What has made you angry this week?

So I decided for this year I am finishing a 300 prompt journal I bought a couple of years ago. A goal I have for 2024 is to also publish at least one entry on Vocal every single day. These prompts will be one of those posts.

This prompt was filled out on January 8th 2021. I felt like it would be appropriate to use this as my first journal post on vocal since the very same person has yet again made me angry.

Journal Prompt: What has made you angry this week?

Angry is an emotion I don't like feeling, but this week the one person who often makes me feel the most angry did it again.

Who?

My Father in law, my husband's dead beat dad.

The epitome of a dead beat dad actually.

How?

Sticking his nose into our business and talking about what goes on in our home to other people. Trying to cause drama in my house as usual.

Angry is an understatement of how I feel towards him. That man makes me see red!

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Now to present day. Almost three years later. Is he still ticking me off?

Why yes, yes he is.

How this time?

Well apparently I am a bitch who turned his son against him. I am the reason his son didn't call him on New Year's eve.

I know you all are saying, "Well why did he not call him on New Years? Why does his father think you are a bitch?"

I mean maybe I am a bitch.

Maybe I take being a wife of almost 20 years pretty damn seriously and when I see a toxic person, pouring their radioactive waste out on my family, I stand up to it. Life is short, I won't live with toxic waste.

Little backstory on me, I am the middle child of a retired military man. My entire personality has been shaped by being an overly observant shadow. I watched while people overlooked me.

I haven't stopped being that way in my adult life. I am still very much invisible. Very much the shadow in a room, that you don't see until the light is too bright and you need some shade.

I have watched my husband's father be the person he is for 18 years. There has been no change. He is a dead beat dad and an even worse grandfather.

It went from my husband being the little boy on the porch watching his father drive by and turn his head when he saw him, to my children seeing their grandfather be so completely absorbed in himself that he knows nothing about them.

I have listened to him call them "damn kids" and blame them for my husband not running at his beck and call. I have had him sit at my table and complain about his own partner while she had cancer.

And then watched him mope when I wouldn't allow him to shove his feet under my table and live with us.

So if I have kept my husband from his father then maybe it was for the best. Because my husband would never turn his head to his children. He would never call his son's wife a bitch.

But what my father in law doesn't realize, is that if he really and truly knew his own son, he would know that no one, not even a bitching wife, can make my husband do anything or turn away from anyone.

We make our own decisions about people and then we come together as a couple to make sure that person is allowed around our children and our home. We work together.

And if that makes him angry....

Well maybe he needs to journal about it too.

Writing is therapeutic! Maybe he can learn to keep his negative emotions to himself.