The Fights In Life

Today I had the pleasure of spending the day with a very dear family of mine. I'm not related to them, but I spend enough time with them that sometimes it feels like I am.

Well, I have learned when you are around people enough, you get to see their true real selves-- and don't hold back when they are mad at each other just because you are around. I am not exactly sure when the undertones of conflict actually started, it seemed to be there the entire day. But a simple comment of "wheres my shoe?" as we walked out of Subway cause the big fight of the day that when on-and-on-and on. This fight went from yelling words, to very stern talking to each other, to silences, to " I'm sorry that I spoke to you" apologies and back a few times.

I'm not writing this to recap some people you don't know petty fight from today, but being in the midst of this argument--I spent a lot of time in thought-- thinking about how this fight is going down, comparing it to other couple's fight style and how conflict happen within my family growing up.

My mom was a stay-at-home mom and she is very easy going, but we did have conflict at times. Whenever I had conflict with my mom it was something that I could handle. I never felt scared, I never felt like this situation was more than I could handle. I felt like I could share with her my feelings in the situation, even if I was ugly in the process, I knew it would be okay and we would be okay in the end.

However, when my dad was around conflict was the scariest thing that could happen. He would explode in anger, though he was never violent to any person when he was mad, how he reacted was was in his anger hurt you to the core. I never was allowed to respond to his anger, I could not explain why I did what I did that resulted in the anger towards me.

Often the anger was not justifiable. Most of the time I could easily see the other side of the coin and why the other party did this "injustice" towards my dad, typically it was just a poor judgement call, not out of malice. Often it wasn't even a real poor-judgement call, it just wasn't my dad's prefer way of doing things. But it always killed me that he got to be right, because he set-up the situation to where you can't say a thing, and if you did, the anger towards that person plus 10 times more would be thrown at you AND you would hurt his feelings in the process and have to apologize later for it.

In some ways, I think I was wise beyond my years in the subject of anger, I would get so upset and hurt by the way my dad would treat people. As a high school-er, I wanted to move far away and in a place where I wasn't under my dad's authority because I didn't want this angry and way of living ever to be my norm. I never wanted to be or around that response to anger on a daily basis. I didn't want to live with the fear of having everything be find than "snap" everyone is on edge because of anger. I could see that it was not okay and never want to live where I began to believe that it was okay.

We never make it out of our childhood free and clear of the things that our parents taught, molded and lived out in their lives.

To this day, I am okay in handling conflict with women. I don't like it, but I am fairy emotionally stable during the process. When I have conflict with men, especially men who are powerful, I come back to the mindset of the scared kid I once was.

And I don't know how to handle or react to women who break the rules that my house had of how to behave when dad is mad. Especially when it is a wife responding to her husband. I immediately want to correct the wife--they are breaking all the rules. I immediately expect and see my dad's raw emotions come out of the husband, that the rest of the week is going to be completely ruined by this stupid back-talk reaction that you should've kept to yourself.

That has never been the case. Walking away from these situations and thinking about it later, I see amazing things in these conflicts that I was on edge about before. These women marry men that they feel free to speak openly and honestly to, even if its ugly and terrible in the moment. They have this sense that everything will be okay once this conflict is settled, like how it is with me and my mom. I don't always agree with what they say, it is often very hurtful- but there is something magical in being able to say hurtful things to people we love and they still love you even after you said it.

That could of been the case with my dad. I don't know if he would ever stop loving me if I reacted differently to his anger. But I am too scared to find out. Even now, when I am practically 30 years old, I fear my dad. I fear making him angry. I fear the wrath of his anger towards me. I will not test that water anytime soon if I can help it.