time they piss off an outsider, they just pay their way out of it. And we're not really rich, so they end up spending a lot of money on lawyers and fines that could have been used for much more productive things. It's really frustrating that they haven't learned how to behave.

They take so much for granted, even each other. My sister and brothers just expect my Mom to support them. My Mom, thinking she's avoiding conflict, just gives in repeatedly to their expectations. So it's a real vicious cycle that's been created here, and I do not feel as if I have the power to stop it. I feel like the best way is to just try to stay calm and appreciative of all that I receive from this situation.