Damned if I do, damned if I don't (a parental rant).

The BBQ Pit
1

Note: those who wish to gain a more thorough understanding of the situation would do well to read this thread.

All right–so my dad lost his job a couple of months ago, a victim of the Motorola layoffs. He’s been looking for a new one, and will probably have one in the not-to-distant future. With the economy the way it is, though, and with my father being not-quite a spring chicken, and in a somewhat overpaid position, he probably won’t make as much as he used to. Possibly to the tune of 40K+ less.

Now, I’m in college. And, to boot, I’m in a private college. My parents pay about 10,000 dollars a year. Looking at my credits a few days ago, I saw that I could graduate at the end of 2003; in otherwords, I’d graduate after 2 1/2 years of college with my BA. So I come to the conclusion that I can graduate early, and maybe go and get my teaching certification at an in-state school, commuting and working, with or without parental aid.

This would save my parents anywhere from $7K - 15K, all told. It would also get me out of Valparaiso, a place that seems to stifle the spirit. And, yes, it would move me closer to my engaged-to SO.

Back to the pissy part…

My dad takes me out to breakfast the day I’m going to go back to school. He starts asking me about my plans. Heretofore, I’d been planning on taking full advantage of my pretty decent scholarship from VU and using the full 4 years to get my degree and (possibly) certification. My dad, of course, being the ornery sort, opposed this idea, saying I should graduate in three years.

We sit down with our menus, place our orders, and then begin talking.

Angel’s Dad: So you can graduate in three years, right?
Angel: Actually, I can graduate in 2 1/2, and–
Angel’s Dad: Well, you should do that, then.
Angel: I was planning on doing that, actually…
Angel’s Dad: Oh…::long pause:: Well, I think you should take four years.

Um, what the bloody hell?

I silently contemplated this change of mind throughout the entire conversation. He thinks I should get my certification at the private school I’m at now. I tell him that the local public school has a better education program (which it does). He says I should pick up a second major; I say that there’s no second major which is going to help prepare me, and that I don’t like being at Valpo very much. This goes on and on.

I didn’t understand it at first. I mean, I was proposing a solution that made both fiscal and educational sense. I was trying to save my parents a fair chunk of change that, frankly, I didn’t have to (they’d’ve paid anyway, taking it out of savings). I was improving my quality of life, placing myself near to the ones that I love. And my father–who had supported and half-proposed the plan before I’d mentioned that it was my plan–was having none of it. Then, it dawned on me:

My father is a control freak.

He wanted to be able to tell me how to go about getting an education. He’s been doing it ever since high school, when he made me take Spanish instead of French. When he tried to get me to rent an apartment even though A.) I wanted to live in a dorm and B.) I couldn’t live off campus before I was a senior. When he tried to force me to take a second major in computer science, even though I hate math, don’t program anything more complicated than basic Java, and would shoot myself before I took up programming for a living.

He’s always been this way, and will always be this way. I mean, he was forcing me to go to bed at 10:30 at night over break–and he does it in a passive-aggressive manner, which pisses me off even more. He slept on the couch every night over break so that I couldn’t be downstairs (which is where everything I could use at night is–TV, computer, VCR, phones, and a good chunk of my books). He slept in the bed before break, and he’s sleeping in the bed now. He didn’t tell me to go to bed–he just made it the only viable possibility. All this so he could give his 19 year-old daughter a bedtime.

And now he’s trying to control what I want to do for my education. Words cannot express how much this infuriates me.

This is the man who reduced me to tears by not attending any of my poetry readings. In Chicago. Where I won awards.

This is the man who alienated my uncle by not attending my RCIA (baptism, first communion, and confirmation) when I was 14.

This is the man who never picked me up from school activities, who never cleaned up my vomit, who seldom took the opportunity to talk to me, who called me a “fat, lazy bitch,” who searched my room for drugs periodically even though I never gave him any reason to suspect I’d used drugs BECAUSE I HADN’T, then yelled at me for hours about how my room wasn’t clean enough. This is the man who uttered the words, “I love you for doing this for me.”

Not, I love you, or I love you because you’re my daughter, or I love you because you’re you. I love you for doing this for me. And he presumes to try and control my life, to keep the leash on me for as long as possible.

I’ve given him emotional support, and I will continue to do so because he’s my dad, and I love him. I will continue to love him despite his failings and faults, and his apparent lack of reciprocation. I won’t ever abandon him, even though I’m sorely tempted to do so sometimes. But I refuse to do what he wants me to do right now.

I can’t kowtow to him my entire life. I can’t let him dictate my decisions. I can’t even comprehend why he doesn’t want me to do this (and, no, I didn’t say, “I’m doing this because you lost your job.” Give me some credit). To quote the first Star Trek movie I ever saw, “The line must be drawn here. This far, no farther.”

I don’t know what kind of hell I’ll catch for this. He can be completely irrational. He gets angry and breaks things and throws things. He holds grudges like you wouldn’t believe. He’s not above sacking me financially, I’m sure. But I don’t care. I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t, and I’m damned sure he’s not controlling another instance of my life.

But, as I look into the abyss of the unknown and possibly very un-fun, a different phrase–which, to my knowledge, was never spoken by Captain Picard–comes to mind:

Oh fuck.

2

Agree with him that you’ll take your time and graduate in 4 years.

Go back to school and plan on graduating in 2 and a half.

THEN EVER SEE THE MAN AGAIN.

Trust me, parents react to their children growing up VERY slowly. I’ve been living on my own since I graduated with my BA, I’ll be hopefully going to gradschool soon. I’m a gooddamned BSL-3 tech and I’m incharge of purchasing and a good chunk of running both the BSL2 and 3 labs. And I still don’t notice a whole pile of difference in how my parents react to me when I was 16.

I guess what I’m trying to say: He’s not going to change. It doesn’t sound like he’s done a whole lot to deserve and love from you, so why give it?

3

Sounds very much like my dad. And you know what surprised me? All it took for me to get him to lay off was to 1) tell him that I was the one who had to live with my choices, not him, and so long as those choices weren’t insane, that he should just accept that our opinions on how I, an adult, should live my life would differ; and 2) then I genuinely stopped caring when he got his panties in a twist about issues he had no business butting into.

Now I just smile, say, “Thanks for the input, Dad, but you know, I’ve taken that into consideration already,” when he offers his opinion. Sometimes I’ll even explain my overriding reasons for doing what I’m doing–all in the calm, assured tone of someone who knows she doesn’t owe Dad an explanation.

I started doing this while he was paying my tuition to college. I knew that he was paying the bills, but there was only so much I was willing to put up with. Stunningly, he started respecting me a lot more after that. I think the reason is that when we get upset about our parents’s opinions, we still appear to be petulant children in their eyes. When you act calm, self-assured, and independent, you seem more adult to them. Of course, YMMV depending on how reasonable your dad is (though my dad is a pretty unreasonable, unstable guy).

I have a much better relationship with my dad now than I did five years ago. I think it’s largely due to the fact that I’ve learned not to let his crazy opinions or his emotional abuse bother me anymore, and I have let go of most of my resentments about past treatment. I feel overwhelming pity for him. He’s a bitter, unhappy old man who has no friends, whose family doesn’t like him, and who’s genuinely confused about why that is, even though he spends most of his time trying to make everyone else as unhappy as he is. How could I possibly credit the opinion of someone that pathetic and messed-up? Please, for your own sake, learn to let it go. You’ll be so much happier–or at least relieved of a huge burden.

Incidentally, I suspect a lot of your dad’s nuttier behavior (like sleeping on the couch to deprive you of the pleasure of the computer and TV) is related to his being out of work. My dad went through this twice and both times he was an absolutely miserable human being who was torture to live with. He wasn’t happy, and he tried very hard to get in the way of the fun of others. Why not try getting out of the house in the evenings? It used to do me a world of good.

Good luck. I really feel for you here. You brought back a lot of what I felt 7 years ago. I’d almost forgotten.

4

Um, he can’t FORCE you to do anything. If you don’t want to listen to his crap, stop taking his money and pay for school yourself. Or, just bite your tongue and finish the degree he’s paying for.

Good luck.

5

I don’t think that the fact that he’s paying for my education factors into the equation; after all, he’s not the only one who’s paying. Via my scholarships, I’m funding well over half of the bill myself. Not to mention the fact that my mom thinks my plan’s a good idea, and she’s also a breadwinner.

My gripe is that the man who’s put very little effort into parenting over the course of my life is now trying to control me as an adult. Not because he has any apparent opinions about what I should do, but because he wants to be able to tell me what to do.

And, incidentally, I am finishing “the degree he’s paying for.” I’m not dropping out. Right now, it’s simply a matter of when and where I finish this degree.

6

Angel, I think perhaps your dad lives in an alternate universe where he is also my dad. :smiley:

Even down to the grumpy, bitchy, unbearable Unemployment Phase you described, you have nailed my father. (My dad’s Unemployment Phase lasted about five years, though, so don’t get me started.)

I never got a dime from my parents for college, other than a few checks for $50 which my mother would send me, on the sly, whenever she could…and my dad STILL thought he was entitled to every opinion on the face of the earth. I called him up when I got my first A in college, on an English paper…and he chewed me out for it because he said I’d only gotten the A by “selling out” and that my paper’s thesis proved to him that I was abandoning all my ideals and beliefs and just sucking up to get a good grade. (Um…hello…don’t you sell out the moment you give them the tuition? :rolleyes:)

Anyway, I can only tell you what worked for me. My dad and I went back and forth for YEARS, on things that are far too detailed to go into here…and it was only last year that I finally got him to get the hell off my back. Using the strategies outlined by Q.N. Jones. If you take him personally, you let him win. You HAVE to realize that, regardless of age, you are the mature one in this relationship…and that when you let him rile you up, and you take him seriously, you are giving him exactly what he wants.

Don’t be a bitch, don’t go out of your way to prove how right you are…but never forget that you ARE. Remain calm, unruffled, and reasonable. Treat him the same way you’d treat a screaming five year old…by thinking to yourself, “I can’t believe I am taking this infantile behavior seriously.” Don’t let him get under your skin. This is what he wants. Trust me.

And until you graduate, and can financially afford to separate yourself from his household…b/c whether you’re living with him or not, you are still financially beholden to him to some degree…suck it up and smile, thinking of the many ways in which you will walk away the better, bigger person.

Trust me on this. Otherwise you’ll go nuts trying to out-psyche and out-manouver and out-think a person who is basically as rational as a three year old. The only way to win is to walk away.

And nothing pisses off this type of person more than trying to engage in an argument/debate/disagreement with someone who didn’t show up to play. So remember that the next time he tries this goofy, manipulative bullshit.

7

Ah, reminds me a little of my late father, god bless his soul. He wasn’t a control freak, but he was a bit, um, quirky.

He liked to call me up and list all of the things that I was doing wrong, which apparently ran everywhere from how I ate breakfast to how I raised my children.

I also learned early on to pretend that he was a young child, and I was just to humour him. Incidently, I was the only one of his kids that had a good relationship with him, and the only one that called him regularly. My siblings would get upset with him, and take everything personally.

When it would get too bad, I’d just tell him that obviously he was not feeling that well, and perhaps I should call him back later. When he was being ridiculous, I’d call him on it. Calmly, like he was a toddler. Worked like a charm.

8

Maybe (and maybe) this is his problem. He is suddenly reflecting on his life and realizing he hasn’t been there for you. So now (when you really don’t need it) he feels like he needs to make up for lost time and be a parent. Which means giving you advice and guiding your life. Smile and nod. Thank him for being so caring and sharing his experience. Do what you need to do anyway.

This happened to my husband. His dad and mom divorced when he was twelve, and his dad moved on. When his dad turned around, his son had grown up, and he’d missed it, so he tried to turn back the clock. It took a marriage, two kids, a successful career, and turning grey at the temples before his dad stopped treating him like a twelve year old.