It’s rare to wake up in my parents’ house and feel warm. Because the house is old and has no insulation, it’s constantly at least 10 degrees below what we consider “room temperature,” if even that. My parents have gotten so used to it that when a room actually is 68 degrees, they think it’s hot. But what has changed over the last year is that my mom has actually felt more and more cold, so they’ve finally been taking advantage of the central heat they installed years ago. I’ve been waking up the last two days feeling warm and cozy, even after I remove my bed covers and expose my arms to the world outside my bed. This felt very unusual and not “normal” for this house.

This momentarily made me angry this morning, though, as I remember Ed used to complain constantly about how cold the house was. Ed’s needs were never taken seriously, so our dad would reject it when Ed would say he wanted to turn the heat on. “Go put on a sweater!” our dad would yell. Then there would be the passive aggressive turn-on, turn-off battle between Ed and my dad. It really was so childish that it was embarrassing to witness. Ed would turn the heat on. Dad would complain and say no heat was needed (mainly because he didn’t want to spend the money on the heat. Isn’t money the main reason to not do most things in life?) and flip the switch off. Ed would go back and turn it on. The battle would ensue for as long as the two of them were home together. Or, occasionally I would insist the heat should be on, as I usually tried to side with Ed, and our dad would begrudgingly leave it on until he felt the house was warm enough, and then switch it off. Unfortunately, that never worked out because this house refuses to retain heat, so the house would just get cold again.

If you cannot be warm and comfortable in your own home, where are you supposed to be comfortable? Or in this case, Ed was never treated like he was a true, worthy part of this house, so his comfort was disregarded and ignored. And now because he’s dead, he’s never coming back to enjoy this warmth that I now have a chance to wake up to here.

In the late morning today, I sat in the Intercontinental hotel lounge while working, waiting for my parents to pick me up. My mom was hell bent on taking me to one of her favorite Vietnamese restaurants in the Tenderloin, which I admit is good, but is on the dodgiest street and has questionable sanitation based on the latest San Francisco health violations report. Then, we’d eventually go home to that cold house on the hill in the Richmond which I have so many negative associations with; “home sweet home,” as some would call it.

This is what I am used to now, as my friend marveled yesterday, a life of four- to five-star hotels, travel, and most importantly… freedom; freedom from having every action I do get scrutinized and criticized, freedom from being told that my showers are too long or that I’m using too much toilet paper or that the brownies I made are too sweet and bad for my parents’ health (even when they asked me to make them). Life now is a strong contrast to what it used to be while living under their roof and their senseless, suffocating, and irrational rules. My “normal” now is vastly different from my “normal” as a child growing up in this house.

That’s why it’s always so frustrating and embarrassing every time I come home and get reminded endlessly of all the insipid things that happen in this house: the constant food waste because they both insist on cooking enough food for 6-8 people when it’s just the two of them; the shower head that won’t adjust to pull down because my dad is too cheap to get a removable shower head installed, the kitchen that was technically expanded but never fully finished because he decided to put the project on hold.. for the last seven years; the piles of junk he’s accumulated from ex-tenants who never cleared out their apartments (that he insists on bringing home) and the hoarding from Craigslist; the constant sorting of “compost waste” from paper from plastic as what appears to be a daily hobby, or in my eyes, a complete and stupid waste of time; my parents eating dinner “together” while my father sits at his computer like a child and watches YouTube videos while my mother actually sits at the table eating by herself. Other than the carpet that my mother had installed 17 years ago and some cheap plastic “dressers” in the two bedrooms, this house is almost exactly like what it was when my dad was a teenager; slightly dilapidated, completely free from renovation, and freezing as hell. He never moved out of his parents’ house. This house is pretty much exactly the same as then.

But this is what is “normal” to them. It’s “normal” for them to sit like that at the dinner table. It’s normal to have a peeling kitchen counter when they could afford to have it replaced. It’s normal for them to hoard junk so that beds and chairs are no longer places where you can sit or lie down without clearing everything off them for five minutes.

My version of “normal” was once that, but even as a young child, I knew so many things here were not normal. I know that the “normal” I have in my mind now will never, ever be achievable in this house with them. Ed tried to believe he could somehow get there, and he realized at the end of his life it was impossible. The only way to have a “normal” life is to separate myself from all this as much as possible.

Thank God Chris comes here for work, otherwise I’d have zero buffer and zero normalcy.

At the end of yesterday’s engagement party in a suburban Melbourne park, Chris and I got into the car to find that the car would not start. Even the side-view mirrors, which usually turned all the way out when you unlocked the doors, only turned out half way when I pressed the button. Fortunately, we weren’t too far away from home, and Chris’s parents hadn’t taken off yet and called for roadside support. We found out that the battery had died, which we suspected, and that while typical batteries for this type of car last only four years, Chris’s mother (who owns this vehicle) had this battery for going on seven years now. So, it was just lucky for all of us that this happened near home and with the family present, and not at a critical time for transportation needs. This morning, Chris’s dad called Lexus to come to the house to replace the battery, and everything now is as good as new.

As Chris’s dad explained all of this to me, he spoke with a smile, saying how happy he was that it happened yesterday with everyone present, that this was a blessing in disguise and how fortunate the car was to have had a battery that lasted seven years and not just four. The entire time as he is speaking, I am standing there slightly in awe, again wondering what would have happened if the same situation happened in my own family. It’s hard to get away from it, but I always have these “what if that happened in my family?” thoughts when things go slightly awry in Chris’s family.

In my own family, I could imagine how the scene would have been very different. Even in the calmest situations, my family manages to create tension and stress where it doesn’t even exist. So when real problems arise, it’s literally like hell breaking loose.

If it were me driving my dad’s car (I got shudders thinking about that), I’d be asked… did you make sure to shut off the headlights or running lights (well, that’s irrelevant in this case because with this model, the lights shut off automatically when you shut off the engine)? Did you have the AC going too much? What other bad things could you possibly have done to have caused this to happen? Why did you not see this coming? Did you have anything plugged into the car that could have drained the battery? All of this would be yelled in an accusatory tone. In other words, all of this is your fault, and you caused this to happen. In my family, someone is always to be blamed, and it’s never my parents. It’s always Ed or me. And now that Ed is gone, it’s pretty much always me.

Chris’s cousin and his wife have just had their third baby boy. We received the news via email two days ago, and some photos have been shared over email and our secret family Facebook group. The outpouring of congratulations and happy sentiments were quick to be shared.

It’s always amusing to think of how family news is shared in Chris’s family vs. my family. In Chris’s family, people literally scream, shout, and burst into happy dances. In my family, people either have no reaction or when they do have some reaction, it tends to either be indifferent or negative. When I got engaged, there was very little reaction outside of my aunts and uncle – even that was quite muted. My parents barely even reacted, and my mom asked me later, “Are you sure?” Two out of four cousins didn’t even respond to my email because they didn’t care. When my cousin’s first and only baby was born four years ago, his own brother didn’t even text, call, or email to congratulate him. When confronted about it two weeks later, he said he was “busy.”

I wonder what it would be like when I get pregnant and share the news. Maybe I won’t even share it with my extended family at all and just let them know after the baby is born. It’s not like they truly care anyway, so what difference would it make?