I drove to my parents' house this weekend. It would be a mistake to say that I drove "home", as not only is there no room for me anymore (or anything else), but I can't believe that these idiots (my parents) are related to me.
My little brother is 12, almost 13. He's going into the seventh grade. Except he's not, because he's never been to school. My mom has put him through what I'll kindly call "half-assed homeschooling" (it's probably more like "one-twentieth-assed homeschooling"). Her brand of homeschooling involves her giving my brother a worksheet and then retreating to her bedroom (a complete fucking mess...I'll take a picture tomorrow if I can). Whereupon he starts playing video games or just doing something, anything, other than the worksheet. He doesn't read books, he doesn't write more than a sentence at a time.
Because homeschooling is primarily a Christian nut activity, most of the books that she gets are for Christian nuts. The logic book that she purchased wanted little kids to brand statements such as "Jesus turned water into wine." as either "True Statement" or "False Statement." The math book concept of this amuses me of course, because I imagine problems such as "Q: Andy has 10 apples and Jesus takes 4 from him. How many apples does Andy have left? A: 10, because Jesus doesn't steal." The math books aren't that blatantly religious, but they still definitely reference religious bullshit.
The past few years, it gets to May and my parents say that he will be going to school next year. Then, by July, they've changed their tune and they think it's a good idea to wait another year. Then by the end of July it's not until high school that they're really going to have to send him to school, since my mom "can't teach him Algebra II."
They're at the latter point right now. A couple of months ago when I was here, he was going to school next year. Then apparently one of his friend's friends didn't like him, so he got scared about going to school next year, and convinced my parents (I'm sure it took him saying something only once) to let him stay home again. And why wouldn't he want to stay at home? There are no demands or expectations on him here. Those can only go up if he goes to school.
My biggest complaints though are the lack of schedule, lack of discipline, and a lack of a dedicated workspace (related to the discipline, I think). They constantly move around where his school materials are and where he is expected to work. To me it signals a lack of dedication to the homeschooling and yet another lack of discipline.
So I'm not in the door more than 10 minutes tonight when the argument starts about this whole clusterfuck. I tell my mom that she's not disciplined enough, he's not disciplined enough to carry this out. He's got no desire to learn, obviously she hasn't instilled that in him, maybe school can. She complains about my dad not helping, even though it's her party, she wants to do it. At that point, he did start bitching her out a bit about the fact that the homeschooling should be done by the time he gets home at 3pm. But for the most part, my parents are recreating the dynamic of my grandparents. What she says goes, he doesn't try to argue, even though he knows that she's full of shit.
I continued berating her, and I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but my mom set off the powderkeg. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm horrible at trying to find a job. Horrible. I'm going to law school because, primarily, I'm awful at trying to find a job. It's really not laziness, it's more that I hate the whole rejection game. I never tried out for plays in high school/college because I don't like getting rejected on the basis of some superficial performance that they've staged for me. All of that contributes to my pisspoor performance during interviews (I can only think of one interview that I've had that I thought went really well....didn't get the job then, either).
So my mom says something about not being responsible and playing video games for two years. Seconds until ignition....3....2....1: We have mushroom cloud. While I lived in NC for two years and didn't have a regular job, I did teach classes intermittently. It was like being retired. I worked 11 weeks the one year, and 4 the year after. At $3k per, I made about twice what she did the first year, and probably a little less than she did the second year. What we made aside, I know where my money went. Rent, electricity, car payments, insurance payments, etc. My mom is someone who has never paid rent, electricity, car payments, insurance payments, etc. My dad has always paid for all that, and she lived at home with her parents during college. She pays for my brother's braces, and her credit cards. That's it. She wants to try to school me on responsibility? Fuck that, I blew up. Ballistic is a kind word for it. "You want to fucking take me on about that??"
I didn't get a real chance to get going about it (though I did say a few things) before my dad came in and calmed everyone down. He didn't do enough about the homeschooling issues, but he said more about it than I thought he would.
My brother was present for most of this, he was crying because he was so upset about me attacking my mother for this homeschooling shit. I'm not sure whether he thought I was attacking him or not (and I talked to him privately later and told him that I wasn't attacking him at all). I had to buy him off with a little Rita's.
After the Rita's trip, things settled down. My mother didn't really talk to me again tonight. We'll see how tomorrow progresses. At this point I'm glad I have the option of a hotel room in DC on Friday.
But at least it did give me something to write about.
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