I’ve hit my limit on this kind of chantage, and make no mistake, teenage sullenness is a mutation of chantage. Shall we review chantage?

My step mother-in-law was the first person I ever heard say chantage when she described 18-month old Daisy sobbing with the babysitter when we left for dinner, although I didn’t really trust the Estonian 14-year old whom our Normandy weekly rental landlord had procured to babysit, so we could go out to dinner with Calvin’s father and his second wife.

Calvin’s father was slipping fast into dementia. This really aggravated my step mother-in-law, so she attacked me, letting me know I was fat and probably a lesbian, since I was fond enough of gay people to not mind if one of our children was gay. Why did I hate men so much, she demanded. It was a terrible dinner out. We should have honored Daisy’s chantage.

What Daisy did, that’s chantage. What my step mother-in-law did, I don’t know what that was. But as for chantage, I don’t love the practice and it doesn’t stop. It continues throughout one’s life and you must catch it with your family members and partners when it is happening so you don’t end up sacrificing your own existence for someone else’s self-perceived quality of life.

I’m looking back over my adult life right now trying to figure out how someone as deluded as I was (and am, sometimes) made such smart decisions. I do think I have an aptitude for recognizing systemic chantage, when something is actually harmful to me. When I recognize it, I get really mad and sometimes burn things down and claw my way out. Not always, but sometimes.

Often, I get really mad and burn the wrong thing down, so it’s hard to control. But I’ve made a lot of progress on that. Truly.

Back to chantage and Wyatt and frustration

Wyatt gets mad at me a lot for being me, basically. We’ll be watching TV and eating dinner and he’ll just give me the finger. He picks at me and resents my chewing, and in meantime his socks smell terrible and he does strange twitchy movements (and the socks just smell).

He’s actively trying to be mean to me, and I don’t know why. I don’t like it and I think if he does it too much, I’m might give him a piece of my mind.