How Long is Too Long

I've whined on here a variety of times about issues that we have had with my inlaws. They have ranged from simple things like hurt feelings or bigger things like that World War that has gone on for the better part of last year.

Saturday things started out fairly normally for us. We had an early appointment to take our dogs to the groomers. And by early I mean, it should be evil and illegal to get up at 7am on a Saturday morning. We decided that we were going to stop by a local supermarket that has a deli and makes fabulous breakfast quesadillas. Little did we know the interesting turn that day would take.

John's sister, who was a former employee, was back working in the deli. Talk about surprises. We weren't expecting to see her there, and neither of us was sure how we should react. We chatted with her a little, but not much. We sat down and had breakfast, and as we were preparing to leave, John's parents (whom I hadn't seen or talked to since July) walked in. Talk about surprise. We sat at United and chatted with them for quite some time, then the kicker. They invited us over for dinner.

Yeah, I know. We agreed, simply because we couldn't talk amongst ourselves without them overhearing.

We debated about it the better part of the afternoon until we got a text message asking for us to bring some items to contribute to dinner. Here was the opportunity to get out of dinner if we needed to.

Neither of us wanted the last year to have been swept under the rug and things just to sorta trudge along. We wanted all of the issues from the last year, and honestly from the beginning of our marriage to be all nice and worked out and finished for once. So John sent a text message about how we needed to deal with all of this, and would they be willing to have this conversation over dinner tonight. They agreed.

I don't know about John, but I was really worried about how things were going to go. Amazingly so, they went better than I could have thought. I think that John's parents have a better understanding of our marriage, and of several other issues.

We did get some insight into problems with his brother and wife and sister. Which over the course of the next few weeks/months we will be sitting down and working things out with them as well. It's not something I'm looking forward too, in fact it's something that I dread, more so with the siblings than with the inlaws.

There is a lot of misunderstandings all around. A lot. And there is a lot of people who don't have the guts (myself included) to comment to the person that they have the problem with and attempt to work things out. Which I could understand when we got married, Brad and I were young, there was a lot going on in his family at the time that it was easy to just sweep it under the rug and never deal with it. So we did. And 12 years later we are finally attempted to deal with it.

I'm hoping that the next several months will allow us to at least attempt to repair these relationships, and allow us to, in a since start over. Because to be honest, I haven't attempted much effort in the last few years to get to know any of them. It all seemed like it went down hill and that I got tired of trying, and I got tired of it always being my fault. No matter what happened, it was always my fault. That wasn't something that thrilled me either. So here's hoping that we can all put on our big girl/boy panties and deal with this stuff now, once and for all.