Family: You Can't Kill Them

Last night at dinner was absolutely ridiculous. To understand why I honestly can't believe the sequence of events that occurred at dinner, you will have to briefly hear about one of my "projects" of the last couple of weeks. My dad is a doc, an OB/GYN at that, and he currently teaches residents and med students through a prominent hospital here in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Well, supposedly he has some major lecture on preterm labor that he has to give at one of the DO (Doctor of Osteopathy) schools in the area. So, what does that mean for me? It means that my free moments in the last couple of weeks have been spent typing about preeclampsia and vaginosis and other really sick words. (I don't really know what they mean, and I'm pretty sure I don't really want to know what they mean. They give word pictures that I have no interest in ever seeing.) Anyway, finally, two nights ago I finished his powerpoint presentation at like 3:30am. (It feels like I can't ever fall asleep so I figured I'd do something "productive" with my time and learn a few more things about PTL--that's the acronym for Pre Term Labor, if you wanted to know.) So yeah, there are 75 slides. 75! You type 75 slides about vaginosis and see how defiled you feel! ...calming down now....

So I finish the last of the slides and am feeling pretty dang good about it. I want to tell my dad so I can hear what a wonderful boy I am and just to keep the poor man from blowing a gasket about how much more work there still is to do. So at dinner last night I tell him that I finished the slides. He replies without even looking at me, "Good. We're not done yet." I ignore the obvious second part of his comment, knowing that my dad will probably change something on all 75 of those slides before the lecture next week, and I try another route: I let him know how much work I had done for him. "There were 75 slides, dad." His trite reply: "Wow." I sat there shoveling as much of my sweet and sour chicken into my mouth as I possibly could so that I didn't hurl my fork across the table like a Chinese star hoping to stick him in the juggular. All he could say was "wow"!?! I was pissed. When I couldn't take it anymore, I finally said to him, "All I wanted you to say was thank you. That's all I wanted. Why is that so hard?" After many long seconds of quiet, dumbfoundedly he responds, "We're not done yet." Let's just say that I wanted to give the old man a severe case of vaginosis on the spot. I couldn't believe that he honestly would not say thank you. I don't remember much more of the conversation except that he started shaking his head at me in oh-so-obvious disbelief that I was making a big deal about this, and while shaking his head, he finally allowed the weakest "thank you" ever to slip out of his mouth. I would have rather he not said it at that point. But, hey, it figures...right?

So this little peach of a story leads me to this question: Why is it so hard to be nice to your family? I'm not saying that my dad is the only perpetrator of such nonsense, it's just a very fresh story and it's easier to point a finger at him than share excessive amounts of my own dirty laundry over the the world wide web. Family: you can't kill them. With that understood, what is it about family that makes them so hard to love? I know that my dad was probably up all night delivering babies and praying against PTL and preeclampsia, but this is a regular phenomenon in families, isn't it? Why? What is it about family that makes them so hard to love?