A Thing of the past

I have always thought that everything comes with an expiry date and mostly i have been right. which is probably why i have a huge amount of tolerance when it comes to my parents. i have sat on the sides and watched the endless fights, the accusing fingers,the many miserable nights. since a while am trying the neutral approach where i dont really pick a side or i try not to involve me despite their many attempts to do so. he says " tell her that i am not interested in hearing this anymore" and she says " ask him never to call me again"

much earlier me and the sister tried many ways of dealing with this, for a while we pretended this was what most houses were like, we played the tv loud as we had seen in some serial and laughed loudly ignoring them, then we grew up and grew out of that.the problem is its hard not to pick a side, after a while you get used to the noise and since it seems repetetive you learn to ignore the content which is obviously a mistake cos you can get taken by surprise. which is probably why when she said "i even hate signing his name next to mine" and that too not with resentment but more of a calm defeat it struck me. this is when the side taking happens.my dad got a job abroad and left a while back while she chose to stay back citing many a reason which i now am thankful for.

i have always watched all this with a kind of annoyance wishing i was more detached but often its more a pity, they live so sadly,if i try putting it differently, focused on just both of them, then they are such strangers to romance. which maybe is not such a bad thing for them. but being married myself makes me see it in a very very different light. they constantly the miss the moment,coming together.

individually taken apart and analysed they are great people. he is one of the most succesful people i know, great at talking people in and out of things, always well liked,funny even. she is wonderfully kind and cute and stylish and so very generous. but.together they bring out the worst in the other. latelyi have noticed how they wait for the other to screw up with a perverse kind of happiness when they do. dont they have a theory for this?self fulfilling prophecy i think.

for most parts they fool most people putting up this great front.
a part of me worries that some of this must have rubbed off on me, i have a near perfect marriage, we pretty much get each other and there are no encroachments in space and most fights are resolved pretty quick. but sometimes i catch myself wanting him to mess up and to see him feel bad, which of course i dont let him wallow in much. but yet.

obviously i dont hope for any reconciliation or tearful coming togethers, and admission of past follies, what i wish for is that they find a common ground that could pull them through, now that me and my sister are no longer the binding factor i am not sure there is anything left. sometimes in my side taking hobby i find them so unhappy that i asked them what they thought of separating, and though i asked in a more casual enquiring way it took me by suprise that they had considered it and then dropped it cos of every other reason but the one for which most people stay together. i have seen a kind of quiet companionship in many of my friends families, one that comes from years of togetherness and having crossed many a hurdle together, but these two dont even have that.
my dad is the kind of person who looks down upon housework and has been bought up by this absolute horror of a woman and still prefers to act as the "male" power in the family, he makes a huge scene about something as simple as washing one's own plate. this one time i saw him do it, his face was all controted in this look-what-i-put-up-with way and she is the kind who can never let one mistake go unnoticed and obviously doesnt beleive in letting go of the past.
a part of me wishes they wouldnt put me and the sister through this,its so unbeleivably unbearable in the same house together even for a single day.