The holidays

I've been going back and forth on how to write this post.  Our holidays with the in-laws were, well, so-so.  Please forgive me in advance for my inability to maintain maturity.  :)

Dh got home safe and sound though a little sick and a lot jet-lagged.  His flight landed around 6pm on Wednesday and we left our house at 1pm on Thursday to drive the 10 hours to his parent's for Christmas.  I had made arrangements to stay at a pretty nice hotel about a 4 hour drive from our place that first night.

Things went really well that first day, just the two of us packing up and driving down.  We had a decent dinner at the hotel, but my allergies were bothering me and I ended the meal with a huge coughing fit that resulted in my peeing my pants (literally, pee dripping down my legs).

Dh was a super-champ about it -- what a harsh welcome back to pregnancy land!  I have coughing fits a lot so he's used to that, and the "I just peed my pants and have to go to the room" thing didn't seem to phase him.  He paid the bill and brought up all our luggage to the room by himself while I went and cleaned myself up and licked the wounds to whatever dignity I might have still had left after the last two years of IF.

We arrived at his parent's place just after dark the next day (Christmas eve).  We tied a bow around my belly.  When we walked in (and they didn't seem to notice) we said that we wanted to give them their big present early -- a granddaughter!

The reaction:
The mother-in-law: leans over and hangs her head over the counter.
The father-in-law: hugs me and immediately cheers congratulations.
Back to the mother-in-law: stands back up and says, "well, are you two happy about this?"

Needless to say, this was only half the reaction we expected.  It continued to get worse, as my being pregnant became the elephant in the room that no one would talk about except Dh and me.  Dh would constantly refer to my being pregnant, to our daughter on the way, etc.  FIL asked a couple of questions here and there over the next 5 days but MIL was pretty pissed and wouldn't acknowledge the conversation topic.

And she wouldn't feed me.  She's got this weird thing about food where she is ridiculously miserly in the servings.  This is a mixed blessing because she's a terrible cook.  I typically think of my visits to their house as an opportunity to go on a little diet, but I can't do that right now.  I feel really sick if I don't eat, and I need to eat food I feel good about.  Her food does not fall under that category by any definition (i.e., lots of instant and low-quality stuff that isn't cooked quite right).  Add on the fact that she has apparently given up using dish soap, and you'll understand why I was pretty concerned about getting food poisoning.

So she was also pissed that we brought some food with us (like steel-cut oats to cook for breakfast instead of eating through the 10-year old 50 pound bag of oatmeal she got at the mormon church for a good price, except that it was a good price because it hadn't been husked quite right and contains sharp pieces that do not qualify as "oats").  And I took real milk because watered-down instant milk just sucks.  And fresh veggies, I took fresh veggies because frozen celery reheated in the microwave is disgusting.

She was additionally pissed about what a pig I am.  She kept trying to only give me super meager servings, like part of a banana or apple.  Apparently in her world these fruits should be shared by at least 2-4 people per piece.  At the first breakfast Dh forcefully pushed back and said that I was going to eat the whole banana because I am pregnant and need to.  I loved that he defended me and was looking out for little M, but it pissed me off royally that every meal was a fight and lead to bad feelings all around.  Such a contrast to my family that kept pushing me to finish off the last bits of particularly healthy foods.

Christmas dinner absolutely sucked.  She made instant mashed potatoes (that I can barely stomach even to be polite), a "pork roast" that looked and tasted a lot like a roll of bologna (which again, I don't care for and shouldn't eat right now; Dh doesn't even like pork, needless to say faux pork), and some stale roles that a neighbor made and mailed special for Dh to have.  Yes, I said that she mailed them...  I insisted on making salad, professing a craving.  She had planned on making a salad that consisted of one leaf of lettuce split between four people.  I augmented with a lot more lettuce and other veggies (that she insisted they were allergic too and couldn't eat -- are people really allergic to cucumbers and bell peppers? that was a new one for me).  That worked out ok though because at least Dh and I had salad to fill our bellies. 

Dh tells me that he spent quite a bit of his childhood kind of hungry.  This makes me very, very sad.

We did try to go out to eat a couple of times, but this was equally bad.  MIL complained and complained about how the restaurant was terrible compared to what it was 20 years before, had been "junked up by prostitutes" (explanation: any woman not dressed ridiculously modestly is a prostitute in her mind), a waste of money, too loud, we were all eating too much, etc.  Pick your poison, literally.

One of the particularly hard things about this food situation for Dh is that his dad just finished radiation therapy for his cancer.  He was a very thin man to begin with but lost about 30 pounds over the last few months.  He's been sent to nutritionists because he seriously needs to gain weight.  But his wife controls all the food in the house and she won't feed him more than what he was eating before the cancer, when he was maintaining a very thin weight.  But even worse, she read somewhere that sugar feeds cancer cells (note: sugar feeds ALL cells) so she won't let him put sugar on his oatmeal in the morning anymore.  Needless to say, between the partial servings and the disgusting food, he's hungry but not gaining any weight.  This was so hard for Dh as he can see that his mother is making his father more sick.  We tried to make suggestions or to make things that FIL liked and would eat lots of (like my steel-cut oats, of which he'd eat more than a serving at every breakfast), but it just kept pissing his mom off more and more.

The visit did not end on a good note.  I hadn't seen Dh so perky since he's been back as he was the morning we were leaving.  I almost asked him to tone it down, except at that point I was so irked too that I just didn't care.

Overall, it was good to see his parents.  They've had a really tough 6 months and I can imagine that his mom is in a really emotionally complicated place.  But it was still hard to endure all the complaining, negativity, and meanness, especially about little M and especially towards their son who is really excited about his daughter. 

One wonderful side bonus to having little M next time we go down there is that we'll have the perfect excuse to stay in a hotel instead of their trailer.  The place is just too dang small, and in all honesty, I wouldn't want my little baby in a place that hadn't been vacuumed in about a year.  It was gross...  (I'm so mean, I know it.  Please forgive me.)

It's great to be home.