I need to know my limits.

Disclaimer: MY THOUGHTS, MY LIFE

I need to stop having dinner with my parents when the brother and the girlfriend are over. It totally exhausts me emotionally and leaves me feeling like shit. My father doesn't realize he does this, but he totally cuts me off mid-sentence to talk about what he wants to talk about, and then will listen to ramblings from the girlfriend of the brother about something as silly as the dog. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but half of me thinks its because both my brother and his girlfriend did WHAT HE DID and FOLLOWED THAT PATH and they just have forgotten how to communicate with me all together because I'm not researching someone's brain at some hoity-toity grad program. I may be jealous, or I may just entirely be an outsider in my own family.

I find it really hard to talk to someone that has not been outside her own country, and has not had to have a real job waiting tables or lifting bricks or doing some kind of manual labor and got into the first grad program she applied to RIGHT AFTER UNDERGRAD. It strikes me that I may be a little bitter, but it also strikes me that I may just be a little beyond all of that. Grow up, and stop seeing only what you want to see. Stop treating me like shit because I followed the path less taken and am better off for it.

My parents don't know what to do with a daughter that was a shut in high school, went to school to be an elementary teacher, dropped that to make $800/month shoveling gravel for the Gulf Coast and then go to Minnesota to make less than that babysitting other people's kids. I didn't use my brain in a way that they wanted to, therefore I'm not worth listening to at the dinner table? They don't know what to do with a daughter that met her boyfriend on the internet and not at an academic institution. So I quit. I quit my family for a while. They always say that you don't choose your family and they choose you.

I choose to be with people that make me happy for once. I choose to be with folks that make me feel good about what I'm doing and don't question it. I don't need to own a home and 2.5 kids and have a job I hate because that is simply what you did and that is what makes one an adult. Let's grow up people. This fall can't come soon enough.