“Hey, have you seen my Tupperware container of dog chicken? I wanted to give the dogs a treat,” I said, peering into my parents’ fridge.
“No,” said my father, his standard response to all questions.
“Tupperware? No,” said my mother, who actually listens to questions.
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a Tupperware container…but one of those glass containers with a blue plastic lid on it?”
“Glass?” my mother said. “You mean the chicken bone?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see it,” I said, moving things around in the fridge. “Chris cooked it for the dogs and gave it to me, and I put underneath the canned dog food, but it’s not here anymore.”
My mother turned on my father. “You said that was left over from yesterday!”
My father turned on my mother. “How was I supposed to know!”
My mother: “You should have told me that was dog chicken!”
My father: “But I didn’t know!”
My mother: “I knew we didn’t have leftovers! I asked you why there was a bone!”
My father: “I thought you left it!”
“Hey!” I yelled. “It’s no one’s fault; I didn’t tell anyone it was dog chicken. But where is it now?”
My mother turned glumly to the pot she was stirring. She opened the lid. The three of us stared inside the pot.
“I put it in the soup,” she said.
“You tell Chris he’ll never find anyone so good again,” my mother said.
“Why would I tell him that?” I asked. “Anyway, he can; it’s easy to get married to anyone these days.”
“No, I’m not talking about you, I mean me. He’ll never find another mother-in-law as good as me!”
Until this past year, I hadn’t had much time to get to know my nephew because he lives a 6-hour plane ride away. And let’s face it, very young babies aren’t usually too interesting — by the time one of them gets used to you, your visit’s just about over.
But now that P.T.’s almost 3 and has firmly developed a personality, I’ve begun discovering the joys of being “Auntie Jane.” So when my sister said she and her husband had a business trip in New York, and would I be able to come down and babysit him for a day, I agreed.
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My old standard: “Does he burp?”
My new standard: “OK, does he at least turn his head away when he burps?”
My mother’s old standard: “What kind of job does he have?”
My mother’s new standard: “Does he have a job?”
A bit premature, but here we go:
New Year (Death Cab For Cutie)
I received my latest phone bill today from AT&T. Two double-sided pages of charges and taxes, and then a third page that started:
Go Green and Make a Difference! Sign up for paperless billing and join AT&T in its efforts to be more earth-friendly and environmentally aware…
A few more sentences about how great it is to be green and go paperless, and then the rest of the page was blank, as well as the other side. Thanks, AT&T, for showing me the way!
Thursday morning: Slept in.
Thursday afternoon: Baked cake. Cleaned apartment in anticipation of meeting Cousin #1’s boyfriend who would be staying with Cousin #1 and #2 at my apartment. Boyfriend did not end up coming. Clean apartment possibly appreciated by cousins, but information unverified. Forgot to eat lunch.
Thursday night: Helped parents heat up various foods. Ate cake, red bean bun, and bowl of noodles prior to relatives arriving. Relatives arrived. Ate Thanksgiving dinner, including more cake and noodles. Watched cousins fall asleep on couch at 9pm.
Friday morning/afternoon: Cousins and I got up late. Ate breakfast, followed immediately by lunch. Went out to buy ingredients for cheesecake cupcakes. Baked cheesecake cupcakes, ate two each, then left house to meet other relatives for all-you-can-eat buffet.
Friday night: Dying from buffet. Played long game of Monopoly, during which we discovered no one knows the actual rules of Monopoly, accompanied by more snacks and cheesecake cupcakes.
Saturday morning: Got up late. Found out Cousin #2 had used my towel the previous day when she showered. Grossed out. In unrelated note, went to meet relatives for dim sum.
Saturday afternoon: Relatives went home, can finally skip a meal and take a nap instead.
Saturday night: Eating a salad. Oh, blessed greenery. Hmm, maybe I’ll have some cake after…
My new GPS and I are on the outs. All I asked of it was to take me to Angela’s house, and it interpreted this to mean, “Take me to Angela’s house by way of the most scenic route in Cambridge and then go backwards through Angela’s town until I accidentally stumble across her house, twenty minutes later than expected.”
Cousin Terry visited me this past weekend, and in return for her thoughtfulness, I took her out to brunch where we accidentally became part of the most boring date in the world.
The young woman sitting behind us at the restaurant had a very loud voice, which is how we first noticed her and her date. It wasn’t an unpleasant or grating voice; it just never stopped, and at a volume we couldn’t ignore.
Terry had her back to their table, and after about 10 minutes, she asked me, “What race is that woman behind me?”
I gave her a puzzled look, and peered around her to look at the woman. “Just white, I think,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “She sounds like she has an accent.”
“I think she’s just talking very fast,” I said doubtfully.
The woman was talking so fast that at first, I couldn’t distinguish any of her words. Luckily, Cousin Terry is under 30 and therefore, according to the Internet, able to hear high-pitched sounds that we over-30s can’t, so she was able to understand the conversation and translate for me.
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Dear In-laws,
Remember when you said, less than a year ago, that you loved me and Joe just like Cindy and Chris? That was clearly a lie, and I wish you hadn’t lied, because the lie made it that much harder for me when you cut me off without a second’s thought once Chris decided he wanted a divorce.
What happened was this:
One day Chris said he felt disconnected from everyone. In that same conversation, he said he wanted a divorce. This was the first I knew about any problem, and in many conversations after that, he continued saying he wanted a divorce. It turns out that by the time of the first conversation he had with me, he had already figured out a solution to his feelings: divorce. I had and still don’t have any say in what he wants and what he decided about our life together and how it would end.
Apparently our past 11 years together was just a lie, during which he felt very little but had convinced himself this was how a relationship should be. Now that he has seen the light, he needs to re-learn feeling and emotions, and to do so, he has decided he must dump me to the curb and start over with a fresh woman, and only then can he learn what a real relationship is.
Now you know as much as I do.
Maybe you would know more, if you actually talked to your precious son instead of reading my website or waiting for information to be passed from Joe to Cindy to you.
In the last few months, my life as I knew it was completely destroyed. I had as much warning as you did, and believe me, I feel a LOT WORSE than you do. So stop making things even harder. I do not need you accusing me of treating your son unfairly, or doing things behind his back.
I do not snoop. I have never snooped. My change of address has not been processed yet for my paychecks, and my household income has dropped by 2/3 in the last few months while my expenses have gone up 1/3. In other words, I need my money the day it arrives. So on the days I go to take care of the dogs, I bring in the mail to check for paychecks. Chris knows I do this, and has never indicated that he has a problem with it.
Cindy’s envelope was in the mail one day when I happened to bring it in, and that’s all I saw — the envelope.
Do you know what my parents did when they found out about all of this? They wanted to know what Chris was thinking. They wanted to see him. They wanted to talk to him, to tell him they loved him. I asked them not to, and told them some of the things Chris had said about me, about our marriage, and how much he was hurting me, and that I needed their support now more than Chris did. I also told Chris that my parents wanted to reach out to him, but I had asked them not to.
Chris says he never asked you to stop contacting me. You chose that on your own, and you and Cindy cut me out of the family faster than Chris cut me out. Do you see the difference between my family’s reactions, and yours? Maybe this difference is why, after knowing Chris 11 years, I wanted to do whatever I could to make things work with him, even though I didn’t understand what he felt, even though I was devastated by what I was hearing. And after 11 years of knowing me, Chris only wanted to walk away, rather than have an actual conversation with me.
Sincerely,
Your former/ex/daughter-in-law, who was never a daughter in any sense of the word, and you made damned sure I was always reminded of that.
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