gottawonder

There's something difficult about hosting my husband's parents, after a while.

I think things are a lot better than they used to be. I REALLY didn't enjoy having them in our home at one point, and I still have a hard time staying with them. Mainly, it's that I have my own odd way of living and I end up being forced to live more on their rhythm.

I'm a strong night owl, and they are fairly early risers. I like to do my own thing, and they are the kind of people who prefer to do things as a group all day long. I would rather spend most of my time being able to work on my art, or pottery, that kind of thing. Or reading. I have a hard time if my husband is home for a long stretch too. I don't like not having my long evening of working on art, because when he's home for a long stretch, he ends up staying up later and later, so I don't have the night to myself. When they are here, we have to sit together and be social all night long. I can do that, and I enjoy it, but after a day or so, I just want to be alone so I can work on my art. I can't do any of that when they are here. Being creative requires long stretches of uninterrupted time.

I think that the key difference between my husband's Mom and me, is that she likes to have a very staged, decorated type of home. Like a page from Home and Garden. She wants to buy a striking painting so it'll go with her room. I want to CREATE a striking painting, and not necessarily as a décor accessory (I despise the idea of art and décor being the same thing). A person who creates art is going to have paints, and a work area, and books about art, and dirty rags covered in paint, and is going to have to likely give up on housework to get better at painting, and might not care about having supper at 6 pm.

She wants to have the perfect vase to set off an arrangement. I want to MAKE the perfect vase, and it might have more going on with it than just being pretty in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. So, I have buckets of clay, and clothes with clay, and clay tools, and books about ceramic art, and I'm going to not care about dirt in my house because I want to spend 10 hours a week doing pottery, not dusting my house. She can pick out any number of perfect pottery items just by walking into a store and buying them. I have to spend five years making a hundred things that aren't anywhere near perfect first, and half of them are still in boxes in our house.

She might admire a necklace in one of these shabby chic faux cabin décor and gift shops, but I want to make that necklace. Thus, more containers full of beads, tools, string, necklaces for inspiration, necklaces I'm taking apart for parts, and dozens of imperfect prototypes.

She might enjoy watching some equestrian show once in a while, but I want to BE in that show!

So, she has no stuff, and everything in her house looks nice because she just went and picked it out. If it doesn't look perfect, she gets rid of it. I have the stuff and clutter, because I want to make everything myself, but I don't care how the house looks. I care how my painting turns out, or my pottery, or how my riding is doing. Not my house.

I also just really hate giving up my life in order to conform to a group, and sometimes I don't even like how much I have to change my life when my husband is home. I hate it when my husband wants to re-arrange the pantry, or he does things like puts something away in a place that he thinks makes more sense, and doesn't tell me (or ask me), and then I can't find it. Sometimes he does that and then goes back to work, and I have to call him and ask him where he put something.

It's also not easy for me, that when he's home for a longer stretch, life revs up to a crazy level because we have to do some insane project while he's home. I can lose my patience often about how sometimes he'll go a year without doing any of the things that need doing, but them when he's home for a few weeks, all of a sudden we're rebuilding our fence and looking at replacing our house and I might have to live in some horrible situation while that's happening, and his parents are going to end up living with us for a week or two to help us with the new house!! It's too much. I go from being alone most of the time, with not a lot going on except normal daily chores, doing things pretty much the way I like doing them, when I like doing them, to just...chaos, and not doing what I want, when I want, and so on. Sharing the bathroom, the kitchen, not having much personal time, being around people all the time, demands all the time.

Basically, I'm an introvert being forced into constant socializing and team activities for days on end when his parents visit, when I can really only deal with that for short periods of time. I get so worn out from trying to be chatty and doing group things, and it's so weird having people watching you all the time.

My sweetie's Mom is also pretty judging. If we talk just her and I, the conversation rapidly turns to tearing down her sister in law, who is kind of a hoarder, or her sister who is morbidly obese, or her brother who isn't involved enough in the family, or the one grandson who maybe isn't turning out to be an overachieving winner at everything like his sister (how he must hate her). OR, she talks about how INCREDIBLE and PERFECT the family members that she likes are. She doesn't seem to just value people for themselves, she values things like academic achievement, and how nice their house is (but she will also hate how some people spend too much money and have too nice a house), and will talk about how amazing this one grand daughter is (personally I think she's working herself to death for approval). If she judges other people like this to me, you know damn well she's going to go back and talk about me to everyone else too.

I know that on some level, we all do this, but she seems kind of relentless. Then, after a while, I feel like some of her judging is moving towards me. It used to be pretty blatantly about me.

This evening we were talking about what we might do about a house, and her conversation eventually started veering towards how we shouldn't move into an unfinished house (we won't have a choice), and how ridiculous it is to have so much stuff, and how much work it will be to move it, and wouldn't it be better to live in a minimal way like she does? (She has also had to move from a big house where she had lots of stuff, to a small home with no basement and no storage, to an even smaller condo in the last 20 years. If we had to do that, we'd be forced to part with a lot of things too, and we wouldn't have all the stuff associated with animals, or all the tools and building supplies my husband has in the garage. It's not a fair comparison in lifestyles. She doesn't even have work clothes or barn jackets and boots, just town clothes. She also can't do any of the art or creative things I do because her hands shake, and they don't have a garden either, so there's not much valid comparison). Her lifestyle doesn't need hardly ANY of the stuff we have. She doesn't even really have hobbies except decorating, so what things she does own, is just what looks good.

I didn't lose my temper when she started saying things like "can you imagine trying to fit what you own into a small apartment, why bother keeping things that you just have in boxes" I just replied "well, we're not building a smaller home, we're trying to build one the same size as what we are living in right now" (which is about 1100 square feet, which is not huge). When she kept shooting down our plan for how we were going to stage the project (move the house to our property, put it on blocks and level it, hook up basic utilities and live in it that way until we can get our current home demolished and a basement built, then move the house onto the foundation), I just asked "well, how would you do it?' and she would just say something like "well, you just can't live like that" (we won't have a choice, unless we want to live in an RV for the summer with 4 cats and a dog, which is even worse than living in a house on blocks for the summer).

She talked about how hard it was going to be to live in an older home, as if we hadn't lived in a house that was almost demolished (when we lived in Wyoming, we bought our first home and spent 7 years renovating it, and made enough money on selling it to buy our acreage), and then have spent the last 11 years living in our current ancient trailer that has needed constant work to remain livable. I'm utterly confused about how she thinks we don't know what it's like to live in a home that requires extreme renovation.

The homes I've seen her living in were perfect in comparison to the homes we've had, but we will not have the luxury of just living somewhere else while someone builds us a perfect home that is all finished when we move in. Nope. One way or the other, we are either building a new home, in which case we will have to move into it long before it is finished, or we will be moving on an existing home that we will have to renovate. We don't have the money, or another place to live, to be able to tear down this house and live somewhere else for three or four months for a new build.

She doesn't seem to understand that we aren't building a bigger house to accommodate all of my stuff. We are building one because we HAVE TO. Our ancient trailer is a waste of money to keep maintaining.

Anyhow, I get edgy having other people in my kitchen making supper (she kind of takes over my house when they're here, so I feel like I'm staying at her house. I have to eat when she starts cooking, and then we all do dishes together because she never leaves dishes in the sink, and then you can feel her judging that I have too many dishes, and the kitchen isn't organized properly, and I feel like just leaving and letting her do her judging by herself).

It funny, because I don't hate them, but I don't like having them in my house, and I don't like staying at theirs. When they're at our house, I have to just give up the idea that it's my house and my life. They might compliment my pottery or the kitties, but then after a while, it feels like she starts trying to "fix" me, and that the house is hers now. My husband stops being my husband, and becomes their son. I don't feel like we get to be a husband and wife in their home, we end up being the kids.

I cleaned my house like a demon so that I would feel like it was good enough, but after a while she'll start to slip in the little comments..."where do these dishes go? I feel like there's no room for them in the cupboards".

They aren't awful, and I get along better with my sweetie's Dad, mostly because he doesn't have an opinion about my house, and doesn't start cooking or cleaning for me. He mostly just likes building stuff with my husband. However, I lose my normal role of being my husband's partner in building things. I end up feeling like I now have to be "one of the women", except that's not my thing, and my husband's Mom does the woman thing, so now I have no role to play. I just wander around, doing what I'm told.

I guess it's that my husband's Mom wants to be the MOM again, every time she's in my house. In charge, because I can't do it, I guess.

I can't even spend any amount of time at their house, because I feel like I have no free will at all. I can't go watch a movie, I can't do my art, I can't stay up late working on something, I can't do anything except for some group thing like play cards, or look at family pictures, or go for a group walk, and that's okay for maybe one day, but not three or four days. The problem is, when you live a distance from each other, your visits are for several days because you've travelled to see each other.

That said, if we lived close to each other, then we'd see them all the time. I guess what would be okay, is to meet them at a restaurant once or twice a month? Or have supper at their house once a month? Something where we could talk for a couple of hours, and then I could get my life back?

I can deal with having them here for one day, overnight one night, and then I can't do it anymore. Every time, I just end up exhausted because I can't sleep, feeling like I don't have a role to play (really, they just want to be my husband's parents and I don't want to play this game), and tired of having no schedule that makes sense to me.