October 25/13

Fancy, where the fuck have you been?

Well, living a half-life of unsettling and resettling.

We've moved.  With little fanfare and a lot of headaches, stress, aching backs and strained muscles and patience, we stopped being residents of the Golden Triangle, and became residents of the Market.  It's a long, complicated, rage-inducing story, but if we could write the book on how NOT to do a move, we would.  We spent most of September in packing and painting mode, and most of October in unpacking and settling-in mode.  I've thought about coming back to the blog on many occasions, but by the end of the day, I'd usually be tired exhausted and it's taken a lot of energy to try and settle into the new place with a new routine.

So it's strange that I have so many things every day that I could share here, but the one that pushes me back is my non-relationship with my father-in-law Etienne's dad.

I'm a difficult person, and admittedly, I set high expectations for people in my life, so I have trouble dealing with it when my expectations have created problems.  I own my part in this failure, and I'm often sorry for it, though there aren't usually opportunities to say so.  So if we've had any rifts in the past over it, I'd like to apologize.  I'm a work in progress, and I hope that I'm moving in the right direction.

Etienne's father and I haven't connected.  The fact is, our personalities clash. I always tell myself that I should work on improving the relationship because I don't want to be the cause of any troubles or rifts between father and son, but then something happens to upset me, and I'm back where I started.  There are so many reasons why I would not receive a seal of approval: I'm older, divorced, don't want children, and that's just for starters.  I'm also an atheist, an anglophone (to be fair, these are more about my own insecurity than anything that has been reflected in interactions with the father), and I'm strong-willed.  Ultimately, we come from different worlds, and there isn't much common ground to build a relationship on.

I want to encourage father and son to maintain a relationship--I know that as people age, they find comfort in their relationships.  I've also seen enough fences mended around me to know the benefits.  Furthermore, I was pretty traumatized when Rod's father suddenly past away, knowing that theirs was a close, loving father-son relationship cut short.  Family matters a great deal to me.  Mine, though not the model of a Norman Rockwell painting, is my rock, and I know despite the distance (both physical and emotional at times), we'd walk through fire for each other.  I don't want Etienne to have regrets about family, which compels me to work on bettering my relationship with his family.  Hopefully the French lessons will help bridge a lot of the gap (Oh, yeah, BTW, I'm in French classes), but the rest comes down to there being enough to at the very least build a creditable, polite relationship.

So all of this to say that in recent weeks, things have been said or inferred which indicate that I am facing an enormous amount of work with the father, and I have to be aware that because I can't "convince" his son to get married, I might be facing a doomed task.

Knowing I can't win them all (and frequently don't), there's not much more to do or say...just have to get back to work.

Because family matters...

...Wish you were here.