Away From Home For the Holidays

Not a good, old-fashioned Georgia Christmas for me this year, but a (probably) stressful New York Christmas instead.  It is with some trepidation that I agreed to go to New York, my husband’s home territory, for Christmas to visit his parents.  It may sound odd that someone like myself who has been to several foreign countries and within the U.S. has traveled as far away as California, should be nervous about going to New York.  I feel like Dr. McCoy who still refers to himself as a “simple country doctor” even though he’s light years away from Earth on a spaceship exchanging witty banter with an alien.  It isn’t just New York that gives me cause for worry.  It’s where we’ll be staying while we’re there…with the in-laws…whom I’ve never met.  Yep, two and a half years into my marriage and I’ve never met my husband’s parents or siblings.  I feel like I’m some sort of embarrassing family secret.  

In reality it isn’t that my husband’s embarrassed because of me.  He just has no sense of proper social convention and customs and has neatly compartmentalized his married life as separate from his “other” family life.  In his mind, these bubbles don’t overlap.  If it weren't for me he'd probably wait to introduce me to his parents at our child's high school graduation (and we don't currently have children). It hasn’t helped that I was in the Army for the entirety of our engagement and the first year of our marriage and not always available to travel whenever he went to visit his parents.  Still, it makes for an awkward time of things now. Not only am I meeting them but I’m staying in their house for several days.  I wouldn’t even want to spend Christmas sleeping over at my own parent’s house, much less someone else’s.  I’m weird like that.  

There’s a reason the in-law situation has a bad rap in most families….it’s true.  In-laws see their child’s spouse as not being good enough and are often more critical of them than they are their own children.  In return, the spouse resents interference from the in-laws because “They’re not my parents” and any advice is considered (either correctly or incorrectly) meddling.  This makes for a tense situation.  This is precisely the type of situation I hope to avoid.  So, all I have to do is make a good first impression, smooth over any hard feeling his parents have about never having met me before, get in good with his siblings, carry on conversations with everyone over the course of several days, chip in around the house by helping to cook the Christmas meal, take care of my two pets that are coming with us, keep myself busy and occupied during the inevitably long periods of time my husband will be sleeping, and enjoy my Christmas.  Sounds easy….I got this.