As the year 2008 on the calendar comes to a close, I find myself taking stock. This was a year of poor relations with family. Mrs. Geek and I don't know what happened to cause it all, but we didn't seem to be on the same page with several people. Well, we know the facts of what happened, but we're not sure why there has been a lack of communication in certain quarters. Is it because we now live at a new address, and moving 10 miles further away from some family members has made seeing them just that much more infrequent? Is it that the process of getting established in our first house has left us looking more inward to ourselves than outward to others? Are we just being too touchy? I don't know.
All this even popped up on Christmas Day. We visited two groups of Mrs. Geek's family, my in-laws. The first group has a couple people in it who just seem to communicate on a different wavelength than Mrs. Geek or myself -- so talking with them since the miscarriage in September has been a series of awkward statements that seem to lack empathy about what happened to us. Christmas Day was no exception, though to be fair, what was said mostly fell into the "where on earth did you come up with that?" category.
Our problems with the second group on Christmas were more overt. We had a bit of a dust up with this group back in June that I didn't mention here... over money. We'd received a financial gift last Christmas and it was felt that we'd not properly acknowledged it. This was false -- Mrs. Geek had provided a verbal thank you last January, after some grumbling even then that our gratitude had not been shown quickly enough. This conversation was initially not remembered, and the way the whole thing was brought up made Mrs. Geek feel like she was about five years old. It was eventually all settled... or so we thought. Well, we got a financial gift this year again from the same people -- along with a box of thank you notes. Again, Mrs. Geek and I five years old...
I realize lately that I wake up in the morning with some part of me emotionally clenched. I need to stop that. New Year's Resolution #1: relax. After that, maybe we can start having better relations with different members of the family.
said drgeek
on 2008-12-29 at 6:42 a.m.
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The Wayback Machine - To Infinity And Beyond
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