Last Shreds Of Sanity

Those MomDotters are at it again...Small talk Six! On Saturdays.Today’s topic is "6 things (good or bad) that you credit your mother-in-law for". You can answer this with a list of 6 words, 6 phrases, 6 sentences. 6 paragraphs, 6 photos, 6 videos, etc...

Oh Lord, this is a hard one for me. My MIL and I had a contentious relationship. And that is putting it nicely. She did some awful things to me in 20 years. It has not been good. But she died suddenly this past May and I am not sure what to do about this topic. I'm not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but then again, it's all true. OY!!

Here ya go...

1) NOT teaching my Husband about God. She bitched and moaned about us not getting married in the Catholic Church, but she never made her kids go. They never even had their First Communion! And I'm not Catholic.

2) Causing huge fights between my Husband and I because of her behavior towards me. My Husband didn't want to admit that she {And his sister} were purposefully doing things to hurt me and cause trouble. It wasn't until she refused to hold The Diva because we told her to wash her hands first {Doctor's orders}, that he finally fully acknowledged it and stood up to her. It only took 15 years and her {And other family members'} mistreatment of our newborn daughter to do it!

3) Us getting married in Las Vegas. We had it all set. A beautiful little stone chapel, all our friends and family, my Uncle giving me away, a reception...then she and my Husband's sister invited a bunch more people to our wedding without consulting us or offering to pay for the extra people {We were paying for it ourselves}. The chapel only held 125 guests and we had invited 110 ourselves. When I found out, my Husband said "Let's just go to Vegas". So we did. And his family showed up. This would have been fine if my MIL and SIL hadn't acted like such royal bitches the whole time. I have wedding photos I can't even look at now because of the looks on their faces.

4) My wedding dress being two sizes too big and missing huge pieces of lace. She offered to make my wedding gown as long as we got married in a church in SoCal. I gave her the picture of what I wanted and said if she could make that one, she had a deal. She agreed. Then she decided to make the dress the wrong size and leave off the major parts of lace coming down from the bodice onto the skirt. I paid for all the material. She {And her sister} provided the labor. Her excuses were that she wanted me to be "comfortable" in the gown and that they had conveniently "lost" the pictures of the gown I had provided. Uh huh. {I had to pay a seamstress A LOT of money to fix it before the wedding}

5) Our daughter not having a good, strong relationship with her Daddy's side of the family. If she had not been so bloody offended at having to wash her hands before holding The Diva {She almost died at birth and was in the NICU for 18 days and had a depressed immune system for a very long time}, she would have had a great relationship with her amazing granddaughter. But she, my SIL and BIL were deeply disturbed by the thought of having to do anything to ensure The Diva's health. Well, other than what they thought they should be doing, anyway. They even said it was me who was being paranoid and not our pediatrician! I got him to write a note to prove it was him and not me just being and overprotective bitch.

6) Us not going to her house for nearly 4 years. This was my Husband's response to them refusing to wash their hands for the baby's health. He thought it would make them step up. It didn't. Instead they consistently tried to make him feel guilty for never visiting and them and only seeing The Diva at family gatherings. My Husband wouldn't give in until January 2008, because his sister confronted him on Christmas Eve 2007, and told him how sick his Mom really was. And she wasn't nice about it. At all. Yeah, Merry Christmas!

There you have it. It wasn't a pretty 20 years. It wasn't any fun either. I am very sad that she died before all these issues could be completely resolved. And I am even sadder that she will never know The Diva the way she knew my Husband's nieces {They are teens now}.

~*~*~
Please vote for me in the Dottie Awards. I was in the lead for the Michael Moore award, but Miss Stitchblade {Brandy} at Not So Average Mama is edging me out. Surely you, my dear readers, don't want to see me lose, do you?

Please go vote for www.LastShredsOfSanity.com over at MomDot.com. You don't need to register, just click and go. You can vote once per IP address, so if you have a cell phone with internet access or another computer you can use, you can vote more than once. And I really do want to win this award. So please help me. Tell a friend, tell a stranger.

Voting has been extended until Tuesday, October 27, 2009. You can also tweet "Vote for www.LastShredsOfSanity.com for The Michael Moore Award http://www.momdot.com/dottie-awards-voting/" to help me out. {Remove the quotation marks first, please}

~*~*~