tell 'em why you mad son

Unresolved: (Merriam Webster) Not yet settled or decided.

(Urban Dictionary) Unresolvable* The Obamacare website. The biggest piece of shit website in the whole wide world. Every page that you try to visit on this piece of crap website comes up with an error message that says “unresolvable”. Only the government could come up with a site that no one ever will be able to fix.

*Original word was not available for definition. 

 

I think the older we get, the more certain unresolved issues really affect you. Sure, some things we are eventually able to just let go of, but some issues, if left unresolved, can cause a big clusterfuck in your life. Case in point:

Last year my father and I went down to Tampa to visit my grandmother for Mother’s Day. Last year was extra special because my grandmother’s 85th birthday happened to fall on Mother’s Day. Visits to Tampa are always pretty stressful because no one on my father’s side of the family gets along. I mean no one. You need an NCAA bracket in order to keep track of who is not talking to who.

Anyway, the plan was to have a Mother’s Day BBQ at one of my aunt’s houses. 26 people were going to be there so needless to say, there needed a large amount of food. The night before, my father, aunts, and uncles got together to determine how much food they would need and how it was going to be paid for. All of them decided to just split the cost of the food, which was no big deal.

Back to the day of the bbq, Mother’s Day. Everything started off great. The food had been purchased and my father was on the grill. Everyone was sitting around, enjoying the day and waiting for the food to be prepared. Then enters trouble. One of my uncles arrives with his family, plus five additional people. The fact that my uncle brought extra people was not the issue. It was what the extra people did that later became an issue.

My uncle and ALL of his guests were the last to arrive to the Mother’s Day bbq. The extra guest included my uncle’s wife, her twin daughters, and both of their boyfriends. They were in addition to my uncle and his three boys. So all together, my uncle’s crew totaled nine people.

The food was not ready yet, it was still being cooked. My father was taking meat off the grill as it was getting done so that he could make room for other food that needed to be cooked. Not even ten minutes after their arrivals, my uncle’s wife, her twins, and their boyfriends began grabbing plates and loading them up with food even after multiple people told them that the food was not done and no one was eating yet. Not only did they grab plates before it was time to eat, they also PILED the food onto the plates. I’m talking three burgers and hotdogs at one time. Now, in case you forgot, we already had a party of 26 people that needed to eat. In a normal setting, common curtesy dictates that you start off with only one serving until everyone has been served. Then if there is extra, you can help yourself.

As soon as my father and another cousin of mine caught wind of this, all hell broke loose. I remember watching the twins and their boyfriends pack their plates while thinking to myself, “This is so rude. Not only do extra people come over here, empty handed, but they come and eat everything in site, before even my grandmother gets a plate. This is about to start a fight.” Sure enough, as the Impatient Five sat down to begin eating, World War III is going on outside by the grill. My cousin and my father had confronted my uncle about his Hungry Hungry Hippo add-ons and how he now needed to contribute more money to replace the food that they ate up. What should have been a simple and short two-minute argument about food turned into an all out altercation about shit nobody cared about that happened 40+ years ago.

All of a sudden I hear people calling me outside and telling me to come and get my father. When I step outside all I see is a crowd of people gathered around two over 50-year-old mean standing in each other’s face, screaming and yelling, fat belly to fat belly. My uncle is screaming at my dad about stuff he did when they were kids, my cousin is on the sidelines yelling at my uncle about all the times he had paid for his kid’s plane tickets to Florida, and my father is telling my uncle how he’s never liked his greedy wife.

To this day I’m still trying to figure out how things escalated so quickly. Remember at the beginning of this post when I said it was hard to keep track of who wasn’t talking to who? Well part of that reason is because my father and his siblings have held on to so many things that happened to them when they were kids and were never able to move on from it. When you hold on to things for so long and never resolve them, your feelings about those issues tend to manifest themselves at inappropriate times in inappropriate ways. Your emotions seem to just “come out of no where”, even though they really aren’t coming out of nowhere. One minute you can be playing a game of cards with friend and the next minute you’re punching a hole in the wall because of a joke that hurt your feelings six months ago. It’s no good to you to continue to hold in your feelings, especially when they are negative. As hard as it might be, it’s usually better to be honest and express (verbally) if something is upsetting you sooner than later. The longer you hold things in, the more it consumes you and the longer you carry around negative energy.

Unfortunately, my uncle left the Mother’s Day bbq (not without threatening to kill everybody) yet again with issues unresolved with my father. He has since stopped speaking to everyone in the family. My father still gets upset about things from his childhood to this day and it’s extremely unproductive. I mean look what it cost him, a relationship with his brother. And my father still ended up coming out of his own pocket to replace the food. I bet he brings that up in the next family argument…….