The Best Things You've Learned From Your Parents

That family is overrated.

More from my mother than my father. I was aware of my father's shortcomings but he acknowledges them himself and doesn't hold any illusions about infallible moral rectitude or anything.

My mother, on the other hand, has been spiralling downward ever since she remarried and it's truly beginning to grate on my nerves. She's finding religion again and now her husband (ex-seminarian AND ex-military, how's that for a recipe for self-righteousness) has her all but completely brainwashed into believing in his warped worldview wherein her "failure" to take my brother and myself to church as we were growing up represents a serious failure on her part as a human being. It's sick watching what he's doing to her mind but sicker still to hear her parrot it and go right along with it. He actually once told me that he and I were at war, but that it was "a moral war" and that he couldn't possibly lose. How she can possibly defend him to me, in anything he does, after that episode is beyond me.

But I've stopped caring. She knows he's on a one-strike system wherein after his first fuckup, he is never again permitted in my home and that I'll call the police on sight if I see him. Scorched-earth? Maybe, but like I said, I've stopped caring. My brother goes off to college in another year and I'm confident I'll be able to maintain my stellar relationship with him, especially when he's no longer stuck sharing a house with the two of them.

I'd probably have a lot of bad things to say about my father too, but since he moved out to PA (we're in Chicago) the lack of day-to-day contact makes things much easier. I'm sure a lot of it is my borderline-LeHah level of disagreeability that can sometimes exhibit itself (less here than in real life), but you can't tell me that you don't get jaded when your mother (formerly the godlike, infallible, ultimately reliable paragon of stability in your young eyes) marries a complete and utter cocksucker and is totally blind to the error she's made.

Oh, but they were old high school sweethearts, reunited in their hometown. So that makes it all okay or something. Whatever.

Edit: Oh, wait, it says "best" things. Ummmmmm...get back to you on that?

How ya doing, buddy?