Family Disharmony

Look, I love my family, like the rest of us love our families, even though they drive us crazy sometimes. My family is no exception in the crazy department, more literal in some senses than others. They’re a wonderful, unique, and open-minded family full of their own quirks, but…Good Lord!

Sometimes I want to bang my head against the wall when I’m around them.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to go and visit my family, who live in a different state. Luckily, the drive is not that far. I drove down to see my family, I left work a little early to miss the major traffic outside of the city of Greenville, where traffic grows for no reason. Seriously, traffic grows on the trees there and there’s really not a reason for it. It mysteriously clears up once you’re outside of the Greenville region.

I made it to my family’s house, where they promptly began to ignore me, as usual. That’s generally how it works. Whenever I visit my family I room in my youngest brother’s room and he sleeps on the couch. The elderly cat living in the house, Siam, whom we also call Darth Vader, happens to really like my youngest brother’s room.

The reason we call Siam Darth Vader is because he breathes loudly. He has allergies or some type of nasal problem. You can hear him breathing from feet away. The cat breaks his way into my brother’s room to get into the closet and breathe in there. That’s him in the picture just after he forced the door open. The door was locked. No, he’s not Houdini, the door just isn’t hung properly and as a result every single cat in the house can force the door open; there are four cats in the house.

Moving away from speak of cats, the idea was to go out for lunch on Saturday. Easy enough right? No, not easy enough. For some reason, it is impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, for my family to get out the door in any less than two-three hours. HOURS! HOURS PEOPLE!

I get dressed and I get out the door when I want to go somewhere. Sometimes in ten minutes or less. My morning routine, takes less than an hour. I don’t understand how it can take so long.

With my family it’s not only that they take forever to get ready, which is part of it, they’re always doing stuff at the last-minute.

My mother got up and spent hours washing dishes and doing laundry, instead of getting ready. Then my step-father spent hours taking the van to get its oiled changed and put air in its tires. Seriously, hours.

Then my two youngest brothers were still asleep until noon.

Then my mom finally did start to get ready, which took over an hour. So all-in-all, we didn’t leave for the restaurant until 1:30 in the afternoon. We should have left at 11:30. We didn’t get to the restaurant until after 2:00, even then, it was only with much stress. First the turn was missed. Then someone pulled into a dead-end. Then we finally ended up at the restaurant.

It’s like an act of Congress, if they were on an expedition to the North Pole, to get my family out of the house. It frustrates me to no end. Really. I just don’t understand. I don’t. If I’m leaving the house, I’m leaving the house. Capisce? Get in the car and go.

This isn’t the only reason I get frustrated with my family. They live in a rather cluttered and disorganized manner, which I can’t stand. I have places for things in my house. There are places one type of things belong and those things do not belong anywhere else.

Things are just everywhere at my family’s house. Like, why is there ceramic tile in the dining room. What’s with that Total Gym in the living room? Why is there a bedroom full of food? Litter boxes in the hallway? Gun cabinet in my brother’s room? Nope, I don’t understand.

Recently, my family took my artwork for safe-keeping. I was afraid that it would be destroyed due to an unstable situation in my personal life. I had it spirited away out of my house because I was afraid I would lose it. At my family’s house, on my visit, a cat peed on one of my artwork bags because instead of having my bags of artwork put away in a room where cats could not get to them, my family just put them in the dining room, because you know, artwork belongs in dining room.

I got upset about this. This is over twenty years of artwork that I don’t want ruined by cat pee. I gathered up every single bag and every piece of artwork my family had brought down to their house and put it in my car. I’m taking it back to my house. I can’t have it ruined when I put so much work into it because my family has so little respect for my possessions

That’s just how they are. They keep their possessions in chaos and think other people would also be ok with their possessions being in chaos. Call me crazy, but I just don’t like all my stuff sitting around everywhere in disarray with cats peeing on it.

I love my family, but I always look forward to leaving. I need a vacation from the vacation I took to see my family. .