What strange and fascinating creatures professor, what are they?

Those would be the in-laws. There are many folks in my office that have a great relationship with their in-laws; I am not one of those. My relationship with them is rather tenuous. Without rehashing about 8 years of incidents, let me say that their parenting style is quite different from my parents and extremely hard to get used to. My parents encouraged independent thinking, and self decision making while providing insight and often playing the devil’s advocate. For being from the Midwest, I was quite surprised to see how “California” my parents were when it came to creating free thinkers.

His parents were much more authoritarian. Being parents, they wanted to keep their child safe (as any parent) but often their decision was the only one and was not up for discussion. The coping technique my spouse learned to deal with this parenting style was to give lip service – telling them yes to something and then going and doing the exact opposite.

As you can see these two methods clash horribly and create the fun and joy of having in-laws. I take most of their comments with a grain of salt and discard 98% after listening to what was said. Unfortunately what got under my skin this weekend was part of a phone call from them. Their timing is usually poor, they always call during dinner, as we are leaving or while we are sleeping, but that’s not the problem.

While talking to mom the comment was made “Well are you lonely?” No actually I am not. My friends, co-workers, grad school, and my dog keep me quite busy. This was taken as some kind of affront because of the next question which asked me if I was looking forward to him coming home and then of course to him coming home for R&R. I had to bite my tongue to keep from making a smart remark about how I would be sad at having to end my torrid love affair with a friend and her husband but figured that would just NOT go well. Yes of course I am looking forward to him coming home. This to me is a silly question, but I seem to get these from her. The general feel (and not just me being sensitive) is that I am not good enough for her son or that I don’t love him. So I guess she looks for reasons or proof of some kind that I am being “bad” in some way shape or form in order to prove her theory.

I hate to tell you lady, but if I have stayed with him this long, I am not going anywhere. I love the man, with all my heart and there’s no budging me no matter what weird questions you throw my way.