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I need to get this off my chest...... at 1 in the morning.

I often forget to put less importance on materialistic things. I forget that I'm lucky. I forget that things that can be bought with money aren't as important as they seem. It's so easy to want more. To want what she has, or that overpriced shirt that would look SO PERFECT with my new jeans.

Things get really tense around the house when my mom's not around. My dad gets extremely stressed out, and I get extremely fustrated with him. This makes it almost impossible for us to communicate. The phrase I have said the most since she left (It's only been three days...) is: "Please stop yelling at me." It's one thing if I'm being disrespectful, but it's another for him to take out his anger on me. It gets difficult when I can't even ask why there's no paper towels without him screaming at me.

But anyways. There's one particular moment that happened a few years ago that always makes me feel ashamed of myself. It was literally my dad's "last straw" moment. To this day, I still don't think what I did was all that bad, but maybe that's just my pride talking. He was so furious, and there was no mother to restrain him. Not just, "Oh crap, I'm in trouble," furious. I mean like, "I'm so scared I'm gonna pee in my pants 'cause he's gonna beat the crap out of me," furious. I was so frightened until he did something that made me snap. He smashed my phone, my new, fresh-from-Hong-Kong, slidey phone, into a million pieces. Beyond repair. And ontop of that, he started grabbing clothes out of my closet and snipped away with a pair of scissors. At that point, I went ballistic.

The ending wasn't pretty. The result wasn't too good-looking either. It left me crying on the floor for 2 reasons:

#1. An angry dad makes a guilty child.

#2. I have never, EVER, been so angry with ANYTHING in my whole entire life. Even now, I've never been so pissed off compared to that moment. And it was over clothes. I was humliated. I still am.

I think I've finally realized why I bring myself back to that moment a lot. It's taken me until now to stop blaming my dad for what happened, put aside my anger, forget how much brokenness was in the situation, and actually draw something good from it. I remind myself of this incident, not because I want to cause myself pain, but because it humbles me when I feel prideful, and when I feel like I deserve more. It reminds me that the shirts and scarves that I now consider rags are more than some kids get in their lifetime. It reminds me that clothes and material things are worth nothing after one snip or one smash. It reminds me that my priorites need to lie in something more tangible.