And no, this isn’t about who you might think it’s about (although that also applies)
Seventeen years ago today, I married Mr T.
Our wedding was not fun.
Why?
Because his parents were there.
Heck, because his parents existed.
A month before we got married, Mr T’s parents – let’s call them Sly and Doris – called him and asked him if he was alone.
He was not. We were in the car together.
They insisted that they speak to him when I was not there.
I thought, “Perhaps they want to give me a present? Perhaps this is a discussion of a nice wedding present?”
Reader, it was not. Indeed, there was never to be anything anyone could describe as a “nice present” ever. Their gifts to us – gifts we did not want and tried to get them to stop by asking for a present detente where no presents were exchanged because we neither needed nor wanted stuff – included gems like the cheap Chinese pressed-board nesting tables painted with hummingbirds and hibiscus, about which, when Mr T asked how we could return them, Doris sniffed and claimed that my sisters-in-law loved. (They did not. I asked.)
Nope, the conversation was about how Mr T should not marry me and how I was marrying him only for his money and how his parents intended to boycott our wedding, to which I said, “GOOD I DIDN’T WANT THEM THERE ANYHOW.”
Mr T did not have any money.
I mean, he had a normal amount of money that a man who has put two people through college and supported a family with two children over the years would have.
I had more assets than he did, as I had only to put one person – myself – through college.
And Mr T was not set up to inherit great riches from his parents. Even if they had been really rich, he was not included in their will. All the money went to their grandkids.
Not to mention women who marry for money earn that money.
Anyhow they came to the wedding after all because it turns out I was, much to our surprise, pregnant and Mr T told them that if they wanted to see their grandchild ever, they would come to the wedding, even though I had no intention of honoring Mr T’s deal with his parents because I would not have let my child be around such mean, bitter people.
And then I had a miscarriage the week Sly and Doris were at our house.
But I didn’t tell them because I did not want them in my business.
And I had to have a D&C which who knows if I would be able to get that today, given all the shit that the regime is trying.
And I floated through the week on vicodin and anger, watching Sly and Doris, who stayed in our house, get drunk every night on our (expensive that we keep for guests but guests we like who don’t drink it by the tumbler) booze and eat all of our Good Cheese (Carr Valley, which can cost $24 a pound), and complain I wasn’t doing laundry right, that I didn’t make apple pie right, and that there was nothing to do because we don’t have a TV upstairs and don’t have cable.
Years later, I found out that one of the many reasons Sly and Doris did not like me was because of the way I eat bacon and nope, I am not making this up. On one of my first visits to their house, I peeled the loose, flabby, undercooked fat off my bacon and didn’t eat it.
Sly thought that was an insult to the chef (him) and had been stewing about it for years. He finally revealed this to Mr T in one of their regular weekly drunken (Sly and Doris drunk, not Mr T) mandatory phone calls.
Anyhow, that’s when I decided to stop caring about their opinion of me and live my life, but poor Mr T cared because people almost always care about what their parents think about them and his parents were mean to him and said horrible things like Doris was thinking about suicide because Mr T and I were not visiting them for Christmas (we had just gone there for Thanksgiving and damn isn’t that enough?).
For years, they were mean to him. And then Sly needed surgery and insisted that Mr T go to Florida to take care of him post-surgery.
FRIENDS WE DID NOT KNOW ABOUT REHAB CENTERS AT THE TIME.
But Sly apparently had refused to go to a rehab center and we didn’t know enough to say, NOPE. Instead, we just wondered what happened to people who didn’t have kids who would help them.
Mr T went to Florida to take care of his dad and worked late into the night on his job and got almost no sleep because Sly was immobile and wouldn’t do his PT and Doris was weak and both of them got drunk every day at 4:00 p.m.
And two months later, Sly fell on Doris and broke her knee. She went into the hospital and Sly had to go in for surgery and neither of them ever came out again. Doris died after six weeks in the hospital and Sly died six weeks after she did and Mr T was there almost the entire time, dealing with Doris’ begging him to bring her booze in the hospital and Sly demanding demanding demanding and Mr T calling me in exhaustion at night.
They both died.
They left a mess for Mr T to clean up – not including him in the will, which is their right, but then making him executor and trustee for the grandkids.
That was ten years ago.
And not once have I missed them.
Not once has Mr T missed them.
Indeed, as time has gone on, Mr T has gotten angrier and angrier at them as he realizes how dysfunctional his home was and how poorly he was treated.
And here I am, a decade later, still writing about how awful they were.
Because that is the legacy they created for themselves.
They did this.
I am so glad they are not here to be mean to Mr T anymore.
Texan in Exile 