Honor Your Parents

One of the Ten Commandments listed in the bible is – infuriatingly – to unconditionally honor your parents. God expects that for the sake of virtue, as unworthy of honor a parent can be, his son will manage to delude himself and emulate artificial respect for that sordid creature.

I’ve never had a great relationship with my father. From the pits of my memory, I can recall having always favored my mother greatly over that man. But I also recall ancient days when I still had remote bits of love for him - like I actually enjoyed his presence. Now that love has been replaced by a nauseating feeling of disgust for my kin, and a bitter longing for that man to disappear from my life.

Over the past years, I have grown to feel underappreciated. My overall great academic life, talents in music, and indisputable practicalities for this household has been left unheeded for him. Instead, he criticizes me for what he considers to be fatal imperfections.

You see, I am the complete opposite of him. Unlike him, who is social, aesthetically distasteful, sickeningly inartistic, ancient, mathematically adept, and stingy, I am socially inept, aesthetically tasteful, musical, well-informed, mathematically average, and capable of enjoying luxuries. Somehow, the man expects his son to be a reincarnation of him – for his choleric personality requires everything to agree with him. And so, with my being the complete opposite of his wishes for a son, he expresses his disappointment with endless, unjustified, moronic denigration.

Worse of all, he blatantly displays his severe incompetence as a parent by comparing me with my sister – who he worships as if she is godsend, despite her clearly obvious faults. It’s probably because she’s more like him – musically inept, mathematically-inclined, and interested in sports – than I am. Ironically, even she, who fortunately spends most of her time away from him, can’t stand him.

When treated with endless belittlement, a person would either be saddened or annoyed. The latter applies to me, because among many things, the only trait I share with him is stubbornness. Over the years, he has become more and more of a nuisance – probably because over the years, he sees more and more that I am unlike him. So now, I avoid seeing his gorilla-like face in dread of the itching irritation I experience whenever I argue with him. And whenever I am stuck in an argument with him in the car, I deafen myself with my iPod and my earphones – my lifesavers – and allow him to express his parental ineptitude to himself.

I suppose, like Okonkwo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the man deserves some sympathy. His son never turned out to be the way he quite wanted him to be, and the daughter he is so proud of doesn’t share mutual feelings for him. But I am not sympathetic for that incubus of familial calamity. Desensitized, I have been, by the ceaseless infuriation that man had caused me.

I know he loves me, but like my sister, those feelings aren’t mutual. Oh, the horror.

If only I was witless enough to be tolerant of lunacy, then we could be one happy, harmonious family. How unfortunate it is that I am not; that my honor for him is nonexistent; that I am stuck in this spiraling deathtrap of familial discord.