I've posted about my dad and his unbridled use of porn when anyone in the house can see him, but things are getting worse with him, and this time it's not involving the porn.
I work, my boyfriend works and pays my parents rent every month. I go to school and so does he. I'm trying to get a second job right now, and my boyfriend drives me places because my car blew it's engine and I finally had to sell it to a junkyard. We take out the trash every Wednesday, and the recyclables, we clean the bathrooms, and whenever my parents go out of town, we get the mail and watch the house while they are gone. This week in fact, they as well as my sister and her husband, are out of town and my boyfriend and I are watching the house as well as my sister's pets. A dog, three kittens, a hamster and a tarantula. I have been trying to find an affordable place to live for a while, and we almost did, were it not for the landlord actually doing something illegal, we would be out already. I also just rearanged my room entirely by myself and cleaned and vacuumed it.
My dad ignores all this that we do. One day, I was sitting in the same room with him, and someone had left a fruit-snack wrapper on the desk. He assumed it was mine (it wasn't) and told me to "Stop leaving your crap everywhere." When I told him it wasn't mine, he (and this is the first time I've ever heard him refer to my mom this way, he's always refered to her as "mom".) he said "It ain't my wife's!" I said it probably belonged to my boyfriend, which he said that meant that it was mine. Then he went on to tell me that I'm supposed to clean up after him. I'm not his little house-wife, and he's a big boy so he can, and does, clean up his own messes.
My dad doesn't stop there though. He goes on to tell me that my boyfriend and I "Piss him off" and that if he had his way, we would be out on the streets. He says that we never do anything around the house, we never work and we never clean. That's not true, but at this point there's no convincing him. He says that the only reason we still live here is because of my mom, but even now he's pushing her to throw us out.
When my car started showing signs of blowing out, I said that I wanted to sell it so that I could get a new car (the one that blew was beyond repair). My dad said that he would put some sealer in the cracked area of the engine, which he did, and told me that it would buy me about six months time and I should wait to save up money. I didn't want to, but I did because my boyfriend, my mom, and my dad advised me to.
Turns out, the car blew through the sealer in about a week. I told my dad and he said "I told you it wasn't worth fixing." This is NOT what he said. I tell him that he did tell me to wait to save money. His response? This : "Oh HELL NO. I didn't say that! Don't you DARE try to turn this around on me!" and hangs up. The fact that he tried to tell me "I told you so" when I was the one who said it wasn't worth it made me angry. My dad may have been a mechanic for 25 years, but that doesn't mean that he can just talk to me like I'm an idiot, and then get mad at me for something he did. This isn't the first time he's talked to me this way. He's actually talked trash about me in front of my boyfriend...when I was sitting their watching him. It was like he didn't even care that I was there, or just thinks me to stupid to pick up on that. Like he and my boyfriend are smarter than me for some reason.
The last two times I've talked to my dad on the phone, he's sworn at me and hung up. Both my mother and I have noticed that he has become increasingly stubborn over the past few months, it's almost impossible to talk to him without him telling me that I'm wrong in some way, or that I don't know what I'm talking about, no matter what it is. The last three times he told me (and my mother) that we were dead wrong about something, it turned out to be just the opposite. Him being wrong and we being right. He'll raise his voice to near yelling levels sometimes on subjects that aren't that big of a deal. Like if flavored water or soda is better for you. He insists that soda and flavored water are the same. Upon investigation, my mom found out he's wrong and we were right. Either way, it was nothing to get into an argument about. Neither my mother or I were yelling about that by the way.
My dad didn't used to be this way. He used to talk about how proud he was of me, and how he had big expectations. He said I would go to college ( I am...) he said how great I did in school and how he knew I would go on to big things. I'm about to transfer to a UC within the next year, I have a 3.76, and I'm simultaniously building up a fallback career (my first career choice is a bit of an unforgiving industry...plus it's just good to have a plan anyway.) Now I never hear any of that anymore. I just hear how much I piss him off and how much he wants me out and how he wouldn't care if I were on the streets. I don't know what happened.
