Between a rock and a hard place.

[gottawonder]

Tonight while I was just sitting and thinking, I started thinking about all of the people who will want to come and see our house once it's at a livable point. Our house is kind of a celebrity, because it's a nice old house with wood floors and character, and everyone who visits says "this is the house we always wanted" or "this is the kind of house my grandparents had", and it's like we should have done a reality show about our "journey".

Of course, my husband's parents will want to come visit again. I had a really hard time with their visits this summer, because whenever they come, I feel like I do not have control over my home. I'll wake up and find my husband and his parents working on some project outside together, and that would normally be something my husband and I would do together. So I feel like my role has been taken away, and now my job is what...to go make lunch? To fawn over the menfolk? I sometimes try to join in and help, but instead of feeling like I'm working with my husband, I feel like I'm a kid working for his parents.

Then his Mom takes over the job of being head of the household. She'll just take over cooking and cleaning. She'll literally do things like tell me I need to go find a clean table cloth, placemats, and napkins, and she pulls everything off the table when we're done eating to go in the laundry after one use. Yet, it's her decision too, to pull everything off the table. She walks around the kitchen and cleans everything. When they were helping us move things into the new house, she actually started putting things in the living room like she was decorating it for me, arranging my pottery and vases in a way that was visually pleasing to her. I came in from outside on the first evening we had the dining room table in the new house, to find supper being made, and the room decorated to her taste, and being welcomed into the house like it belonged to his parents, not to us.

His Dad can seem okay for long stretches of time, but he always ends up making some kind of sexist comment or stupid awful sexual joke or whatever that ends up really offending me. For example, on our anniversary, his parents were here helping us move our stuff from the trailer we tore down, to the new house that we'll be putting onto a basement soon. We had another couple over for supper, and it was all nice and good (except my sweetie's Mom was still acting like we were all guests at her new house), and we drifted towards weddings we've been to (a natural topic on our anniversary). So his Dad has to say "so a groom can wear any nice suit to be married, but a bride has to wear a white gown, why do you think that is?" (We all know that he's leering inside, snickering about how women are supposed to be virgins while no one expects a husband to be one). So, I say "Because this Queen Victoria wore a white gown for her wedding, and it became something everyone else copied, and before you know it, it's the norm". This is true, by the way. He shouts "No! It's because women have to be virgins, and white is for virginity" blah blah blah. He has to make it a dirty, chortling joke about how men get to have lots of sex and no one cares, but women have to be virgins, and men get to have sex with a virgin on their wedding night, HRR HRR HRRR HRRRRRRR! I was pissed off, and replied that very few women are virgins anymore, the white dress is not even that important to everyone, and it's all just a fantasy. Then he says "oh, but women USED to have to be virgins!" I said "No, it just had to be that women were good at pretending to be virgins on their wedding day".

Anyhow, at some point he always has to be gross. Like me complimenting him on his belt, so he demonstrates how he can pull his pants off if he loosens his belt. He literally pulls his pants down and laughs about standing in my yard in his underwear. That's just sexual harassment, and if a stranger did that to me he could be charged with indecent exposure. With him, it's just supposed to be funny, and I'm supposed to...laugh?

Then, this last time working together on tearing the trailer down, three times he brushes either my ass or my boobs, and now I'm just done.

I've put up with his parents taking over my home whenever they come, swanning around with wine glasses in their hands like they're at a resort, treating me like either a child or a servant, or just someone who doesn't really belong at all (in my own home), because they're really here to see my husband, for about 20 years now. I've put up with the gross sexist crap coming from his father (though his father would also say that he is actually very supportive of women, and maybe he is as far as them working and going to college, but he still treats them like sex objects).

Again, this isn't to say that they are horrible all the time. This is the hard part. I know they've come to help us several times, when they came to help us build the garage, and this time to help us move and tear down the trailer, and to help build some fence (though I was perfectly capable of helping my husband do this, we did all the rest of it together).

I can spend some time with them and it's okay, but something always happens to piss me off. Again, either his Mom makes me feel like I'm not an adequate woman, and she takes over my house, or it bothers me that she has to drink all the time and tries to pretend she's not an alcholic. Both of my husband's parents drink a lot, and though they don't get drunk during the day, it's non-stop beer and wine, and I don't really drink, and my husband might have A beer on his own is suddenly drinking two or three beer a day, wine with supper, hard stuff after.

I've noticed that now his Mom tends to drink a few glasses of wine together at supper, and she starts to go into this drunken rant, usually about how hard her life has been, or how everyone else in the family needs to fix their lives (and she knows how they should do it, too). The last time she started doing this, I just cut her off and left the table. I don't need to hear about how she's fixed her life by "just getting over" some random sexual abuse she never really clarifies, but her sister is a failure because instead she's just eating herself to death. She just thinks her sister should smarten up and go on a diet, and I tried to say that when a person is emotionally damaged, it's very different, and she just slurs on about how "she learned to love herself", while totally missing the irony of her being an alcoholic all these years. Only, she's not an alcoholic, right? So she's fine.

Basically, the whole time they're here, I'm on edge, I feel out of control, and I always know something awful and uncomfortable is going to happen, even if I can have stretches of time with them that are okay.

I just don't want them in my life anymore. I think that I've given it a fair go, 20 years of consistently not liking them is enough, isn't it?

So, I got thinking about how, before you know it, his folks are likely going to want to come here again to visit the house that they will undoubtedly think they have an ownership of in some part, because of their help.

I told my husband that I don't want them here. I'm done hosting that shit show. I'm done feeling like a second class citizen in my own home. I don't want to have to tolerate his Dad's sexual harassment, and his Mom's drunk rants.

I know he loves them. I know he's blind to how gross his Dad is, and how drunk his Mom is. He can go visit them.

I know this hurts my husband, because he loves having them here. I'm not sure how to tell them that I'm not up to having them here anymore. I just know that tonight, the mere thought of having them here again brought me to rage. I'm sick of them.