Thursday, August 11, 2005

T v. W

Well, I've been married a little over a month and have run full force into a huge difference between the two families. Here is the story:

I got sick on Saturday. I told my husband I wasn't feeling well in the morning during breakfast. He still really REALLY wanted to go to the gun & outdoors show so I caved and said I'd go with him. (Don't get me started about that last sentence.) Anyway, we went with his parents and left around noon. John, my father-in-law, decided he'd get us lunch and when we stopped at the place I was so sick to my stomach that the smell of the Mexican food was torture! (Probably a bit of an overstatement.) So everyone else ate while I just sat there. We went to the fairgrounds and found out that it was NOT as my husband had though and gun & outdoors show but merely a gun show. Since nobody was REALLY interested in paying the money just to go look at guns we decided to bag the whole idea. I was very grateful thinking that I would be able to return home soon. John had the alternate activity of going to look at the Saline (I'm not sure how to spell that one), which is some type of Mustang. I was perfectly happy with that since I figured it would be quicker than the gun show anyway. Little did I know what was ahead of me. I got SO SICK on the way to Coeur d'Alene that we had to pull over at the first gas station he could see so I could throw up in the restroom. Then we STILL MADE two other stops after having established how sick I was. I was so very upset at this I just made myself sicker. Plus, the motion of the car was making things in my stomach even worse. I was really glad at this point I had not eaten any of the Mexican food at lunch. I am still feeling a little under the weather six days later. I have calmed down and just realized that the reason my in-laws are acting like this is a basic philisophical difference between our families. I thought it was just because they didn't really think I WAS sick. I thought it might be because they didn't CARE that I was sick. No, no. The reason is that in my family the focus on a sick person is making them feel the best they can while on the road to recovery. You make sure they have enough blankets, you give them time to sleep and make sure they have the food they need. In my husband's family the focus is on making you feel as normal as possible to help you focus on BEING recovered. Therefore they treat you as much like you are not sick as they can. This means they don't really check in on you (this included my husband for a while) or anything of the sort. While neither way is wrong it certainly did hurt my feelings until I understood that I had to ask for any help I wanted. Now I ask and they are more than happy to help me. What a fiasco! Next time I must remember that I'm not with my parents before I get my feelings hurt.

PS. I can't wait to be better. I'm so tired of being sick at the moment.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how little you knew about your husband before marrying him!

Katie said...

Becuase she didn't know how his parents act when a person is sick she didn't know very much about him?!?!?! That's retarded.

Mags, I'm sorry you felt so crappy. I wish I could have been there to get you 7up and Saltines.

Glad you hear your not preggers or puking anymore.

Heather said...

Plus she already DID know that about her husband and his family... she just didn't realize how EXTREME it is.

That was my first thought too, Katie! Oo, maybe margs is pregnant! Too bad, but at the same time, not really seeing as how it would become much harder for you to finish school.

Maggie said...

That was a worry for me for about 12 hours! About the most stressful 12 hours of my life.

As far as knowing little about my husband, you can't possibly know everything about a person until after you marry them or move in with them. I know the big stufff. The important stuff and a lot of the little stuff too. This just happens to have been a little hole in my knowledge that time and experience gladly filled for me. Since I don't believe in living with a person of the opposite sex before I marry them there are bound to be little times if revelation. Plus, I've lived with one Miss Heather Higgins (Schaffer) for three years now and I'm still learning stuff about her.