Not even good?!?!

I love my parents. Of course I do! But sometimes… sometimes… Well sometimes they make me really-  I don’t know, angry and sad and, and, well everything, all at once!

This morning I was going to get help from my mom a project I was having trouble with. It was a problem with my English assignment, so it was exceptionally frustrating. My mom had to take my little brother to an appointment I had forgotten about so she asked my dad to help me. He told me to read it to him and I said I didn’t want to. So he, to my utter embarrassment, decided to read it out loud. He read every mistake and gives me this look like Really? This is the best you could do? When he finished he didn’t say anything. I started to try to defend myself saying, “It’s a really rough draft! It hasn’t even been proof read!” so he looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you proof read it?” He sounded really disapproving, like what he wanted to say was, What are you stupid? I don’t proof read my own stuff cause I never catch anything!

I explain that the project is really hard because we already wrote to different papers about the same character and there isn’t much more to say about her. Well that sends him into this big story about how a teacher asked his students to make as many observations as they could about this one passage in the Bible. “At first they only had about ten.” He said. “Then their teacher told them that wasn’t good enough, so they went back and looked for more. Do you know how many they had in the end?” he asked.

“No.” I said.

“One hundred.” He said triumphantly.

“So…?” I guess I looked kind of confused because he launched into another explanation.

“Did you read the book?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I said.

“Then why don’t you tell us more about Kathy? You can say why her mom sent her to Canada. Tell how she met Mike.”

“But dad,” I complained, “this isn’t a summary! We already did a summary! This an essay on ‘how Kathy grew, matured throughout the course or the book’.” I said, annoyed.

“You didn’t really read the book!”

“Yes I did!”

“You may have read it, but that doesn’t matter! You haven’t made any observations! You didn’t get anything out of it.”

I wanted to say, D-U-H! It was a stupid Canadian love story!!!! But instead I said, “It was REALLY boring. I didn’t pay all that much attention.” I was not about to tell him I did some Major skimming.

“Well, go re-read it!”

 

“What? It was like, 300 pages and this is due tomorrow!” (Did I mention that I sort of waited till the last minute to get help? Yeah, I did.) All I could think about was how much he annoying me when out of the blue came the pièce de résistance (Pièce de résistance means ‘Best part’ in French. It makes me sound edumacated!)!

 

“This isn’t even good writing!”

 

I nodded, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anger turned to turmoil. Not even good?! I thought. How can he say that?! He wouldn’t know good writing if pooped in his hair!!! Not even good? Tears sprung to my eyes. Not even good?

 

“You need to re-write it!”

 

“I have tons of other homework! Science, math...” My lips quivered and I just sat there.

 

“Fine then. You have one hour! That will leave time for the other subjects.”

 

I got up and ran up the stairs behind him. Flopping on my bed I started to cry. Not even good!

 

And that wasn’t even all he did today! I think I’d rather not give everyone to bad an impression of my dad, but he does that by himself on a daily basis.

TTFN (Tah-Tah For Now)

 

~Elise (Stay gold!)