momebie

It's really painful to go home and feel like you don't belong there.

My parents' house stinks of dust and dirt and probably a little mildew. It's not overwhelming, not to me anyway, but it's definitely there. When I lived there, some ten years ago, it was messy. Now it's a disaster. When I go back all I can see are the seating areas you can't sit in because of all the crap in them, the years and years of dust on table and bar surfaces covered in piles of newspaper fliers and notes and receipts that no one is ever going to go through, and the way the carpets are dingy and worn through in some places. It makes me miserable to think about. When I go home I stay with my boyfriend's family when I can so I don't have to deal with it.

My mother is trying to slowly work through the house and get things cleared up, but she works three jobs. My brothers live at home because they're going to school close to there, and my dad only works one job. You'd think at some point any of the three of them would get sick of living in filth and help mom try and organize things or clean them away. But they don't. They'd rather play WoW or go golfing.

It's not only the physical mess that drives me away, it's the verbal shit storms that my presence there seems to bring about. My father is a very staunch conservative, which is fine in and of itself, except he spends all of his time watching FOX News and parroting that shit back at us. The boys, for whatever reason, have decided to absorb these 'facts' and not question them. Now, I do not think badly of conservatives of any breed simply because they're conservative. Just because most of my views are quite liberal does not mean that anyone else is Wrong. What I DO think badly of is being told that I am too young to understand the world and that I'll give up my liberal beliefs eventually and how can I sleep at night knowing that I put that Idiot in office?

And about now you're thinking to yourself: why can't you just not talk about politics with your family? You know? I would love to. I would love more than ANYTHING ON THE PLANET to be able to go home and have a discussion about ANYTHING without being dragged into some sort of political debate. But I can't, because stuff like this happens:

Me: So basically your Kindle or your Nook is what you want. The iPad is probably more than you really need, even if it is shiny like the future.
Dad: The future isn't so shiny anymore with the current administration.

Over Thanksgiving my dad tried to call me on the carpet and tell me how wrong I was for having Opinions and I finally told him that I just didn't fucking care. Because I don't. I'm not a person who is interested in political discussion. Ever. For any reason. I love listening to people's points of view, but it's also important to me for the speaker to be respectful to others while they explain. I prefer not to see the world in blacks and whites. And I refuse to be preached to by people who do. I can hardly spend more than a few hours at home anymore.

The problem is that they're my family and I love them. And because I can only spend a few hours at home once every couple of months without completely losing my mind, I feel like there's something wrong with me. What kind of a bitch am I? Why can't I fulfill my familial obligation? Why can't I smile and nod at their hate and their stubbornness and their rigidly simple world perspectives? And why don't I really want to be able to? I worry a lot about getting older and becoming ostracized because I'm never there and I'm not interested in the same things they are.

I have recently begun making plans to move to Portland, Oregon in the fall of 2012. It's something I had wanted to do years ago, but had to put off for several reasons. But now that I've made the decision I've been feeling a bit down about it all. Not the move really, because I need that, but about other things. I'll sometimes look around myself at Disney or at Universal or just out to dinner with my friends and think about how I'll be losing this. About how I'll never get to do some of these things again. But nine hours with my family pushed me firmly into being excited to leave. If I'm not close, I don't have to come home. That thought thrilled me. And then I thought about how awful it was of me to think about people I loved that way, which made me cry for twenty minutes over my frustrations with baking blueberry mini pies. (Because really, who cries over pie? Someone who's worried about something else, that's who.)

And that feeling? The way it spreads through my soul? That feeling stinks more than any amount of dirt or dust ever could.

This entry was written for Free Topic: Stink, Stank, Stunk at