more baggage to unpack
June 04, 2015

Spouse and I have differing philosophies when it comes to family; I have issues, I keep low contact--but I do feel there are times when I have to make myself available. He, on the other hand, is very good at totally blowing off any potentially unpleasant family interaction, and cannot understand why I feel the way I do.

Plus, I think it really bothers him that my family treats me like leftover dirt and he hates to watch me put myself out for them when they never return the favor. He sees this weekend as me wasting my valuable time and money on a fool's errand. He knows it stresses and depresses me, and he just doesn't get why I put myself through it. Unfortunately, this ends up causing tension between the two of us and stressing me out even more.

I have my reasons for wanting to go; I also have plenty of reasons for NOT wanting to go. But I want to see the baby and the new parents, and I want to see Dad, and I just have to put up with the rest of the shit in order to do so.

Spouse doesn't know the half of it, anyway. All the crap that comes floating to the surface when I start thinking about the way I've always been treated by my family. The 90% of issues I had with Mom that I never ever told him about.

I've probably mentioned before how my mom never really allowed me to feel like I owned anything. Anything I had could be appropriated at any time, if she felt she wanted or needed it. (Example: when I was abut 10, my mom decided she needed a watch for work, but didn't want to spend the money on one. So she took my official Girl Scout watch away from me, wore it herself for months, eventually managed to lose it--and pinned the blame for its loss on me!)

And somehow--this kind of thing was considered perfectly normal behavior. It eventually spread to my whole family. They were all conditioned to accept that taking things from whyme is perfectly fine. And I was equally conditioned, I guess. At any rate, I was not brought up to have the tools to defend myself against it.

And they still do it--even my dad. He raided the jewelry my mom left for me and gave a ring to to my SIL, even before he gave the box to me. He pressured me to take another of them and give it to the other SIL. And he called me last night to ask if a particular (fairly valuable) ring was in that box--because if it was, he wanted it back. So he could give it to my cousin. (It wasn't. But even if it had been, I would have told him no. Because DAMN!)

I know that I will always be the one to be inconvenienced. To be my spending time, money, and gas to travel out of state to attend any function, because there are more of them than there are of me. And that is, in the short term, fair. (add the trips up over the course of a few decades, the math is a little different.) But I still feel like I have to go.

But I know Spouse doesn't like it, or think it fair (in my heart of hearts, I think he prefers that only HE be accorded the privilege.). He hates my SSIL even more than I do, I think--she is very much the type of N his mother was, and she drives him nuts.

But we are always going to disagree on this subject, because I am willing to suffer a lot of bad for a relatively small amount of good, and he doesn't believe that any amount of good is worth suffering any amount of bad for.

Oh, well--it will feel so good when it stops, right?