A shitload of baggage

It's been one of those days when I couldn't even finish a thought without being interrupted. Everything I started, even if it was only a ten-minute task, seemed to take for-freaking-ever because it was either the phone ringing or being paged or someone coming in my office. It was unbelievable.

At one point right after lunch, I walked over to our accounting building and when I got back my voice mail light was blinking. I punched in my codes and lo and behold, it was good old SG asking if he could bill retainage on a job he did for EPOD about six months ago. Now normally, I would erase the voice mail and go track down EPOD to find out the answer. But somehow, I forgot all about that part of it and ended up wandering around the building for twenty minutes looking for EPOD to ask the question and totally forgot to actually hang up my voice mail. Which happened to be on speakerphone. And stuck in permanent "Make your selection now" mode. Luckily, The Fox was in a decent mood and we shared a good laugh about my tunnel vision. But honestly, that was probably the most I accomplished all day.

Mentally, I'm not in a very good place right now. The in-laws' extortion attempt has really eaten away at me and I'm having a really hard time dealing with it. I think the biggest realization is that my husband is afraid to even mention his parents to me anymore because of my shitty reactions and that makes me sad. Really sad that it ever got to this point. We had a really long talk last night and a lot of stuff got unloaded, one of the biggest things being my admission that I still kind of resent the fact that for years he took his parents' side against me every time we had one of our little skirmishes. Whether my feelings were right or wrong, I felt like he totally invalidated my feelings about the way they treated us and it has bugged me the whole time.

I don't enjoy being pissy about my in-laws. I don't enjoy being physically ill every time I know I have to see them. I don't enjoy knowing that nine times out of ten, they will pull some stupid bullshit stunt every time we see them which will leave me reeling for days. I miss the way things used to be when we all got along and respected each others' boundaries. Now we have been reduced to adversaries in competition for the love of one person.

On one hand, I feel bad for Joey. As the son of an alcoholic, he falls into the role of "peacemaker" all of the time. Always afraid of being criticized, of not being good enough, of being rejected, and of making people unhappy. He's not only this way in his personal life, he's that way in business too and I think he's beginning to see this with a little more clarity. What worries me is that he has gotten to the point where he bottles stuff up inside instead of sharing with me because he's scared of my reaction. Yeah, I tend to have a pretty crappy attitude when it comes to my in-laws, but after all that they've done who exactly can blame me? I can put on a happy face until the cows come home, but that doesn't change how my heart hurts and my stomach does flip-flops every time I have to deal with them at all.

As for the money part, the agreement has been that he will give his parents half of the money for the air conditioner - his brother will hopefully chip in a quarter of it, leaving a quarter of the cost for his parents to pony up. I'm not really confident in his brother's participation, but at this point I'm just so tired of worrying about it that I just want it all over with.

One thing I want, though, is for Joey to go spend a weekend with his parents and have a real sit-down with them about their financial situation. We really have no idea what they do and don't have, and the fact that they had to ask for money yet again has me really disturbed. I think Joey worries too, but he's stuck his head into the sand and tried to avoid dealing with it. He believes that his parents won't share any financial information with him, so I say play hard ball - no info, no money. Period. End of story. We have our own retirement, Monkey Man's college, and a big-ass mortgage that we're responsible for, and if we end up having to supplement them on a regular basis when they are both 63 years old, we are soooo screwed. Or at least we will be unless we get some kind of plan in place.

About two years ago, I tried to change how I felt about my in-laws. Obviously, they did something right in that Joey is honestly one of the greatest people I have ever known in my entire life. We used to all get along until all the crap started. And I know I can't control them - but I can control how I react to them. My biggest problem with that is that I can't stop this cycle of hatred that has lodged itself in my belly like a cancer. "Our number one sticking point in our marriage is my parents," said Joey last night, "and that's not a problem that's going to go away."

No, it's not. And I just don't know how to handle this anymore, because I am fucking exhausted.