I just played complaint knifey-spoony with my father and lost big time.

 

I haven’t been sleeping very well lately and when I become super tired for an extended period of time, I get very whingey. Usually I can complain like a demon, but deprive me of some sleep and I can hit new lows of patheticery even Kanye West would think twice about tweeting. So when my hotline blung (I’d like to think that the correct way to refer to hotline bling in past tense for is hotline blung but I haven’t any real authority to make that call) earlier tonight, it could only mean one thing: a good ol fashioned venting. But the problem was the bling was blung by my home number, and my father had done the dial.

 

I briefly detailed my ailments, and then my father proceeded to tell me about a teenager with cerebral palsy who loves cars but can’t get his licence and is watching all his mates hoon about from the sidelines. “It could always be worse,” he told me.

 

This is how it always goes when I attempt to trade my woes for sympathy with my father. I present my meagre quandaries and he shows them up. It’s almost like a competition. To better explain this phenomenon, let me put this scenario into pop culture context:

 

Imagine the scene from Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan is threatened with a pocketknife by a New York City Punk. The missus is very concerned and reacts just as the hooligan wanted. But leathery old Mick barely reacts and whips out his shard of steel so large it could have been a surfboard, dwarfing the other knife scaring the thug and his mates away. Now imagine that instead of the little baby pocketknife, the New York City Punk is actually armed with a fist full of complaints – job’s a joke, you’re broke, love life’s DOA, the standard issues facing Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey and Chandler (although apparently affordable housing was never one of them). Sure, they’re not fun but they’re not particularly impressive life obstacles.

 

Then imagine my father being completely unmoved, chuckling in an eerily cheerful way. At this point I, the flamboyantly misguided youngster wearing old lino for a jacket thinking my weapon was especially remarkable, start looking from left to right, not sure what this crazy Aussie bastard is going to do next. My father then reaches into his native animal leather jacket and pulls out a misfortune so depressing it would not only make Australian Story, but would also be referenced on commercial breakfast television presenters the next day.

 

My father wears an akubra, a lot of khaki and still carries a pocketknife around on his belt even though having an offensive weapon in a public place is an offence that attracts a custodial sentence. Aside form “Dad”, he is only referred to as “Macca”. He drives an old Defender ute with the back seats ripped out to allow the secure storage of chainsaws, bags of spanners and unexplained lengths of rope. So it’s not too hard to imagine my father in this scenario.

 

“That’s not a problem, THIS is a problem,” is, in essence, what he tells me every time.

 

You see, my parents are packing when it comes to problems. My mother had polio as a kid, had three spinal fusions (one of those after her pregnancy with me, which, weirdly, kind of makes me feel like I’m tough because I destroyed my mother’s body – I like to think I was a hulk baby who punched my way upward and tore open her scars from her previous c sections, ripping my way to freedom) and now has a permanent tracheostomy which means she has a tube hanging out her neck to help her breathe. My father, on the other hand, is of reasonably good health but spent time in orphanages, not knowing his father and not being able to afford shoes as a youngster.

 

So to these people, my problems are not real problems.

 

To make matters worse, my father is closet Catholic, which means he isn’t visually or verbally outward about his faith but has those guilt-ridden “help thy neighbour” or “think of those brothers and sisters less fortunate than you” sort of ideas pulsating through his veins like the overwhelming desire to dress like a beefy Marilyn Munroe and sing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in a room full of strangers. As much as he tries to ignore the sequins and feather boas of his true self, sometimes he will catch himself off guard and spend an afternoon moving furniture for a family who lost all their possessions in a fire or making sure his mother-in-law feels loved at Christmas. This is a bad thing when you want to wallow in your misery and be selfish. It’s especially bad when you’re fishing for sympathy. So instead of getting the deluxe triple dad Full House treatment when life gets me down, I get a combination of Mick Dundee, Abe Simpson and Maggie Smith’s character in the first half of Sister Act.

 

“There are plenty of other poor bastards out there who’ve got it a lot worse,” he tells me nearly word-for-word every time I start feeling sorry for myself.

 

Perhaps this is why I’ve become so good at complaining. I’ve had to compete with the best. My parents already set the benchmark pretty high in terms of setbacks, but raised the bar even higher by never feeling sorry for themselves. This is very annoying for me, their offspring, because if they don’t feel sorry for themselves for the shitty hand fate dealt them, I’m not entitled to wallow in self pity for anything less than they endured. If you can’t top a spinal tap, you’ve got nothing to whinge about.

 

You might say this is a good thing that offers a grounded perspective on the trivial woes that face a middle class white person like me, but for me there is nothing more decadent than sinking into a pit of pity. Wallowing is one of my favourite things to do – you get to eat family-sized portions of things with a single fork, you can watch as many Bette Midler movies as you want, you can wear jumpers than are three sizes too big for you and you can stare blankly into the abyss of your life. I love doing all of those things. Sometimes I think about having a fake break up weekend, when I get to enjoy all the perks of having a broken heart without all the lost emotional investment – I’m actually considering turning it into the next hottest retreat concept.

 

So it’s really unfair that I don’t have anything in my life that warrants marinating myself in misery. It’s not my fault I was properly vaccinated or came from a loving family. I didn’t choose this to happen to me. And for that matter, it’s not my fault I happened to be born in a country where my skin colour means I’m immediately accepted as the norm. It wasn’t my doing to be brought up in a stable home that always had food, electricity and no violence. It wasn’t my choice to be given an education. I didn’t decide to be heterosexual. And I certainly didn’t give the go ahead for my brain to fully develop in a normally-formed human body.

 

I didn’t get to be looked at differently because of the pigment of my skin, or be excluded because of the slant of my eyes. I didn’t get to be unable to participate in society because my brain works differently or my body spasms, contorts or doesn’t move. I didn’t get to be told my relationships were wrong or that I dressed like a freak. I didn’t get to be unable to keep up with schoolwork because I was hungry or bruised or tired from being up all night scared of what the next shouting match would bring. I didn’t get to not go to school or a doctor or have no bed or have no food to eat. I didn’t get to not be loved.

 

Yep. It’s pretty unfair alright. But I’m so good at complaining that I can complain about having nothing to complain about.