Like I Have Time For This?

RegularDad’s family is, like, HUGE.

Seriously. There’s just tons of aunts and uncles and cousins and significant others, and squeezing in holiday visits to all of them in such a way that no one is unhappy or offended is something even Houdini couldn’t pull off.

Now, my family is small. There’s me, RegularSis, her husband and 2 babies, and our crazy mother. And that’s pretty much it. On RegularDad’s side, though, there’s at least 30 people. And they’re all crazy. In their own special ways.

This was the first time in 12 years that we were actually within driving distance of all of them at Christmas. And all I’m gonna say is that we managed to see just about all of them with only one crying session on my part, and only one instance of someone asking us: Now that you’ve bought a house here, will you be putting the kids in school?

The crying fit came as a result of my RegularDad’s mom insisting on wrapping the gifts I’d bought for people. For some reason, she just could not handle the fact that none of my gifts were wrapped by the time she arrived from Denver on the 22nd. She harped on it for two days. Every time I mentioned my plans to wrap gifts, she’d jump in and tell me that she would do it for me. At which point I would say, kindly: Oh no. You don’t have to do that. Which is my polite way of saying I would prefer to wrap my own gifts. That way I will know that everyone has the right gift and the tags will appear in my handwriting, ensuring that people will know that the gifts are from me and my family.

After two days of this, when I was finally ready to sit down and wrap, she immediately took over, taking my wrapping paper and bows and tags to the dining room table and proceeding to wrap everything. And all I’m sayin’ is: she’s a REALLY SLOPPY WRAPPER. And I am NOT a really sloppy wrapper. I actually take pride in how carefully and artfully I wrap gifts. It’s just one of my little quirks, okay? And there’s nothing wrong with being like that. And my MIL knows this about me. In fact, she comments on it every year around this time. And I smile and joke about it, saying things like: yeah, in my family, you had to pass Advanced Origami before you were allowed to wrap anything. But the truth is, I really like to make my gift wrappings as beautiful as possible.

But my MIL just doesn’t get that. And I suspect that she thinks I waste a lot of time over it. Because five minutes into the sudden TAKE OVER THE WRAPPING OF THE GIFTS EVENT she looked at me and said: Did you want me to wrap these nicely? and the tone of her voice indicated that I’d better not have wanted that at all. Because she was doing me a FAVOR, dammit, so I wasn’t allowed make comments about the shitty job she was doing.

At that point, the kids suddenly wanted to help, and before I knew what was happening, my 4-year-old had the scissors and was hacking up a tube of wrapping paper, and I yelled out: OKAY. THAT’S ENOUGH! YOU NEED TO STOP NOW.

And then my 7-year-old said: I’m gonna stay near Grandma because she’s nicer.

And that’s when I went into my bedroom and cried.

And then RegularDad stepped in and said: what the hell’s going on? And after we hashed through it all, he told his mother to leave me alone. And then she started crying and said she was sorry and that she had told herself to not take over but she did it anyway and it was all because she missed us so much, and blah blah blah, and then I felt bad because she was a guest and she was crying, and good hospitality indicates that One Should Not Make One’s Guest Cry During A Holiday Visit, so I brushed the whole thing off and we just moved on to dinner.

And then the next day she was scheduled to go spend a few days up at RegularDad’s brother’s house where she could content herself with taking over that household and driving them crazy. We were scheduled to go see RegularDad’s dad and stepmother and then to go see RegularSis and the small (and, might I add, patient!) contingent of people that is MY family.

And so, after the girls opened their gifts from Santa, and we’d eaten our traditional cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and RegularDad and I had both showered and dressed, my MIL was still sitting on the couch in her pajamas, flipping through some books I’d gotten the girls. And finally RegularDad asked: Mom, are you going to shower before you leave? And she said: Oh, well, I’m not in any hurry. I’ll just wait until you all leave and then I’ll get ready.

Which was a HUGE RED FLAG for us. Because she obviously wanted to be alone in our house. Probably to clean it. And to pack up my study with all it’s clutter of books and scraps of half-finished poetry and forgotten tea cups with dried up dregs in them. And then, of course, there’s my underwear drawer to sort through and fold. And all that laundry just sitting around begging to be washed.

She’s done this kind of thing before — come into our house when we weren’t home and cleaned it. It’s not the nice gesture that you think it should be. After she’s done cleaning, it take me days to find everything and put it all back in the right places again. Once she somehow managed to throw out every sanitary napkin I had in the house, and being post-partum at the time, I really needed those things. It was humiliating. And infuriating.

But this time, we weren’t having any of it. RegularDad took me aside and told me not to worry. That we wouldn’t leave until she did. And then he asked her again to get ready because we needed to leave to visit other family. And again, she insisted that she was in no hurry and would wait until we had left to get herself ready. And then RegularDad told her that it would be better for us — better for the girls — if we all left at the same time.

She seemed offended. Oh, I would have thought it was the other way around, she said, eyeing the girls as they played on the floor with all their new loot.

No, RegularDad said. And I loved him for it.

So she showered and dressed and packed her suitcases and we all left the house at the same time. I made sure the doors were locked after she was out. This time, she didn’t have a spare key. Thank God.

And so we headed out to see other family an hour and a half behind schedule.

I could tell you more stories like that from the 3-day whirlwind that was our Christmas With The Family, but I’ve gone on long enough. You get the idea.

It’s taken me a few days to recover from the ordeal, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where I could sit down at the computer and check my messages and write this whole thing out.

Now my days are filled with preparations for our move to the new house. Ironically, we will be moving into the house exactly one year after we got on a plane in Denver during a blinding snowstorm to move back east to be near the family.

This has been the longest move I’ve ever done.