in-law issues

First Contact



I wrote to Will’s mother over the weekend. She had sent a birthday card to Katy, and it was forwarded to our new address. Typically, the letter inside was addressed to my five year old but actually meant for me. The things she writes are calculated to induce guilt because she sees herself as the ultimate victim of Will’s illness and death. I can understand her discounting how everything has affected me, but she discounts completely how it has changed Katy and her life too. Katy is simply an accessory from her grandmother’s point of view. 

I knew the card was coming. I knew I was going to have to reply and finally clue her ,and the other in-laws, in about the changes in my life. What I wrote was fairly matter of fact, and I told them only what they needed to know about Rob, the move, and our life here, and that wasn’t much. I don’t know why I feel I need to protect us from them. But even Will’s father’s family seems tainted to me now. Though they could be selfish and indifferent, they were never cruel. I know what they say about marrying a person’s family, but I don’t believe that any tie to another person or group of people allows them free and easy access. People need to earn the right to be a part of your life. No one is exempt. I have a brother who I kept at arm’s length or better for many, many years because of his self-destructive behaviors, and I still give my youngest sister a wide berth because of her self-absorbed ways. 

I set the record straight with Will’s mother. She knew the boundaries already, I think, but now they are spelled out. I didn’t put them forth in anger, although I am still angry with her about the many incidents that took place those last three months and especially that last weekend. She knows she can write but is on notice about the appropriateness of the content. If she is writing to Katy then it needs to be the types of things grandmothers write to their little granddaughters and not veiled messages for me. I will not put up with the intermediaries she has used in the past to avoid having to speak or communicate with me directly. And, I included some photos of Katy. It was the right thing to do even if her grandmother has never done much more than use her as a prop in the elaborate drama that she prefers over living a real life.

I wish I could feel more empathy, or even pity, for the woman, but I don’t. Even Will had a hard time with that and his main reason for keeping contact amounted to not much more than guilt and obligation. Still, she was his mother and I will do this much for his sake. It’s really him that I owe this too. 

The Penalty Box


I was surfing the widow board as I am wont to do during my daughter’s evening bath, which given her inherited princess tendencies can be lengthy, and I ran across a reply to a post about people in our lives who overstep. The poster mentioned that someone she knows deals with such folk by placing them “in the penalty box”. Apparently this box of retribution lies in the backrooms of one’s mind and interlopers, idiots and probably in-laws are mentally wood-shedded until such time as one is ready to deal with them. This could be tomorrow or it could be never again. There are no real punishments meted out because it is more like a grown-up version of time-out except that the bad behaving adult in question has no idea that they have been shelved. I found the concept very interesting. When applied to my own life, I realized that I have quite a full inbox.

Earlier today I answered the phone and found one of Rob’s late wife’s aunts on the other end. Dianne has been working on having a memorial bench for Shelley made and placed in a local park and she wanted to run the wording of the plaque that will be on the bench by Rob. We chatted only very briefly, but she was quite nice and genuine. I am not really certain how often Rob hears from his in-laws, but his relationship with them stands in stark contrast to my relationship with Will’s family. Granted, Rob and Shelley were married for 25 years and their actual relationship predates that by a couple more, and I really had no chance at all to get to know Will’s extended family before he got sick. Still, I wonder if the state of the union where my in-laws are concerned is something that I should have worked harder at.

Currently, I haven’t heard from Will’s two uncles or his aunt in almost a year, and this is discounting the last minute message I found on my phone inviting my daughter and I to the clan’s family Christmas the night before the festivities. My mother-in-law’s siblings and their children haven’t had any contact with me since well before Will died and some of them have never even seen our child in person. The mother-in-law herself is a long and ugly story that I am through telling. The long or short of it is that they don’t know about Rob or that we are married or that we live in Canada now. Frankly, and surprisingly, this has bothered me all along. And, I thought the reason that I was bothered by it was because I hadn’t tracked them all down and told them about the current events of my life. It’s not though. The reason I am bothered, upset actually, about their not knowing is that they don’t want to know. Katy and I are not important enough to keep in regular or hell, even semi-regular contact with and because we aren’t worth that very minimal effort, I know exactly what Will meant to them. He meant the world to me. He was the world to Katy. He was an afterthought to them and now he isn’t given any thought at all. Not even by his mother, you might be thinking? Surely she mourns him? I have no doubt that she does, but she does so in a way that I have trouble recognizing as love. 

I have decided to close the door on the penalty box of in-laws now. It was not my job to keep them interested and around over the last how ever many months it has been since Will’s death. They are all grown-ups with access to the many modern wonders of communication that are available to us all these days……and they knew where to find me and Katy. Now that they don’t, I doubt they have noticed. When they do, if they do, I will reassess the situation. Until then, I have more important things to do.

Don Williams State Park


Maquoketa Caves State Park

Image by Phil Roeder (lots of comments to catch up on) via Flickr

I love my sister’s in-laws. They are a large, friendly bunch who lay waste to every bad in-law joke you may have ever heard. BIL and his twin were actually high school classmates of mine, and I actually knew him before he and my sister even met.

 

BIL has six brothers. All but the youngest is married. All but two have children. When even a couple of them gather in one place with their families, you know they are there. The last time I saw them all together in one place was nearly 7 years ago when DNOS and BIL married. I remember at my parents house the next day while the grown-ups were outside watching the newlyweds unwrap gifts I walked into the kitchen to find a half-dozen or so of BIL’s nieces and nephews pretending to mix drinks using various concoctions of soda pop.

 

My sister is actually the “oldest” of the sister-in-law’s even though she was the last one of them to marry into the family. DNOS and BIL dated for about fifteen years. They got engaged The Christmas after Will and I got married. In fact, the first time we visited after our engagement BIL’s comment to Will was “Thanks a lot.” Even with the occasionally clash of personalities, I have always thought my sister to be extremely blessed as far as in-laws are concerned. Because Will was an only child and not really comfortable with either side of his family, I knew I wouldn’t have what DNOS did but I had high hopes for pleasant holidays and other such gatherings. I didn’t get that. As we circled the park today trailing after P’s wife K as she scouted about for a picnic site in what is essentially a campground, I had brief flashes of the Mathes family celebrations. A room ringed with people on folding chairs, eating off paper plated balanced precariously on their knees while engaged in the awkward small talk that periodically broke the silence. My sister has not always taken her in-laws in stride, but her observations of mine have made her more grateful for them than she already was.

 

My daughter loves to visit with her cousin’s cousins. She is just beginning to understand that she is not related to Uncle BIL’s family, but she stubbornly maintains that his youngest nephew is in fact just as much her cousin as N2, BIL and DNOS’s son, is. They are quite the trio. No is the oldest at six and a half, followed by N2 who is just six and then my Dee at not quite five. They ran themselves silly, played on the swings and argued over the camping chairs. No tried to convince the other two to play “runway model” on top of one of the picnic tables. N2 was game but Dee hung back and merely watched. I don’t think she knows what a model is and the look on her face indicated that she wasn’t quite certain that this was an activity for boys. My daughter is a bit archaic in her ideas about gender. As I watched I remarked to my sister that her husband would not have permitted a game like that to played for long. He is very archaic in his ideas about gender, but as the two boys sashayed up and down the table top, wiggling their bums like girls in a hip-hop video, everyone but Dee and I pretended not to notice.

 

After a dinner of grilled animal and assorted junk food of which Dee partook and I demurred politely, we said our good-byes. Real good-byes I realized when Dee pointed out to No that it was very unlikely he would ever see my Dee again. It’s interesting the people who are connected to your life, but who you have such a little bit of contact with over the course of it. I wonder if a person is richer or poorer for it?