minefield

I made a mistake a week ago, although I maintain it was a good idea in principle. My father and his wife have constant battles about… well, everything, honestly, but specifically around the holidays as to whether she is being appropriately acknowledged. It doesn’t help that both of their birthdays fall in the holidays, requiring many gifts and much ado.

Given my father still lives in the hospital and has limited options for shopping, I offered to help purchase and wrap any gifts for my step-mother’s Christmas and birthday, in part hoping to avoid some of the emotional blackmail stemming from her feeling under-appreciated, and in part to galvanize him to get something organized.

I do not like buying gifts for my step-mother, as she has returned 95% of what I have given her in the past ten years, and made snide comments about another 4%. One sweater she likes, because she sent me a still from a show as an idea and I tracked down the exact sweater.

I do not like shopping. At all.

I do like helping my dad, and there’s very little I can generally do that’s helpful, and I thought this would be a nice thing. I’m out doing Christmas shopping the next week anyway, it wouldn’t be hard to add some things to my list.

My father has exactly zero ideas as to what he would like to give his wife, and has, over the course of a week and four emails, given up on even trying to think of something. He has sent me a detailed list of things he “will never buy for her because she spends too much money in these categories over the year”.

I’m not going to come up with ideas for him, and I just explicitly told him so. I don’t think it’s my job. Definitely not my place. Also, I’m shit at giving her gifts, so I’m not the one you want in charge of this.

There is dysfunction here on several levels, and I was well aware of that before making the offer, but I genuinely did not think picking up a few and sundry things and wrapping them would be this stressful.