One thing we’ve been doing when going to my parents’ house with the kids has been to basically incentivize them to want to go to the grandparents’ house. Despite my dad just sitting on his iPhone the whole time, my mom will hang out with the kids – they played Qwirkle this afternoon, and they have a pretty good time. They often get sweets from my mom, and they like running around on the flat yard, which is a nice change from our house – they played frisbee for a bit this evening.
I, on the other hand, have been anti-incentivized to go to their house. Every single time I go, I’ve got literally hours of manual labor to do, and every week, it just piles up and up. More, every time a weekend passes and I *don’t* go, by midweek the next week I get some text from my dad saying that he & my mom got in a fight, and she’s a.) so stressed she’s going to leave him, b.) has obvious memory problems and I need to take him seriously, or c.) some other shit.
And no, none of those things are true. But they always weigh on me. So the only associations I have now are a.) lots of difficult, often frustrating physical labor, and b.) being the only bulwark holding back my parents’ implosion.
Every goddamn week.
And it was alright before I had a job. But I have a job now. One I like, sure, but it’s still got a lot of stress & effort, and now I get to go from that to a job I’ve grown to despise, sacrificing what amounts to half my weekend to deal with them.
I get why my mom feels trapped. It’s driving me bananas. And I feel terrible for feeling this way, but also, fuck – half of this shit they can take care of on their own, they just don’t because I’m here. And Ei-Nyung posited that maybe they do this to have an excuse for me to come over, but if that’s the case it’s a terrible plan, because it’s going to explode in their face in a hurry. Or it won’t, because I don’t have any fucking choice in the matter regardless.