My parents have always had issues communicating with each other. My mom mostly gets along with everyone she meets. My dad has communication issues with almost everyone, apart from a few friends and my grandparents. He’s a supervisor at his job and his employees all got together and went to my dad’s boss to tell him my dad “was being an ass” (their words, not mine). Anyway, because they have so many communication issues, they have fought over and over again about the same things for literal years. They’re the couple who should have been divorced a long time ago basically. My mom does what she can to try and make him happy. She’ll take his suggestions and she even suggested marriage counseling, which he refused. My grandma pointed out that my dad is a person who expects everyone but himself to make him happy, when the irony is that you can only make yourself happy. I think she makes a good point. It’s just really hard living with them. Sometimes things get so tense that I have to just hide in my room. I’m trying to get out of their house ASAP but that’s a different story for a different time. I try to be impartial, but it’s hard remembering all the times he’s screamed in her face while she cried, or thrown things. I raised my concern with them back when I was 16, and my dad just wrote it off as him being “passionate” and basically said that I didn’t know what relationships were like. My SO and I don’t and have not ever (in 9 years) had screaming matches like that. He has never thrown anything at me either. Never called me names. My dad is the one who always tries to insert my name into their fights. It makes me really uncomfortable. He’s basically always told me (even when I was in elementary school) that no one cares about my opinions. When I was little, I loved playing dress up. If he saw me wearing a dress and a dress up hat and scarf, he’d say “why you got all that shit on?” He’s just inconsiderate and makes people feel awful. He blames my mom for literally everything that has gone wrong in their relationship. He has accused her of cheating when she was always home with me (for the first few years of my life she was a stay at home mom, then became a nanny and always brought me with her), meanwhile, he has always worked the night shift and has always come home WELL past the time he’s supposed to have gotten off. He accuses her of not thinking about his feelings, while he constantly belittles her and laughs at her, knowing it hurts her feelings. If she tells him something he’s done or said hurt her feelings, he just gets mad. She’s self conscious about growing hair on her face for example. One day, he decided to call her Chewbacca repeatedly... she got upset and I could tell she was trying not to cry. When she asked him to apologize, he said that it was a funny joke and started getting angry again. He was like 54 years old when this happened...aka not 16...

She does literally everything in the house (and I help as much as possible) including: cooking, washing his clothes, picking up things he leaves on the floor (his clothes, towels, food wrappers, paper towels, etc) , making sure he has money for gas and food, making sure he calls his family, making sure his car gets an oil change/inspection, getting the right drinks for him, shaving his freaking back. And he does hardly anything for her, apart from working, which yes, is important since his check is a lot bigger than hers, but I know it would be nice for her to feel appreciated sometimes. When she does these things for him, she almost never gets a thank you. Today for example, she had to make him a doctors appointment because he’s too lazy to do it on his own. Yet, he demands respect. Even if he’s grumpy and rude to everyone around him. I know, it’s their relationship, but all of this goes on in front of me and it affects me. It’s not like I’m hearing it from someone else. Our house is small and the walls are thin. When he’s home, it’s like we have to walk on eggshells because we don’t know what’s gonna set him off.