My dad (73M) yelled at me, and I've(29M) been avoiding him since. How do I stop avoiding him while ensuring that what he did was not really okay to me?

I(29M) had a fight with my parents (73M, 68F) about 4 days ago about leftovers. I’ve been living at our house for the past 2 months since February. I’m 29, and I have just returned from traveling for about 4 months, and I don’t have any other place to stay. We originally worked out that I could stay at their house until June, but now that we have this lockdown situation, I don’t know how long we will stay for. I don’t have any work prospects right now, and my career history is littered with a variety of jobs. Bear with me here as I describe my career history a little as it’s relevant to my issue. I’ve worked as a web developer for a couple years, did not like it so I taught English in Korea for a year, returned to try out my family business, which my parents are the owners of and built it up from nothing over the 30 years. I worked there for 2 years before finally deciding it wasn’t a place I saw myself at for the rest of my life. They are of retiring age, and would have gladly set me up as the successor if I was up to it. I quit to go traveling for about 4 months until I finally returned back to USA. I still don’t have a sure path as to what I’ll be doing in the future, but now that the self-isolation orders have been put in place, we have been self-isolating under the same roof for the past month. In the month before self-isolation, I honestly wasn’t trying too hard to look for a job anyway, as I’ve been trying to set up an ecommerce site to sell some of our company’s excess inventory. Ecommerce is something our family business has never dabbled in. Admittedly, even that is difficult for me to maintain interest in it so I’ve been working on it really slowly.

Fast forward to 4 days ago. I left a small amount of noodles we ate together in the fridge. My parents must have discussed this, and along with their general disapproval with my lifestyle and lack of career path, this was the final straw! I sat down for dinner and my mom immediately and aggressively asked, “Why did you leave these noodles in the fridge? You should’ve put them in a smaller bowl. It looks disgusting. No one wants to eat them.” It’s true, I did forget about the leftover noodles, but she was coming onto me so strongly, and my natural reaction was to defend myself. I told them those were not my leftovers. Those were from the batch of noodles that I took from, and I left the remaining small amount for others. I was becoming increasingly indignant, but in the moment, I would say that she started it first. After some back and forth, my father stepped in and started arguing too. My dad has a pet peeve for leftovers being offered to him, and I often do not remember this part about him. At this point, we’re all invested in this argument and neither of us is backing down. Whatever logic I used in my defense just ticked them off even further, until the point where my dad yelled at me in a way I haven’t been yelled at before since I was a teenager. With a shaking, accusing middle finger pointed at me, he shouted out “, I’m ASHAMED of you. I can’t believe this is how you are. I’m ASHAMED OF YOU! I laid out the road for you (in reference to me working at the family business, and my now lack of career path). You are USELESS! I don’t know what to do with you. I’M ASHAMED!” That really hurt because I am ashamed for myself too. I don’t really have any direction in my life right now, and I’ve fallen into a bad habit of being really lazy the past month. A lot of my peers are doing well in their careers and life, and I don’t have much to show for. We ate the rest of our meal in silence as my dad continued to watch his favorite show on TV. After I left the dinner room, I could hear my dad shouting out all kinds of shit about me to my mom.

I know everyone has their own personal set of values that their logic is built off of. I would be fine compromising with how we manage our food in the shared spaces. We’re all together in social isolation for the next 4 weeks. It’s just the way that the conversation went. They started off so aggressively demanding from the start, and my natural reaction was to be defiant. One thing led to another, and we started having this huge fight until my dad says something hurtful, but true to me. Both my parents are definitely under a lot of pressure, as they’ve been having chats everyday with some of the top employees about how they are going to be able to manage their company now that sales have almost entirely diminished due to the economy. They have already laid off several staff members.

After that incident, I’m okay with my mom as she came to discuss what happened and what my future plans are, and etc. Between she and I, we’ve sectioned off a part of the fridge for me to put my food only. I haven’t talked with my dad, and I’ve avoided him altogether for the past 4 days even though we all live under the same roof. I make sure he’s sleeping when I want to go to the kitchen to make food and etc. Initially I was avoiding him under the belief that if he thinks I’m at shame to look at, then I’ll stay out of sight from him. Now I don’t know. He probably doesn’t even know that I’m deliberately doing this, and thinks that I’m being lazy and waking up at really odd hours. I don’t really know how to deal with this situation. A part of me also doesn’t like the fact that we could have easily discussed and solved this in a totally civil manner, and my father’s outburst was mean-spirited and not right. He hasn’t discussed with me at all about what my plans are. He just assumes. To me, returning to a normal routine and behavior implies that I’m okay with how my parents acted, and the manner in which my dad said to me was also fine. I don’t even know what I want at this point. I can’t ignore him forever, but I do want him to contemplate that his actions have consequences so that he will think twice in the future. Everything seems so ridiculous now, but my dad’s emotional remark really stung. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how I can resolve this situation?

P.S. Unrelated, but the next day I woke up at 11 AM to the sound of my dad shouting at my mom “WELL GET OUT THEN! GET OUT!” and then I heard her drive off. I don’t know what that was all about, but that’s definitely not right. My mom is super paranoid about catching disease and hasn’t left the house in a long time. Later when I asked her about it, she didn’t go into the details but said that she was nagging him and ended up driving off to their office to do some much-needed work. She came back later that evening with takeout food. My mom does have a strong tendency to micro-manage, and sometimes that drives me and my dad off the edge, but I think sometimes she puts up with too much of his shit too. Anyway, he’s usually nice, but he definitely has anger issues when he’s under pressure. He’s not usually like this.

TL;DR: Had a fight with my parents and my Dad yelled at me with some mean, but true thoughts. I’ve been avoiding him for several days but now I’m not sure what to do. Help?

Submitted April 04, 2020 at 04:16PM by throwmethrow9 https://ift.tt/2JBiVP0