A Matter of Respect

Written on 8/10/08

While home visiting my family this past July, at one point I found myself in an unfamiliar local health food store with my parents. It was in this store that I told my father he was “annoying the hell out of me.” He was following me around, pointing things out while I was trying to focus on finding some fancy loose tea.

“And look over in there,” he’d say. “There’s even a little café where you can sit and eat. I’m pretty sure they have vegan options, too.”

“Cool, thanks! By the way, I’m actually looking for some loose tea called yerba maté. Do you know if they have that here?”

“No, I don’t know about that.”

So I figured I’d keep looking and maybe ask one of the employees once I found someone. This is entirely what I was focused on.

My father continued to interrupt as he shadowed me around the store.

“Dad, you’re annoying the hell out of me,” I finally said out of frustration.

I realized my mistake at once, and added a lighthearted giggle at the end of the sentence, turning to smile at him with my eyebrows raised expectantly, exactly like someone who had just made a gut-busting joke and was waiting for the inevitable laughter. I hoped this might soften the blow.

It did not.

Later in the car, my mother turned from the front passenger seat to face me in the back, where I was sitting. I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right.

My mother effectively shamed me, as she reminded me that I should never speak to my father with that kind of disrespect again.

My mother has a thing about disrespect. Be it telling my father he’s annoying the hell out of you or even just raising your voice at either of them—she just won’t tolerate it. And yet, it’s perfectly fine to say the word “fuck” at home in everyday conversation.

I don’t know exactly when it became OK to say "fuck" at home, but I do know that it started with my sister and it started sometime while I was away at art school.

My pretty younger sister who still lives at home has a mouth like a trucker. Over the past few years she has flawlessly integrated “fuck” into her everyday vocabulary. It’s her thing. Everything with her is fuckin’ this or fuckin’ that. Rarely does she ever give a fuck. And sometimes it’s important to remember not to fuck with her. But always, if you have a problem with it, that’s your fuckin’ problem and not hers.

The first time I heard my sister say "fuck" in a conversation with my mother, I was home from art school for the weekend. We all sat around the kitchen table eating dinner—my mother, father, brother, sister and I—and my jaw dropped when my mother made a tongue-in-cheek comment to which my sister replied, “Shut the fuck up.”

I sat in silence holding my food in a half-chewed ball in one cheek, like a chipmunk storing nuts, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did. Instead, my mother laughed and said, “You shut the fuck up.”

I’ve never been able to figure out how telling my mother to “shut the fuck up” is any different from telling my father that he’s “annoying the hell out of [you].” To me, one is just as disrespectful as the next. But who am I to judge when it comes to respecting one’s elders.

Today I thought about this as I was in the grocery store picking out a tomato. I’d gone for a few things that I’d forgotten yesterday when I did the bulk of my shopping, so I was back in the store attempting to pick up my tomato when I noticed that I couldn’t approach the stacks of ripe Jerseys in the produce section. Parked directly in front of those tomatoes stood an anorexic-looking blonde woman and her elderly—deteriorating, even—mother.

There was something seriously wrong with the elderly woman’s right eye. Horribly, I thought she sort of looked like a corpse with a popeye. And she moved with the slow, staggering gait of a zombie, hanging onto a shopping cart and pushing it at tortoise speed.

The elderly woman, like my father last month, was annoying the hell out of me. But to tell the truth, I was a little bit afraid of her. Images of her grabbing me and taking a bite out of my arm as I tried to pass by and get my tomato flashed through my mind. It would be very Night of the Living Dead. But also, I felt a sort of obligation to show some respect by hanging back and allowing her to move out of the way without any added pressure.

So I sort of moved in closer to the tomatoes, just enough to let the elderly woman know that I wanted to be where she was but not enough to make her feel nervous or pressured. It was at this point that the anorexic-looking blonde woman left the elderly woman’s side and started walking past me toward jars of olive oil on shelves along the wall. The elderly woman began to follow.

“I said stay there!” shouted the anorexic-looking blonde woman. And when she shouted it, I could hear the hatred in her voice.

My first thought was Oh! She’s mean to her.

Now the elderly woman stopped directly between those tomatoes and I.

I was thoroughly annoyed. Also amused. As I slipped past the elderly woman who looked entirely confused, and went about picking out my tomato, I thought: Well, I would be mean to her too. I’d be like, “I said stay put, you stupid popeye.”

Catching myself in the act of a startlingly mean thought, I paused to compose myself and watched as the anorexic woman gruffly lead her decaying mother further down the aisle.

Talk about disrespect, I thought. At least I let my parents know when they’re pissing me off. I would never drag my father around a store hanging onto a cart like that, yelling at him. Even if he turns into a zombie with a popeye one day.