The in-laws

Mothers say all sorts of things to their daughters,
in the hopes that their grains of wisdom will take root and be the beautiful flowers of thought for their offspring.

One of my mother's seeds was "When you marry someone, you marry their family too"
I was 16.... i thought "yeah, she kinda has a point, but whatever"

and once i had a boyfriend and absolutely loved his family. they were fabulous, truly. so when we split i regretted loosing them. this was the first time i really started to take in what my mother's words meant.

well, today, I see how her advice has germinated and flowered a family of portugese people that are now my in-laws.

And yet, in the timeless tradition of in-laws, they really are like weeds.
is that terribly mean? weeds that i haven't sprayed yet, but weeds.

and ultimately this is my blog, i don't have to sugar coat anything.
That and JD doesn't read it.

Where to start?
Well, generally we don't like our in-laws because it's family more or less "forced" upon us. When we already have enough problems with our own.
It's a group of people that don't share our own tightly wound social-personal ids and egos.
In-laws are people we will seemingly forever criticize because we'll never really know why they act the way they do.
And in my case, add slight culture shock to the mix.

So, i find myself surrounded by JD's immediate family. His mother, father and brother, and sometimes his aunts and uncles....and there's still more when we go to portugal... but i digress.

I've thought a lot about it. and my commentary and criticism comes back to this.
I am someone who is insatiably curious, and loves to discuss. I moved to a country where the national passtime is discussion and debate.
These qualities of curiosity and love of discussion are not cherished by my in-laws.
Because simply enough, they are not qualities they share.

With so many interesting discussions possible: me being American, they being Portugeese, their history of escaping the dictator St.Lazar, life in Paris in the 60 and 70's, our cultures, the differences between them, life in general, the news in general, the world we live in, the upcoming presidential elections in France, the recent elections in the States, the reproductive cycles of goldfish.... you get the idea.


And yet, his mother can go on and on and on about nothing. and she does, often.
her senseless chatter makes me numb after an hour or so.
and because she is quite the gabber, JD's dad - who is already a pathalogical introvert, never feels saying anything is appropriate. It is clear, discussion for him is painful. He is a man of action.
and then sometimes JD's parents do talk, to each other, and it's often in the form of disagrement and dispute.

fun. makes me feel like i'm 5. so they avoid talking in the same discussions.
wait, we don't ever really have discussions, he doesn't talk when she's talking, which is all the time.

And then there is JD's brother who had a stroke two years ago and now has a serious speech impediment. so he says only what he needs to.
this compounded by the fact that most of the time i'm a dumb-wit and am the only person to not understand what he's saying.

so here you have it.
the in-laws.
they're coming tomorrow and leaving monday.
at least mom-in-law will stuff us with lots of good food. and dad-in-law will stuff us with lots of good alchol. it make the chatter go down a lot easier.

maybe i'll have a Portugeese Thanksgiving after all.