The Pointing Finger

The saying is familiar. If you point your finger at someone, there are three pointing back at you. Three is a number that suits this situation.

I am in deep paska with half of our adult children and maybe four of the six. I can never tell exactly. When this happens I play the scene over and over in my mind looking for clues to explain to myself just what happened and why. I think with the number getting so high, I have to figure out if I am unreasonable, crazy, or both. Sometimes I think I am an easy target, being so cursed with introvertism, combined with the feeling that I am right. Of course the fact remains that it takes at least two to disagree. One never yells at a tree alone in a forest.

Last night during dinner all hell broken loose, or maybe more of that hell to pay now, and the rest will come later. It is something that drives me to my knees. I hate a scene. When it happens during a meal, I cannot swallow. Food and fighting do not mix except in a high school lunch room.

The 18 years I lived under my parent's roof, I never experienced scenes like those I have observed, or been a part of, over the years with the new name I was given 50 years ago. Getting used to listening to yelling and observing anger is nothing I am apparently going to get used to either.

It ends by my lying awake in the night with the replay, which never has an ending, trying to sort it out with my roommate of 50 years, and replaying it again in broad daylight. Nothing is working. I should go right to the source of the problem, but simply cannot take a chance on the incident taking off again where it stopped originally by people walking out in a huff.

The incident was with a daughter and her husband over a turkey. He Who Must Be Obeyed was simply stubbornly silent and unbending. I made everything worse when I used the word 'negligent.' I should have just kept my mouth shut. That is perhaps the answer to it all. Maybe I should have walked out with my last bite in my throat.

I am getting very depressed and exhausted at being so, like my mother called me, compliant. From the very beginning of my life I would rather comply than get pulled into a controversy. So now in my age, when I do not comply, it infurates people and they question my motives. I saw a son-in-law boil with anger and flash a look at his wife with the very mention of instant mashed potatoes. At that they left. Now how bad is that!