Today was going pretty well. I was at an internet cafe earlier today to try to do my on-line check-in for our flight tomorrow, and I thought about blogging about how nice Genci's mother can be and how sometimes she has a lot more patience than I do about our miscommunications. So, earlier I must have felt that way. She is trying, was trying.
Right now I'm angry, discouraged and just want to get the hell out of here. I still haven't been able to do my on-line check-in, but hope to be able to in 22 minutes (24 hours before the second leg of the journey).
One of the things that I hate about being here is that we are forced to lie on a regular basis, in order to avoid tons of unnecessary conflict. It goes against my grain. I don't believe in lying to people, except for minor things like "How do I look? Do I look fat?", and then only if the person isn't really relying on you for an answer - i.e., when they're really just looking for reassurance, not needing a true outside opinion, and when there's nothing they can really do about it anyways.
OK. There's the perspective I'm coming from. Lying tends to just get you into trouble, and it leads to people not trusting you. Better not to even start on that path.
But here we are dealing with a person who cannot be reasonable, who does not hear what you say, but rather hear what she wants to believe, who takes any information you give her and uses it for bad, and who is jealous of any time or gifts that you give to anyone other than herself, even if that person is a sibling or other close relative of hers.
Yes, we lie here. We lie a lot. We went on a visit last night to see my mother-in-law's sister. It was our second visit to their house, but on the first one, they didn't want me to take their family photo because they hadn't showered, and they wanted me to come back again to do that. Plus, they had bought shirts for our kids that they wanted to give us. So we visited them. But it was only 2 days before leaving, so his mother is intensely jealous of any time spent away from her. So we pretended to go to the park to play soccer with the kids and went on a visit. Pretty sick, that we had to pretend that. And we had to tell our kids not to mention that (to LIE if asked!). Lovely.
Today I got pictures printed for that family, and of course, was in a dilemna. How to get them to them? Usually we leave them with Genci's mother. But what if she could tell they were recent (because of the new shirts on our kids in the photos). Better to give them to someone else to pass them on or put them in the mail. But it was seeming complicated, so we decided to let her pass them on. So she looked at them. She got pissed somewhere in the middle of looking at them. No word about why. I was guessing the shirts gave away the day we visited. I'm sure that connection will eventually be made. (By the way, the lying thing is Genci's idea. I do not agree with it, but will go along for his sake.) But, upon questioning, that wasn't it. It was that we don't love her as much as we love everyone else. The reasoning - the photos for them were in a little album that came free with the pictures. Her photos weren't in an album. (Last year I gave her 2 albums and she gave them back to me (emptied) and made me take them home with us.) Also, the photo book I brought her from America had mostly pictures of my relatives and not the Albanian relatives and her. I had a feeling it was a bad idea to give those to her, but they are pretty beautiful books, and also thought there was a chance she might like them. One was the album I made of our trip here (and to England) last year. The other was our family in photos for the year 2010. I'm planning on doing one for each year of my kids life, starting with 2010 and going backwards. Her complaint was that there were more of my parents then of her. Well, yes, there are. There are also way more of my father than of my mother, because my father got married this year and I had some nice ones of him and Kathy and all of us - so that got more pages. Plus, my mother is relatively camera shy lately, so she is underrepresented. Plus, I forgot my cousin's wedding this fall when I was sifting through photos. I realized this later & hope to do an updated album at some point.
I do understand equity in photo representation, but sometimes there are reasons for things that are not just about how much you love someone. I sort of tried to explain some of this and did explain this to Genci, but I didn't really try in Albanian this time, because I had been triggered. Big time.
I am trying so hard to do nice things for her, and it's like walking through a minefield looking for a lottery ticket. Sometimes I do something and it makes her happy (the intended effect). Sometimes she's even touched. Then other times she's pissed and uses something I do as evidence for her great conspiracy theories about how little we care about her.
And I'm very, very, very tired of this. I wasn't cut out for this. Yes, I'm a fucking people pleaser. I like to make people happy. And this is one woman who is incredibly determined to be miserable and she needs someone to blame that misery on. I'm tired of being the one, or part of the ones, that are the cause of her misery. Sometimes I want to hate her. But then lots of times, she's very nice, considerate, thoughtful, caring, patient, engaging, etc. So I get drawn back in. And of course, this all does matter very much to Genci. So I try. I try harder than he does a lot of the time (although he tries more in some respects, like eating to please her).
I give up.
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