I’m switching gears, I’m dropping my frustration and anger that developed from the last post. I have something a little different to talk about. I want to know if you’ve experienced this and what you think about it based on your own experiences.
We all know what a jerk my dad is. We all know what an ass my FIL is. It’s easy, when they act like that, to go on despising them and thinking just what huge pieces of crap they are and not letting them sink their claws in to hold us down. All you can think about is how to get away, how to shut them up, how to dodge the bullets, etc. Then they go and do something nice. Then it fucks it all up.
For example, tonight, my FIL informed me that my nephew is selling cookies. I told him that while it sounded nice, and I’d like to buy some from him to help him out, my husband and I couldn’t afford it because we needed to save every penny for when my husband is unemployed. I’ll be damned if later in the evening my FIL didn’t tell me that he’d cover my husband and I if we wanted to get something from my nephew. He didn’t/doesn’t have to, I didn’t ask him to, and neither did my husband. But it’s a terribly nice gesture of him.
Here’s another example or two. Tonight my husband mentioned that he wanted to do another fish fry sometime soon, before it got too cold. We bought fish for this last one, which was a first time EVER for us. We used to just go fishing and fry up the fish we had caught. So my husband mentions wanting to do another fish fry to my dad and he tells my husband that this time he wants to go fishing for the fish, but that otherwise he’s all game. We all three sat and talked about a really nice sounding day fishing trip. I sort of really actually want to go. Then we can’t forget my dad offering up some of SK’s medicine tonight, without me asking, to help Little Guy. He doesn’t know the cat, isn’t attached to him and pays a good amount of money for the medicine, but he still offered it.
How do you keep a game face when things like this happen? I mean, tonight my dad may be offering up SK’s medicine to help another cat who isn’t of his concern … or my FIL might be offering to buy us cookies … but easily tomorrow they could be jumping our asses, dragging us down and telling us how shitty we are just to keep us in place. I’m not saying that these ‘nice’ things are going to make me drop my guard and all will be forgiven, but damn it makes it hard. It’s like firing a photon torpedo at my shields at point blank range dammit.
I hate having to go about this so tactically. Play nice, play nice, play nice so that you get to take advantage of a very nice offer that to a lot of other people might just seem like a normal offer. It just pisses me off when creeps are nice. But then, at the same time, because I have to live with, or deal with (on a daily basis), these creeps … it’s nice having a break from time to time and maybe thinking they have a heart … or the ghost of one at least. I guess I just don’t like being put in the position where I can either choose to take them up on the offer and worry about ‘owing’ them (because that’s how they both are), or I can deny the offers (and potentially any further offers), or I can grovel while I humbly decline so that further offers might come in the future but I won’t ‘owe’ them anything right now. Argh.
So, anybody else faced with a situation like this? A person gives you almost no reasons to particularly like or trust them, but then they go and do something that almost seems down right human and nice, and you have to rethink it? What happened?
