So.  my parents.  yeah.  total domestic violence situation, they've been divorced for about 5 or 6 years now, and they haven't spoken to each other at all ever since.  a lot of the arrangements of giving my dad his things afterwards was done by me, i basically took over everything, took care of everything, my mom like…disappeared for a couple years, then moved out. [br][br]

okay well yeah boohoo vrinda, that's not the point though – the point is: tomorrow is my son's 2nd birthday.  and my parents will both be there.  at the same time.  for the first time in 5 or 6 years.  and i am starting to freak out. [br][br]

the fact is, it's not really anything to do with me, it's them, right?  yet i can't help but panic over it anyway.  i guess because they're my parents, and it's at my house, so it feels like it's my problem.  the first meeting was going to be at our wedding in november, but there was a lot of anxiety over that as well, in every corner, because, as my dad put it, 'it would be terrible to overcast a day of joy and love with feelings of horrible awkwardness' (or something to that effect).  which i really appreciated, especially coming from him because he's always been terrible at emoting, calls it 'sentimental' like that's an insult.  my mom was offended by george and me worrying about them at the wedding, as if we were accusing her of going to start something at the event.  well, honestly, i wouldn't put it past her sometimes, even if it weren't on purpose, and she didn't talk about him in a way that inspired great hope in either of us.  but that's another story.  or maybe it's not.  i mean…tomorrow….[br][br]

so she was meant to be out of town this weekend, so i invited my dad because he's missed every family gathering ever, due to this not talking to each other business, and then my mom says actually she'll be around and i'm like well dad's coming, and so she thought about it and decided to go along with my dad's suggestion that they meet before the wedding, because he is sick of all this doublebooking of family gatherings – so she suggested they both attend.  so this is what's happening. [br][br]

and george and i were both glad for it at the time of it being arranged.  and his dad was like, 'oh that'll be good' with this smile on his face like he knows 'good' isn't the word I'D personally use first.  oh yeah, george's parents haven't met my dad yet, either, due to all this crap.  we've been together 4.5 years and they don't even know my dad.  [br][br]

what a mess.  the thing is, though…i mean it's easy to think oh well how childish of my mom to have not spoken to him again blah blah, but no, try to remember, domestic violence, i mean i'm asking her to sit in a room again and make nice with the man who, on several occasions, nearly murdered her.  actually, i'm grateful to my mom for being even as understanding as she has been about me finding a way over the years to re-establish a connection with him and develop a relationship with him, because it really wasn't easy, i mean i tried the whole never speaking to him again thing for over a year and it just didn't work out because, at the end of the day, he's my dad, and okay 25% of the time he was totally insane, but the other 75% of the time he was one of my best friends, and i know full well why my mom didn't divorce him sooner, it was because that's a really hard situation to make any sense of, it's hard to make decisions, it's hard to walk away from someone who, the other part of the time, is so much the person you love, you couldn't stand to leave them.  and since she and i did finally kick him out, he's changed a hell of a lot.  he suddenly talks more to me, opens up more, shares things, emotes more, i can finally tell he loves me and is interested in me again.  and i'm old enough now to look over his own parental history and see how abused he was, physically and emotionally, all his life, how abandoned he was, how completely sick and insane both his parents have always been, and i can hear the remorse in his voice now, the way he thinks he'll never really be happy because he believes in karma and why should he ever be happy after all the hurt he's caused…it's genuine repentance, so how can i hate him all my life?  so i am grateful to my mother for understanding that, and not holding it against me. [br][br]

so i'm just totally confused about tomorrow, and i guess it's the beginning of the road to (hopefully) resolution of an old chapter in our lives.  but before you get to that resolution, there tends to be much pain.  like spring cleaning – you have to first take out all the old stuff and throw it all over the floor to see what you have, then organise it all into piles and work out what's to be thrown out, given to charity, rediscovered, kept, and what is going back in boxes because you know you don't need them but you're not quite ready to get rid of them yet.  so i'm kinda thinking, all sorts of emotions are going to come out first, before they can be sorted, reorganised, and dealt with.  so fingers crossed, eventually this will lead to something good, but for now?  i'm petrified.  i might spend the whole day in the kitchen baking cakes.  thank goodness there will be other people there to talk to my parents because…well i sure won't know how to. [br][br]

ugh and that's another thing!  they'll see, now, how i talk to each of them.  except they won't, because i'll be totally awkward and stilted, i'm sure.  it's so predictable.  i'm already planning the distractions to save me.  like, we got percy a big slide and swing for the back garden, so i'm planning don't show it to him until everyone is there, because then i can busy myself with putting it all together – genius!  or cleaning.  yeah.  i can easily see myself going on an obsessive cleaning spree tomorrow.