If my husband is Mr. Depressing, then my parents are the depressing grandparents. They’ve been home since the week before Christmas, and they’ve been miserable the whole time!

They live in their camper and travel while working for most of the year, at least six months, but sometimes as many as eight months out of the year they travel. They have longtime clients and friends whom keep them busy with work that’s not in our area. Sometimes Florida, sometimes Arizona, this year though they went to North Carolina to help out my uncle who was just setting up his own business and had more work than he could handle.

When they’re living in the camper, they seem to get along wonderfully. When they are home, they don’t. They fight constantly. They not only fight constantly, they drag me and my sisters and our families into the mix.

If it’s not my dad showing up on my doorstop to complain about my mom, it’s my mom showing up to complain about my father. It drives me crazy!

Apparently it’s not only me it drives crazy, but my sisters as well, as my younger sister, who lives the farthest from my parents, called this morning to complain about them.

Sometimes I think it would be best if my parents just split up and each went their own ways. But then I wonder if my mom could make it on her own.

A few years back, the year I was pregnant with my daughter, I stumbled onto some information that I really didn’t want to have while I was fixing my father’s computer. It was my own fault in part, because I tend to be a bit nosy. But when you have a parent whom is totally internet clueless and you suddenly find a chat program and transcripts on his computer, which he shouldn’t even be able to understand, let alone use, it makes you curious.

I had just gotten him to understand email a few months before, in my mind he should have never understood ICQ to begin with, let alone figured out how to use it with out help. I just couldn’t resist. I had to take a peek.

That year my parents had been fighting more and more often, it was a stressful time for the whole family, as they kept dragging the rest of us into it. Then to come upon chat transcripts proving that my father was having an affair made it even worse for me.

Not only was he having affair, but it was with a client’s wife. My father’s company was building a new house for the couple, a huge new house. They had all come to be friends. This couple and their children were at all of our family parties that year, they were always out hanging around together, despite the age difference (the couple wasn’t much older than my older sister, which made them about twenty years younger than my parents.)

Anyways, they had become like a part of the family. We all knew them well. (My husband and my brother in law both worked for my father’s company and were both on the crew that was building their house at the time.)

Then I came upon the proof that my father was having an affair with the wife. Not just an affair, they were claiming to be in love.

I’m not sure how it happened, or how my mother found out about it, maybe I knew back then, but if I did, I don’t remember it now.

I blame the fact that I was six months into a very difficult pregnancy at the time, and had other things, more important to my own little family on my mind. It was also still during the phase where I was still having trouble with my own ex-husband trying to ruin my life. Of course at that time, he wasn’t yet my ex-husband, because he refused to give me a divorce, even though I was pregnant to someone else. (Yeah, I’m not exactly one to condemn someone for having an affair, but the situations were different, and that’s not the story I’m trying to tell right now.)

Either way, some how my mother found out about my father’s martial indiscretion and showed up at my house to ask me if I knew anything about it. There I was, knowing full well what was going on, but torn between loyalty to my father and loyalty to my mother. Should I tell her what I knew, or not. I couldn’t decide. I finally decided to tell her the truth. As I said earlier, I placed no judgment on my father for doing something I myself was in the middle of, at least legally; the main difference was I was open about it. I never tried to sneak around or hide anything from anybody.

I blabbed. Whether or not it was the right thing to do, I’ll probably never know.

It crushed my mother to know for pharmacy online sure. She went a bit crazy. She threw my father out, and nearly destroyed his business garage. To this day it still bears the scars of what she had done, the most noticeable one being the message spray painted on the floor. Along with the message she had left items to apparently help make her point.

The message was something along the lines of: Get out, Since she’s getting paid (she threw a jar of change on the floor and smashed it, as the woman he was having an affair with had just joined my father’s all female painting a decorating crew) and you want to get laid (and she had taken a bunch of his pants and cut the crotch out of them and thrown them on the floor), then let her cook your meals (she had dumped a bowl of food here), clean your house and do your laundry. (All the rest of my father’s clothes were at this point) But don’t come back to my house, because I won’t do it anymore!

It was quite awkward because my father’s crew found it the next morning, before my father got in.

This went on for months, my parents fighting back and forth, then the other woman’s husband got in on it and it was a big mess.

At the time, the whole family was pretty much urging them to divorce and get it over with. My mother was living in the house, and my father was living in the camper, parked at a camp ground near where I worked at the time. Which made it all the more worse, because if he wasn’t busy, he would drop in on me at work just to whine and complain some more. If I hadn’t been pregnant, it wouldn’t have mattered, because I was rarely at the office anyway, but because of my difficult pregnancy I was on light duty and wasn’t allowed to work in the field at that time, I was in essence chained to my desk, drawing the survey maps, chained to my desk so that my father knew right where I was.

After nearly a year, they finally got back together. How and why I don’t really remember, as by then I had a newborn along with a seven year old son, an ex-husband that still wouldn’t give me a divorce, and still did everything he could to make my life a living hell, and a live in boyfriend (I guess that’s what you would call him) who ended up laid off, because of my father’s lack of interest in his business due to his personal problems. I was the sole supporter of my little messed up family, and was working more than ever.

The other couple, I’m sorry to say, did end up getting divorced. Which was probably best for them, but I still feel awkward whenever I run into either of them, which is often as their daughter is the same age as my son and they always seem to end up in the same class.

After that my parents seemed to calm down for the most part. That’s when they started traveling for most of the year, which is also when I started having to not only work myself, but also run my father’s company while he’s gone.

Since then, it’s always been the same. When they are away from this area, traveling and working (my mother never worked for my father until they started this, she had never had any interest in his business, even though it was her father that he had inherited it from the year I was born, now she works with him nearly everyday) they get along great. When they are home, it’s pretty much non-stop fighting.

My sisters and I are able to put it out of our minds for the most part, most of the year. But the holidays, which are usually stressful enough as it is, when my parents return, the problems return. In the summer when they’re home, it’s not usually so bad, because my dad’s gone more, as cialis 20 mg cost there’s more work around here for him then.

As I was talking to my sister this morning, I asked her if she ever found herself counting the days until our parents leave. I know I do. That’s when she informed me that mom doesn’t want to go this time. She doesn’t like North Carolina, or at least the area that they’re at this time.

Usually they’re near friends, and long time clients for whom they’re working, but this time it’s my dad’s brother instead. As he’s currently unmarried, she feels a bit left out. Dad has his brother to hang out with after work, and she’s left to her own devices.

So I’m wondering what this will bring.

Did I make a point with this story? I’m not so sure it’s one of my best pieces of work, but it sure relieved some of my tension writing it, and that’s what this site it for basically! So I guess it works for me!