Anxiety Attack

My dad is sleeping over at our house tonight. My dad.

For other people that sentence is fairly innocuous. My co-workers certainly think its no big deal. But I do. It's a big deal; a big nerve-wracking one. And no, he's not a rapist, just so we're clear on that.



My dad is sleeping over at our house tonight so he can help my mom and me get a cheque we need that only he can claim. (If you'd worked in insurance like I did at one point, you'd understand.) My mom's at work, she's constantly on the night shift her days off don't fall on weekdays for this month, so I'm not really worried about that happening, not even if she doesn't have work.

And I'm not scared of him either. I'm scared of what I might or might not do to him.

The last time we saw each other was when his bestfriend's dad passed away, which, according to my really anxious brain, was about 2 years ago. We were amiable, we talked, we joked, we made fun of other people together. Thing is, since that time, I've come to realize just how angry I am at him, not for what he's done to us but for what he keeps on doing to himself.

You'd expect a man in his mid-fifties would've at least reconsidered his life and tried to see the error of his ways. Tried. Which apparently he didn't. And it's infuriating how he seems to think that I'm actually okay that he's my father and that he's nothing short of a bastard. hard words to use on your own fathe, but there, I said it. Not very Christian of me, I know.

Which is exactly why I'm worried about tonight, when I have to have at least a kind of civil conversation with him. In what passes for a normal day I avoid standing around people like him, much less talking! I don't know what I might do. I might scream at him, cuss (I never do, but then, never say never!), or, heaven forbid, actually throw him out on the street. All of which will do nothing to change him and everything to shatter what little self-respect I have left.

And it doesn't help when people around pretend they understand when they actually don't.

Excuse me, I have to go and punch somebody now.

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UPDATE:
I read this post again and realized I misspelled a couple of words and forgot to put in punctuation marks where I should have. That was how agitated I was at the time.

Anyway, I didn't do anything. Now that I think about it, I can't say I did the right thing.