Ok, so I asked what else I could write about to day and Karen asked the following:

Maybe you could talk about meeting and getting to know A’s family?

Wow, what a doozie of a question.  I will do my best.

A and I had been hanging out off and on for about six months.  We finally started "dating" about three weeks before he left for China in August 1996.  And by dating, of course I mean hooking up.  I was pretty protective of my affections at that point in time so there were many tragic scenes where A would passionately say "I just love you SO MUCH."  Total snot that I am, I would reply, "Um, well I COULD love you, but you’re moving to China."  Ah, college romantic drama.

After A had filled the first few months after he left with the most heart-stoppingly beautiful letters describing China (and how much he hated it).  Being young and in possession of too much scholarship money and a passport I decided to visit him.

When I was leaving for China, A’s mom asked (via his sister) if I could take some stuff to China for him.  Happy to comply, I agreed.  A few days before I left, I found a bag on my porch with the following items:

• A gigantic chinese-english bible
• cans of Chinese wheat gluten
• cans of bamboo shoots
• cans of Chinese mushrooms
• Ramen noodles

Yes, that is right my friends, his mom sent CHINESE FOOD to CHINA.  And she sent a huge Chinese-English bible, despite the fact that A is not at all religous (hasn’t gone to church since he was very young) AND he doesn’t read chinese.  She sent so much crap it almost entirely filled my little carry-on suitcase and it weighed a ton.  You tell me, who thinks you can’t get CHINESE FOOD in CHINA?  That is practically all they eat there!

I should have suspected at that point that something was weird about his family.

I didn’t actually meet MIL in person until several years later.  A and I went to a rather benign dinner to celebrate his older sister’s admission to medical school.  I was very nervous, but no one really paid much attention to me.

A year after that (1998), A and I went to Cambodia for the summer.  While we were there, we got the news that his younger sister had had "a nevous breakdown." while she was visiting his dad who was living there temporarily.  This was right before A’s second year of law school started.  After we went to Hong Kong, he flew to Taiwan to see what was going on with his sister.  It turned out that she had suffered from a very serious psychotic break and was in the psych ward in a Taiwanese hospital where no one spoke English.  A flew back with her to Ohio and contemplated taking a leave of absence from Law School to take care of her. 

In protest of that plan, I went over to his older (not crazy) sister’s house to talk her into telling him to stay in school.  In a rather embarrassing interaction, I told her all about my old, dead-from-suicide boyfriend and how I had cared for him during the final year of his life.  I was convinced if I became the caregiver for his other sister, he would never finish school.  Older sister was very sympathetic and pretended to ignore the high level of embarrassment I felt at crying at only our second meeting.

Needless to say, A stayed in law school and I moved out to San Francisco to live too. The next summer, we moved back to ohio and each lived with our parents.  That was when A’s dad married the ukranian mail order bride.  I didn’t see his family during that year, but I heard a lot about that fiasco.

The next time I really saw A’s family was on one of the most painful weekends of my entire life: A’s law school graduation.  You can click the link because I can’t bear to type out that nightmare again.

That was followed by the truly hideous things she said after M was born (it is in the 6th paragraph although that visit is truly worthy of a post of its own) and then by the way she tried to sabotage our wedding.

Basically, there was very little that was good about getting to know A’s family for the first couple years.  It has only been in the last 1.5 years that I have become more sympathetic with their (combined) mental illness.  I am finding myself less irritated and better able to put up with their complete and total lack of boundries and the plethora of eccentricities they bring to the table.

That being said, A’s older sister and her husband have been amazing.  I love hanging out with them.  BIL runs a local Asian professional group and is active in the Asian community, so it makes it really easy for our family to stay plugged in and be accepted there (for M & the future kids’ sake).  They are getting ready to move for a couple years for a job for SIL, but we are hoping, hoping, hoping that they will come back when that job is over. Especially now that she is pregnant and her baby will be about the same age as our next kid.

I have been working on adopting a very Zen/flexible  attitude where they are concerned.  I don’t always succeed and I still dread visiting with the inlaws (MIL mostly).