Don't Tell me To RELAX

When DH and I first met, I was warned about his mother. He did not like her and had not liked her for the majority of his life. He told me many stories about what she was like over the years. My personal favorite was the one about how she had a picture of him at the age of 3, high of her second-hand pot smoke. The picture was taken because she thought it was so funny. That right there should tell you all you need to know about her ability to parent. The best thing she ever did for my sweetie was to dump him at his grandparent's house and run away for 4 years of his life when he turned 2. His grandparents are very fine, upstanding people with high morals and values. They taught him how to be a man.

When DH and I started dating, she was married to his step-dad. In the two and a half months DH and I were engaged she asked for and got a divorce, moved to Mexico to start a business, went bust, moved back home, and started living in a motel. Classy.

I tolerated the woman until after DH and I were married, and then I tried to ignore her the best I could. She lived in the motel for about 6 months and then started to mooch off of friends. She would go "visit" them for as long as they could tolerate her and kick her out. So she went, burning bridges all along the way. She emailed me one day and said that she wanted to come stay with us for two or more weeks. I laughed and told her there was no way in hell. We told her she was welcome for one weekend, and then she had to be on her way to ruining her next friendship. She tried to book her ticket out to our house, and it conveniently spanned the week of our first wedding anniversary.

DH finally put his foot down himself (instead of telling me to tell her off) and told her she absolutely, positively could NOT be around for our first anniversary. She tried to play my sweetness into relenting. I told her absolutely not as well. She said she figured that we would go somewhere for our anniversary and she could stay at our house while we were gone. I informed her we had no plans of going anywhere that weekend, and she was to be gone no later than 24 hours before our anniversary.

It was after our first anniversary that we started undergoing infertility treatments. When she caught wind of this, she began sending me emails explaining why I was having such a hard time. They included subjects like, "Being overweight can cause infertility." I weighed 113 lbs. "Drinking too much can cause infertility." I don't drink, never have. She knows this. "Drinking too much coffee can cause infertility." I don't drink coffee either, never have. She knows this. So yes, her emails were sent to be just plain rude. But then she would turn her puppy eyes to my husband and tell him that I was too sensitive, that she was only trying to help. He told her to back off. He knew better. He had already told her off about similar emails she would constantly send me telling me about all of the soldiers killed in Iraq while my brother was deployed there.

Next, she would IM me and tell me that I needed to relax to get pregnant. Every time she would communicate with me, she would end it with, "Relax!" It started to really chap my damn hide. Then one day we were in town and decided to take her to dinner for her birthday. It was the last time I would see her for a couple of years. Her last words to me that night were, "RELAX!" Finally I had had enough. I told her that relaxing would not solve our infertility, that we were almost positive there was a medical reason, and that her telling me to relax implied that she felt I was so uptight I was preventing myself from ovulating every month. She then told me that she never had any desire to be a grandmother, to which I replied, "Works for me! We'll tell our kids you don't exist."

In the end, it did turn out our reasons for infertility were medical. I had pretty extensive endometriosis as well as PCOS. No amount of relaxing would fix either of those problems. I just want to rub her nose in it for being so ignorant and insensitive. I want her to realize she doesn't know everything, and that her form of "support" is uncalled for.

It would make me feel worse if she only did these things to me, but I recently found out she did them to her sister as well. While her sister was fighting breast cancer and going through chemo, my BIL (Bit**-in-law) sent her emails similar to the ones I received, only about cancer. "Drinking too much alcohol causes cancer." "Being overweight causes cancer." Does being an insensitive waste of a person cause cancer? Because if it does, my BIL ought to go get checked out ASAP.

I realize this post makes me sound angry, but I'm really not anymore. I am still anoid and will be every time I have to see her or communicate with her, but I'm letting the rage go. Now that I am officially seeing a shrink, I am getting all of the bad vibes out and letting them go for good. I don't need to carry this junk anymore. While this woman may, very unfortunately for me, be the grandmother of my daughter, I don't need to carry around her baggage anymore. So this is the end of it.