Yesterday, I explained the overarching history that has led to the problems that Barney and I currently face in relation to spending time with his family. Today I am going to focus more on the concrete details so that you can get a better picture of what the situation looks like from a day-to-day perspective. The issues have always been present, but the daily actuality of what they look like has definitely changed a lot from the early days in our marriage. In the beginning, I felt like an 11th wheel in his family. I felt like Barney would spend all of his time with his brothers, doing activities that excluded me and leaving me to fend for myself with his sisters, whom I believed as a whole did not enjoy being around me.
The situations remains the same in that I constantly feel like I am left alone to fend for myself as Barney plays with his brothers all day and night, but I am much more comfortable being around his family now. Instead, the issues arise because I feel like I am left to to figure out how to assume all of the childcare responsibilities for both children while continuing to maintain all of my work (I don't get vacations--the downside of working from home), and also trying to spend time with his family and getting to do the fun activities for the girls. When we fight about this, and we do a lot, Barney always insists that his mother wants to take care of the children and that I should just leave that to her so that I can work and do stuff with the girls.
I agree that his mother dotes on our children and loves taking care of them. However, she has eight grandchildren, ranging from George at three years to a three week old baby. She also has a husband, seven children, and five son and daughter-in-laws to feed, clean up after, and manage to generally keep organized and under control. That amounts to twenty two people under one roof, just to save you some math.
Here are some recent specific examples of things that have happened relating to this situation:
Yesterday, I really wanted to go shopping to see if I could find any after-Christmas sales on a few specific items. All of the girls planned to go during naptime to make things easier on the guys. However, once the guys realized that it was naptime, they decided to go to the local gym to work out, leaving one brother-in-law at home with all eight children (3 and under), including that brother-in-law's three week old son. At this announcement, I was absolutely furious with them. If any other the other children woke up before someone returned, the one left behind would be in a big bind, because his son was not sleeping and required constant attention. I felt like I had three bad options: 1. to make a big scene and demand that at least Barney if not all of the boys (all of whom but one are fathers of these grandchildren) stay at the house in case one of their kids woke up. 2. stay home from shopping or 3. go knowing that I was leaving behind a potentially disastrous situation.
Another recent example occurred on Christmas Eve, when I had twenty four essays that I had to grade and return that day. Barney was aware of the situation, but he spent the morning at the gym, followed by a movie, followed by a soccer match outside (no kids allowed). This meant that I had to spend all of my time grading and trying to care for my children at the same time and thus was completely unable to help cook or clean dinner. I feel like this makes the other girls resent me and feel like I do not contribute to my share of the responsibilities.
These types of situations literally occur multiple times a day when we stay with Barney's family, so I will only offer up one other example from this trip on the assumption that I have hopefully given a pretty clear picture of how things stand. One of the days we were here (they are all starting to run together), it was Barney's day to get up with the children, which he did without complaint. I got an extra hour and a half of sleep (and gratefully so) on the assumption that he was downstairs taking care of the children. However, when I got up and went downstairs, I learned that Barney had gone with a couple of the other guys to work out, leaving his mother and any other girls who were awake to take care of our children in addition to their own. While I had no idea that this was the situation, I feel like it made me look like I was shirking off my childrearing responsibilities while just assuming that someone else would take care of the kids for me.
Barney feels totally justified in his actions. I think that this is in part because none of the other wives seem to take nearly as much umbrage to things as they currently stand. I have theories about why this is (and all of them could be self-justification, I am coming to realize). But, I'm going to explain them anyway. There are four sisters and two daughter-in-laws in the family, including me. Of these six, only two of us work full time. The sister who works full-time is single and has no children. All of the rest are stay-at-home wives whose primary responsibility is caring for the children (though others two do work part time from home). I am the only woman who has to work when we are on these trips, and so I am the only person who actually assumes a lot more responsibility than normal when we are here versus when we are at home. For everyone else, being here is actually less responsibility because of the collective nature of taking care of the kids coupled with the relative lack of cooking and housework, which means that it is not a big deal that the guys' agenda rarely includes helping out with the children or any other domestic activities.
That is the situation as it stands, as explained to the best of my ability. My goal is to change my perspective of the situation, my attitude towards the way that his family operates, and my expectations of what I think I "deserve" when we are visiting my in-laws. Tomorrow I will write about my progress at this point and my attempts at bringing about positive change.
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