It’s been seven months since the fateful text message I sent to Fun Sink, in which I asked her to loop me in on the plans she makes with my kids. There never really was a resolution to any of it, but looking back I think it has been a net positive, because it exposed who Fun Sink really is, and what she really thinks of me. It’s liberating, because I truly no longer care about what she thinks. This is especially convenient as we approach the Christmas season.
We don’t see Fun Sink as much as we did before. I look at it as a natural consequence that she has to face for the way she acted. When I see her, I’m nice to her, and she’s nice to me. But I know how she really feels about me, and she knows how I really feel about her, and we both know the other one knows. When the kids have activities or plans with friends on Friday nights, those take precedence. If Fun Sink wants to schedule a Friday night a few weeks ahead of time to celebrate something special, that’s fine too. I’m not trying to keep any grandkids away from any grandparents, but my kids are onto her too. (More on that in another post.) Just like the consequences that resulted after the way she treated my brother-in-law, she has only herself to thank for seeing my kids less.
I am so excited for Christmas this year, and I realized a big part of it is that I don’t care if she sees our tree. I. Don’t. Care. I used to be really stressed about it because I didn’t want to damage her relationship with my husband because of the tree that I insisted on, but now the damage has been done—by her—so WHO CARES? She also already knows about the tree. In one of the conversations my husband had with her about how awful I am, she said to my father-in-law, “Yeah…Twinkle had to have a Christmas tree because her mom died and her dad needed somewhere to celebrate Christmas so they just had to have a tree.” She is an awful person. This year I’m Christmas-ing it up, and not the *slightest* bit stressed about what she thinks about it.
I guess, this many months later, I feel like I know who she is. I know she’ll never like me. I know she never even tried. She tells herself that she’s this wonderful, giving, kind person, who opens her home to everyone, but she put me down since Day One, and she still does. She did it at Thanksgiving. She does it every chance she gets, and now when it happens, I know what’s going on, so I don’t let it bother me so much. Or at all.
I do feel bad for my husband. We watched a dumb Lifetime Christmas movie last night starring Terri Hatcher as an influencer who finds love post-divorce with a man who runs a family business chalet resort in Aspen, and in the movie his French mother was so sweet to her. It actually makes me sad, what could have been. I’m a nice person; I get along with everyone —except Fun Sink. If she had just accepted me and treated me with basic kindness, if she had received me with gladness since I make her son happy, if she ever once gave me credit for these wonderful children that Husband and I have raised, it could have been a normal, loving, equal, friendly, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship. It makes me sad when I see mothers-in-law being kind to their daughters-in-law, in movies or in real life, because I wish I had that. I also can’t BELIEVE it when I see a mother actually accepting and being nice to the girl her son likes. It could have been so different.
I also know how much it hurts to lose a mother. I don’t want my husband to have any regrets about his relationship with his mother after she’s gone, and I certainly don’t want to be the source of that hurt. So that’s a real concern for me, and it’s something I’d like to figure out before it’s too late. I don’t know how, because she hates me, and keeping my distance from her is an act of self-preservation. That one aspect is complicated for me.
More on Thanksgiving and Fun Sink’s controlling ways in a future post…
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