Unravelling Threads

I came in from the torrential rain and the warmth of the house enveloped me like a snug cocoon. I shed all my wet, sticky, cold outer layers so I could be, once again, one with my home.

Dad was stressed, I was stressed, but the house was not. We were stressed and frustrated with totally different things yet the stress hung above us all the same like a thin layer of film, barely there but suffocating. Not acknowledged, but warping our words and shrivelling up our hearts.

“Go pick your sister up,” he said. “I have a lot of work to do”.

I said OK and accepted my banishment into the outside once more, into the torrential rain that was only comforting from inside my cocoon. I said OK and lay in bed for a couple more minutes before slipping back into the cold, the damp, the stiff, the outside.

My sister was a faint wash of color in a household that had somehow, unnoticeably, turned monotonously grey over time. She too, was fading fast, for nothing lasted very long here under the roof of the very house I thought I would always be safe in. I’d talk to her and she’d bring colour into my life for brief moments before everything would die down again. A storyteller, a jokester, and an annoyance, she had just enough of everything to counter all the greyness seeping into my life.

“Oh my God,” she said, dumping her backpack and heading straight to the cat with her jacket and shoes still on. “Taylor was being SO annoying today.”

Taylor again. I sighed. “I don’t want to hear it.”

She continued anyway. “Ok, so you know how she always puts her elbow on my desk? Yeah well, I put my water bottle on the side of the desk so she wouldn’t put her elbow there, but then she TOOK my water bottle and MOVED it away, and then placed her elbow on my desk.”

She walked into the kitchen in search for junk food. “But my water bottle was dripping and it was splashing onto her desk and her papers and I looked over and was just like, huh.” She shrugged and raised her eyebrows, smiling slightly.

“And then when she noticed, she was like, Mr. Morrison, there’s water on my work! And he just told her to clean it up and she was like, but I didn’t do it! And he was just like, well you still have to clean it up, and she got so annoyed. I just looked over and was like hmph, serves her right!” She looked over at me and smirked, cookie crumbs dancing on her lips.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re nice.”

“Hey, she deserved it! Do you know how annoying it is when she leaves no elbow room for me and when she keeps copying my work and borrowing my things?”

“Ok, ok, yeah I guess she is a jerk.”

What I didn’t tell her was that she could be a bit of a jerk too, and I wondered how that had happened. She was the water bottle that was occasionally and very gently dripping onto the things that didn’t really matter. She didn’t notice and probably would never notice until the water ran dry and when it was too late to salvage everything.

As I step back a little, I realize that she is really no different from me, and then I step back a little further still, and see my parents neglecting the leaks in the water bottle that they bought themselves, and poking new holes where there were none before.

“Dad,” I said one day, “you know, it’s not that I don’t want to listen to you, it’s just that I’m always so overwhelmed by everything these days and I’m super stressed out and it’d be nice if you could stop yelling at everything I do.”

Dad takes a breath, too quickly, and I brace myself in the backseat of the car. “Ok, but I’m only telling you to do the things you need to do. I tell you over and over again and you don’t even listen, so I’m only going to — “

I interject; it’s the only way I can speak. “Yeah, you keep telling me to do the same things over and over again and I’m not listening, so maybe you should try a new method. Has it ever occurred to you that what you’re doing is just not working?”

My sister is quiet in the seat beside me but I know she’s listening and I know that she agrees with me. After all, I was the one who moulded her mind.

“I’m only yelling at you because you don’t listen. It’s the only way I can make you do things. Your mom and I, we just want what’s best for you two, that’s why we put in so much effort to make sure you do the things you should be doing.”

I don’t know how to put my thoughts into intelligible words and he doesn’t understand English and I’m so frustrated that tears are welling in my eyes but I try again with broken phrases and all the wrong words. “Dad, no. We’re already so stressed out from school and everything; we don’t need you yelling at us too, and — “

“We’re not trying to make you feel bad! We’re only yelling at you so that you would listen — “

“Dad, can you listen to me for once?” I take a shaky breath and I can’t find the right words anymore so I continue in English in hopes that he’ll catch the gist. “You keep repeating yourself and we get it, we get what you want us to do, but sometimes it’s just so hard for us to do everything right, and we know that we need to sleep earlier and clean our rooms and do our homework, we know that, and we’re trying, we really are, but it’s just so hard to do it with you nagging at us constantly and making us feel worse about the things we already feel bad about.”

Dad is quiet for a second longer than he usually is. “Well if you don’t want us to be yelling at you, then what do you want us to do? You’re just going to avoid doing all those things you should be doing if we don’t say anything about it.”

His question takes me by surprise. I am not used to him asking for my opinion. “Well…uh…you can be more encouraging, you know…” I trail off and look to the window, where trees and road streak past, blurred into one by my tears.

“Ok, fine. We’ll stop yelling at you, see if you can behave better.”

The conversation is over but I still don’t think he understands. I only wish, at least, that we could converse freely in the same language without difficulty. But even then, I don’t think he would ever understand.

They speak at me like I’m a child because I talk to them like a child so that they can understand what I’m saying. I only wish they knew how articulate I can be, how deeply my thoughts actually run, and how much I think about things. I only wish they knew me.

Of course, they never did stop their nagging and it was all I could ever do to keep from pulling out my hair as they screamed at me to do the things I knew I should be doing but couldn’t do because I was so riddled with anxiety about all the things that seemed to be crashing down on me all at once and all I ever wanted was a break from everything but I couldn’t take breaks, not with them around and not with my anxiety around.

Sometimes, I step back even further and realize that I am just so incredibly self-centred. I spend so long complaining to myself about how they never listen to me, how they never try to understand me, how they never have conversations with me, how they never show me any gratitude, how they never praise me, how they never encourage me. It had never really occurred to me that I should have been doing all those things for them, my own parents, who work so hard and who are also trying like I am. Even when I do realize though, my stubbornness sets in and I decide that they’re older, and that they should being treating me better in the first place.

It’s worrying how, as a human being with feelings and emotions and anxieties and frustrations, that I can fail to see the fragile human beings that are in my parents as well.

Over time, we’ve become so trapped in our own bubbles that we stopped reaching out and stopped making connections with each other. The feeble threads that had once held this family together became so weak that they were starting to snap one by one, and as the fabric of our intertwined lives unravelled, the house became colder and colder, both figuratively and literally, for some reason.

I couldn’t help but to stare, mesmerized, as the threads snapped all around me. I wanted so badly to pick up the pieces and tie them back together but I couldn’t. Just like a house that was turning grey, like water leaking from a water bottle, like my mind that was rigid from stubbornness, it couldn’t be reversed. But perhaps we can move, we can refill the water bottle, we can open our minds to new possibilities.

Next January we’ll be living in a new house. Maybe this is all it will take for us to find a little bit of what we lost. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because we’re all only human and we don’t need to have everything; we don’t need to prove anything.