Dad seemed to think I was taking on a lot since I was fourteen and the family came to me for help. It could have been something as basic as looking something up online or helping me make an online purchase. Is it bad enough that I just wanted to hear a “thank you” after the service was rendered? But if I dared to reproach my mom or dad or grandpa for forgetting about the existence of the “magic word”, I was told so much afterward…
And it was always like that. I grew older, went to university, and I was still flying in requests to buy something for someone (because I get a scholarship), or help the neighbor boy to deal with the math for nothing, or take my grandfather to the doctor to solve all the issues, because my grandfather is too old, and even nervous before these visits.
When you get older, you get your own things, responsibilities, job, girlfriend, and you get used to living in a world of giving and receiving, spending time helping your parents to find something on the Internet, which they have not learned to use for so many years, becomes a little unbearable. Especially when mom and dad take turns calling and asking them to enter the meter readings, or to make a purchase for them on the Internet, or to connect my mom to an online seminar, because she “does not know how. Over the years, I learned to say “no” to such requests for help when I couldn’t do it for my own reasons, but it hurt my dad a lot. Not because I didn’t want to do something, but because, in his opinion, I owed it to them.
We had a big fight recently over this. We were fighting on the phone so much it was blowing up in my ears. He thought up a trip in the middle of the week to another city, and wanted me to accompany him, because he is lost there, and google maps do not know how to use. I asked which one of us is a parent, and heard an angry tirade about how I was raised, helped and provided for, and now I have to help my parents.
It ended with a fervent rant about how my dad would never come to me again in my life. I felt guilty for a couple of days after that, and I thought about apologizing, but my father eventually came to me first. And not for a sincere apology and reconciliation, but to confront me with the fact:
– Have you thought of a birthday present for Mom? Let’s throw together and buy her that sewing machine she wanted. I won’t have enough on my own, and we’ll make a nice surprise for her.
What do I say to that? Once again, I’ve been frayed and hurt, and then pretended it didn’t happen.
Does anyone else besides me feel as if their parents are using them when it suits them? They’re adults… What if I wasn’t there? How would they live at all?
