Monday, February 4, 2008

In-laws and Out-laws

One of the other fun things no one talks about is the new in-laws. Or out-laws. There have always been the mother-in-law jokes.. jokes about the tension between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law b/c the daughter-in-law stole her baby boy or whatever, but when you are in a step situation it can be much much worse... especially if they actually liked the exwife. In my case, they actually didn't like her and actually talked bad about her a lot until my husband and I married. It would seem my husband's parents and his exwife got to bond over their mutual resentment of me. Isn't that sweet. Glad I could help bring them closer together. Why the resend me so much is beyond me... but it seems to be the nature of remarriage that someone in the situation is not going to be thrilled about it. Unfortunatly not only do they dislike me, but my "out-laws" are toxic to boot.

Yes, I have the out-laws of my nightmare. My biggest fear growing up was that I would have in-laws that were as nuts as my father's parents... oh, but I got much much worse. Well, actually a lot of the things that they do are strikingly similar to my grandparents. Funny how that happens, isn't it? Well, at least my husband is nothing like my father.

Actually, at first I had no reason to think they were anything other than nice. I missed SO many warning signs because of the stars in my eyes and my husband's official status as a "momma's boy" (oh, the thought of that makes me throw up in my mouth a little now... eww). One of the signs I missed was when we were living... oh you're going to laugh at this... get this... living ON THEIR PROPERTY (yes, that was smart... I know) and they would just walk in to our home without knocking whenever they knew that it was just me at home without my husband. Ya know, there IS such a thing as TOO MUCH family togetherness.

When my husband and his ex seperated and she went back to her home country, he had moved onto their property so that they could help him with "Alan" who was 2 years old at the time. In that time, my husband worked and went to school, so he very much relied on his parents to help with caring for "Alan"... taking him to daycare and picking him up... and putting him to bed a lot of nights. Hubby was really struggling to try to get ahead to spend more time with "Alan", but it just never happened. Then about a year later I came along. His parents had been playing the role of full time parents to "Alan" and truely resented that I had come in and been asked to be in a parenting role instead of them.

Not only do older people seem to resist change, but I truely think that a lot of the older generation views the divorce of their children as a failure on not only the part of the child, but also themselves. Add that to a feeling of loss when they "loose" their child-in-law, and you have a recipe for trouble for any future love interest of that son or daughter. In my husband's case his parents didn't blame themselves at all for what they viewed as their son's failure, they blamed him completely. To this day they claim the exwife to be the innocent victim of my mean mean husband. In their eyes, he simply woke up one morning and decided to not be married anymore. My father-in-law went so far as to tell me that my husband would do the same to me, so I had better make friends with the exwife because at least then I'd have someone that had been through it. Glad they have so much faith in my husband. Unfortunatley, their contempt for my husband coupled with his mother's previous distaste for second wives and stepmoms based on her own father's divorce from her mother and remarriage to his mistress (whom he married and they are still living happily ever after), meant that they would not be able to accept me as part of the family.

His parents current favorite excuse for not accepting me is to remind my husband that before he and his exwife married he had told her that his parents would love her because he loved her. Apparently this means that they made a promise to love her forever and the rule does not apply to me (damn... should have thought to cry to him too and acted scared to meet his parents because then maybe he would have said the same thing to me so then they would HAVE to have accepted me... lol.. yeh right). It would seem that in their minds, loving me would mean rejecting her... it seems that they do not have room in their hearts to love more than one or two people at any one time. How sad for them. In choosing to align themselves with my husband's ex, they have chosen to betray their own son.

Interestingly, this same type of in-law will show a biased towards the stepchildren as well. They seem to view the stepchildren as more a part of the family and more their grandchildren than they children of the subsequent relationship. My own mother-in-law has gone so far as to tell me that my son with my husband (who is her son of course) is just as much a part of the family as is his exwife's daughter with her new boyfriend... I have yet to understand how that child is related to my husband's family being as neither she nor her boyfriend are related, but I digress. The only way I can even somewhat understand that is if they have truely decided that his exwife is their daughter... which is kind of gross if you think about it.. but that would make at least a little bit of sense.

My father-in-law recently said that he loves our daughter not because she is his grandchild, but because my husband loves her. Very sad. It's so odd to me that they choose to so strongly favor one grandchild and consider only that child as their real full grandchild even though they are related to all the children in the exact same way. But, there is no use trying to apply logic and reason to that which is illogical and unreasonable (and this applies to the antics of the exwife as well)... trying to figure all of it out would only make a person crazy and wouldn't accomplish anything in the long run.

No comments: