(I'm reposting this from my blog, so excuse the verbosity)
My housemate's mother has been staying with us for the past 3 weeks. Though a messy cook, she has fixed things around the house, taught me a couple of dishes, and generally been very pleasant to be around.
My housemate never asked my permission for his mother to stay, and to be fair, I have had some misgivings about the fact that later this year she will be coming to stay, in fact, for a year. However, things had gone quite well, and my fears were allayed.
I have had supplementary exams recently, and through that period of studying for them, I have been doing my dishes less frequently than usual (every 1-2 days or so), have not had time to clean properly (to be fair, no-one else in this house has cleaned either) and been waking at odd hours to cook.
Housemate's mother has mentioned a few times that my cooking in the middle of the night has disturbed her. I have been trying to make such activities as quiet as possible as a result, so as not to wake her. While I have done almost all my dishes, the occasional dish appears to have been done by someone else.
I was walking home late tonight thinking about how nice it was to have her with us for a change, and how I really should thank her again for fixing up random things in the house, like a couple of cupboard hinges, a saucepan handle that I accidentally broke (saucepan still useable however) and a fuse that I did not have time to replace in time.
I came home, fixed a quick snack (being careful to close the door to the kitchen), then retired to my room. I received a very unexpected call from someone, and was in the process of telling him that I was off to bed at 2am, when...
In storms Mrs XYZ into my room.
For at least half an hour she yells and yells at me about the following, over and over again:
- How I am a horrible inconsiderate person lose all my friends eventually because I am such a horrible inconsiderate fuckwit who never thinks about anyone but herself because she is such a selfish bitch and
- How one day I will understand what she is saying now and thank her for her advice
Half an hour.
I felt pretty bad about all of this, so after letting her shout at me for a while, I decided to interrupt her and try to apologise. It was 2:30am after all. So I said, and sincerely, that I was very sorry that I had had such an effect on her and that I did not realise that I had disrupted her to this extent and that I had really appreciated her being here and that I had been about to thank her for all that she did here. All of which were true.
She kept going with her rant.
I started bawling my eyes out. I sobbed and sobbed. The stress of trying to help other people all of last semester, of having my house fall apart, of having to move, of having university go to shit, of very bad lovelife matters, of failing my semester, of being in debt, of not getting a job where I wanted and having to leave Melbourne, of horrible things happening to people close to me, of supplementary exams, of feeling simultaneously loved and unloved, of feeling like my ENTIRE LIFE HAD FALLEN APART...
And she kept going.
At this point I felt like the only words popping into head were: "This is my house. THIS IS MY HOUSE. I pay rent. YOU DO NOT. THIS IS MY KITCHEN."
She only stopped and left when I said "I will make sure this never happens again".
I am pretty bloody angry now.
This is my house. And my housemate's house. But it is not HER house. If I was staying with anyone, even my CHILD, and even IF my sleep was being disturbed every other night, I would NEVER do what she did. The things she was saying... were things so bloody rude that if ANYONE ELSE EVER did that to me, I think I would be quite justified in insisting that they never enter my house again.
I NEVER ASKED HER TO DO MY DISHES OR FIX THE HOUSE OR NOT WATCH TV OR ANY OF THOSE "WONDERFUL" "CONSIDERATE" THINGS SHE WAS DOING FOR ME. AND YET I ALWAYS, AL...
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