The Parents Are To Blame

I was working from home today and found myself participating in a conference call from the inside of a dark closet.

My office, you see, was too noisy. So was my living room, kitchen, and every other room in my apartment. The noise was coming from a young woman outside banging on the door to the building and screaming.

I couldn't really make out what she was saying, and I didn't have the attention span to try because I was busy discussing the finer points of vendor management with co-workers on the other end of the phone.

When my call ended I peered out the window to find my landlord and his wife engaged in a rather lively... um... "conversation" with the aforementioned young lady and someone I later discovered to be her mother.

"I WANT TO TALK TO MY FATHER!! HE WON'T ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE AND I KNOW HE'S LIVING HERE!"

"Look, you can't come around here yelling and banging on the door, telling me to go fuck myself..."

Kayla and Robin were out for a walk, so I leashed up the dog and went outside myself. The girl was waving a picture and a bunch of papers around, she and her mother were yelling at my landlord, and my landlord was doing an impressive job calmly explaining to them that whatever their beef with his tenant, they are not doing themselves any good yelling like lunatics. At one point he said, "Look, I got a lady with a baby living here and you're out here screaming."

Since I'm the lady with a baby he was talking about, I turned and looked their way, at which point the girl decided to start yelling at me.

"THIS IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!"

"Actually, you're making it my business. This is my apartment right here."

"Well, this conversation is none of your business."

"Well then maybe you should be having it at your own home and not mine."

Her mother jumped in. "I'm sorry about that and for disturbing you and your baby, and I'll take it away from here, but now you can walk away because this is a private conversation."

My blood started to boil as I scrambled for a polite way to tell her that she was having her "private conversation" at about 104 decibels in public, and that I have more of a right to be standing here than she did, and that I will NOT walk away, and she and her skank daughter are welcome to try to make me. Then I remembered that my precious Treefrog was on her way back home and decided that I'd rather greet her calmly from inside the apartment than have her find me in the middle of beating some strage woman senseless and have to stop and wipe the blood and bone fragments from my hands and face before giving her a kiss hello.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I smiled and went back inside.

My daughter has done more just by existing to make me a better, calmer, more rational person than any self-determination, introspection, and therapy my entire life before her birth. That said, I have to wonder how gigantic a piece of shit the mother I encountered today must have been before the birth of her daughter if she is still this much of an asshole today.

As for the young lady who started this whole mess-- I pity her. She was young, mid 20's at best, possibly even as young as 17 or 18. Her father is obviously an asshole (won't answer his daughter's calls??) and her mother is probably the one who trained her to handle the situation in the most counter-productive, obnoxious way possible.

At the same time, I see a little bit of myself in her. There have been times when I tried to "handle" a situation by screaming and threatening my way through it, and I'm sometimes tempted to do things that way today. Oh, how I would have loved to leap across the conference table and gauge the eyes out of a condescending colleague last week... but that's another story. The point is, I was fortunate enough to have enough good influences in my life to get past the aggression-is-best mentality and eventually become a relatively mature, well-balanced person who can actually walk away from a senseless fight.

My goal is to be a good enough, strong enough influence in my daughter's life that she never feels the need to scream mindlessly at the empty apartment of someone who wronged her.

As goals go, not too ambitious, I hope.