New Year, New Life (19 months)

[adinva]

I still haven't answered anyone yet, so I guess I'm doing Alanon and didn't know it.

Thanks for understanding. My little problems are my biggest ones, even though I know a bunch of people here have bigger ones, and people in the world have even bigger ones. I downplayed the importance of my sitch to my neighbor saying that there were more terrible things happening in the world, and she said yeah but this is the most terrible thing happening to YOU right NOW. That's a fact.

So MIL. I'm leaning now toward just going. I've been thinking about 25's difficult vacation where she decided to just leave all the pain to sit for a while and she acted as-if for the whole trip. This is 2 hours to see MIL. Maybe it would be good for us.

I was very very disappointed to find that no one in my H's family CARED enough about me to ask me how I'm doing or acknowledge that I'm in a hard situation. If you ask them they'll say they care. But what they cared about more at Christmas was to avoid any unpleasantness my emotions might cause. That was very meaningful to me. But not every interaction has to be epic. This can just be lunch and not about the larger picture at all.

At some point I need to step back from being the puppetmaster of the relationship between H and his mom and H and our kids and MIL and our kids. That role was not appreciated by any of the other adults in this situation, and I was knocking myself out in vain. I went ahead and set up this lunch - again playing that role - and can start to step back after this an no harm done.

I do not think I would feel good about not going. I think I have more to gain by going with a smile, again.