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Gerick Once Again Pitches A Fit During My Sister's Visit
Considering how nervous and negative my sister can be, and how prone she is to exaggeration– I request that Gerick be on his best behavior when my sister is over visiting. She stays with us maybe a weekend every other month, so I don't think its too much to ask.
Yet the last 3 visits he's thrown a temper tantrum over some stupid, petty thing shortly after we arrive back from picking her up from my mother's. Three times he's pitched a fit. Once because I dropped a loaf of bread on the heater and the plastic melted from it before I could pick it up again. He freaked out over that one– was throwing things around the kitchen, even– over a loaf of cheap 88 cent bread! AND we had 2 others like it intact! It was a total accident, and yet he acted as though I was the most irresponsible person in the world for daring to be clumsy!
This time he was pissed because the art piece he was working on wasn't coming out right, and so he got into one of his supremely negative moods, where every little thing becomes worth freaking out over because he's upset with himself for not being able to do something as well as he'd like. I know that when he's in such a mood, the slightest thing I do wrong will give him the excuse he needs to turn that self-anger against another and allow him to discharge that hot energy. In this case, it was over yet another petty thing I did wrong.
Marg, like her son, is one of those people who just can't “settle down” for very long. She gets nervous and antsy and her reaction is to find some WORK to do. Cleaning, cooking, some domestic project. I get it, I do. Its not how I relax (and let's face it, not many of us do) but fine. However, this is my house and I have very few rules, but one of them (because I have my own nervous issues) is that as the hostess, I do not let my guests clean for me. I have a way things need to be done, and if someone wants to try something (like cook) that's fine, just run it by me first. But I do the laundry and dishes when we have guests. In this case, Marg has never had a dishwasher, and I already specifically asked her to please leave it to me, and yet she tried to do it anyway. I wasn't pissed off, just sort of rolling my eyes over it– because I had to completely unload the dishwasher and then re-load it. She had it packed where my stemware would break and things wouldn't come clean or would scrape against each other– and, sorry, NO. Just no. She apologized and I accepted and just asked her to please not do dishes, because it actually makes more work for me, not less– though I sincerely appreciated the thought. I knew she was trying to help.
I was irritated, sure. Who wouldn't be? And I sighed as I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher. However, Gerick didn't help, because soon he was teasing me about being particular in a mean way, telling his mother that I was a control freak, and THAT did piss me off. Marg went outside (to do my laundry, another thing I asked her not to do!) and I went upstairs to get something, and to my shock, Gerick chased me up the stairs, and in front of my sister proceeded to bitch me out!
He said I was bullying his mother! That I was using abrupt body language and being all aggressive in how I loaded the dishwasher, and purposely putting her down by making a point of how WRONG she did it. I didn't believe I did any such thing and said so. He had a tiny point about the sigh and the eye-rolling (which she neither saw nor heard) but I was in no way insulting her or being aggressive nor throwing a barely contained tantrum. And– considering how Gerick can be so often, I was outraged at his hypocrisy! I told him he was being ridiculous, and that he had no right what-so-ever to accuse me of doing something that he himself was so guilty of-! He was totally projecting his own shit on me to the point where he was doing exactly what he said I was doing– WHILE I WAS NOT DOING IT.
Fucking wow.
His face was all screwed up and scowly, and he glared at me and told me to “just stay the hell away from” him! Cool. My pleasure!
Just in case though, I went to find Marg to check on her. Nervous people can be very sensitive to implied criticism (and I ought to know!) so I thought I'd better apologize to her for even the slight impatience I may have given away in my reaction. I was hot and needed to sit down and get something to eat and drink and so wasn't in the best of moods myself. Still–. I could have sworn I wasn't as bad as Gerick portrayed.
That's when I found her doing my laundry– or, rather, correcting my laundry sorting and putting things in the dryers a different way than I had them. I swallowed any words to say on that, since, unlike with the dishes, the laundry in question wouldn't be harmed by a different method– just slowed down a bit. I apologized to her for any abruptness on my part regarding the dishes, and she insisted that she wasn't upset, she just felt a little foolish. She explained again that when she gets nervous, she likes to work on things. I gave my sympathy to this, because I truly understand being nervous! But I gave her my perspective– that she really made ME nervous when she did my chores. It also made me feel like a failure as a hostess, like my standards weren't high enough to satisfy her. She said she understood– she didn't think she was making me feel bad. I said if she needed something to do, let me know and we'll find something she can do and enjoy rather than housework. She said she wanted to cook another meal and I said great! We worked out a couple more things, and after that things went quite smoothly.
The important point here though is that watching and listening to her carefully, I could see she wasn't insulted that I corrected her on the dishes. A little abashed maybe, but she was hardly feeling devastated or bullied by me, for pete's sake!
And I couldn't get into things in any way with Gerick with 2 guests over either, so that didn't help. But, mark my words– after Marg and Erica are both home again, time is being set aside to address this latest pitched fit of Gerick's. I'm getting so sick of this! I'm not allowed the slightest latitude or patience, but I'm to give it to everyone else. If I'm less than perfect AND saintly, I must be yelled at. Seriously!? Yet Gerick feels just fine running over other people. He always has a justification for himself. I want to pull my very long hair out sometimes, I swear.
2012-08-23 15:13:02
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