My two best friends, guilt and obligation, have returned

For the past couple days I've been feeling kinda guilty about this whole situation and how it's affected each person of my family, but this morning I was greeted with a lovely email that kind of eliminated that, but still made me feel like shit. As a result, with 12 days left until unemployment, I've called in and crawled back into bed.

My father the attorney sent me this long, rigid, contract-like email, numbered and bullet-ed about how wrong I am for doing this. When my mom contacts me--and we've been a little in touch lately--it's pretty much always, "Hi, how are you, I miss you, I want to hear how you're doing." It's nice and friendly and it encourages me to respond. Not this email. It was impersonal and just full of negative things and very clinical. I will attach some of my favorite parts.

1 – “Teens” run away because they either live in “abusive” homes or they are bad.

However,

2 – “Adult” family members will always argue & disagree on many issues but they do not walk away from their families and stop speaking with them. This is true in every culture, society and religion.

Your actions do not qualify under either (1) or (2) above.

The quotes piss me off. This is how he opened the email. What the fuck is that?? You're not writing a contract, you're not sending a business email, you're writing to your daughter who you apparently want to get in touch with again and this is how you open? Point two is a good point but he's so cold about it, shit. So, skipping a couple of stupid sentences not worth your time, he continues with this:

Let me tell you how I see things & I am sure you have enough brains to understand:

Well isn't it nice that he's sure I have enough brains to understand. I'm pretty sure he's translating this directly from an Arabic phrase he likes to use a lot, and quite a bit gets lost in translation, but his patronizing intent gets through perfectly in either language. He then goes on to list, in bullets and sub-bullets, all the points he has to address and why I shouldn't be so grateful that he's outlined my life and how I'm insane to not follow his path.

• Abuse: his point: I wasn't abused. Yeah, I know. So I should be grateful that I wasn't abused, which is true, but in my opinion, pointing out that I wasn't abused shouldn't really be a thing to point out in the first place.
  
• Marriage: I wasn't forced to get married. Again, not even a question in my mind, and that he has to point that out shows a huge cultural gap that I didn't realize was this big.
• Religion: I wasn't asked/forced to wear religious clothing. Super. Because obviously I'm a very observant, religious person so that's a consideration. Or hell, it's not like HE'S a religious person either. I don't know how religious he could be or how he could even ask me to wear "religious clothing" if he enjoys whiskey on the rocks fairly often.
  
• Money: I wasn't asked to pay for anything. Except that each time I went out with my sisters, to see a movie or eat somewhere or go shopping, I paid for it. I don't mind it but it's something both of my parents tend to forget. Or the fact that I paid for all of my own expenses. I lived in their house for free, yeah, but any time I left and bought something, it was from my own money. This is also something they forget. I'm not complaining about it because I would have felt terrible asking them for money each time I left the house, but I think it's a significant thing.
  
• Education: "If you remember, I suggested you save ALL your salary for a whole year and then go to a law school of your choice." Except that I've mentioned SEVERAL times that I don't want to go to law school. But hey who cares about that.
• Career: He's offered to pull some strings in the ME and get me a job there. Because I really want to go live there. And when I turned it down he got personally offended.
  

This is how he does things. I don't appreciate it. It doesn't make me any more eager to get in touch with them. If anything, it just pushes me away more, and now that I think about it, it makes me more angry and resentful than before. He hasn't changed. He hasn't even pretended. He still talks to me this way even after I've left. So screw it. I can't decide if I want to respond with a rebuttal or just leave it alone. I'll have to think about it.

But in the meantime this email has made me chain smoke a bunch of cigarettes too early in the morning. Because I wasn't getting more and more tempted to smoke cigarettes as it is, I got a lovely excuse to have too many too early. My smoking habits are making me dislike myself. The apartment smells like cigarette smoke and marijuana. I won't be passing any drug tests any time soon.