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Post by jillster on Nov 26, 2018 2:42:55 GMT -5
Because even board moderators need advice sometimes....
Should I have cancelled the Thanksgiving dinner we host for my husband's family, six weeks before Thanksgiving, to attend the Thanksgiving dinner my niece planned when her parents decided to be in our part of the world Thanksgiving week? (They met and married in the town where my niece goes to college, near where I now live. They live quite a ways away, but niece attends the old alma mater.)
I invited them all to our dinner, but my sister said my niece was so excited about hosting her first Thanksgiving dinner that she said they were going to let her just run with it. (Apparently she had been planning it for months, but I never knew anything about it until mid-October. My niece, in fact, has never spoken to me, texted, or emailed about this dinner, ever. All communications have gone through her mother.)
I haven't had a Thanksgiving dinner with my sister in decades, but I'd have had to dump the other side of my family on relatively short notice to do it. They were at least supposed to come by our house for pie, but then the weekend before my sister announced that we needed to come over there to help them eat *their* pies.
Things have been pretty frosty between us now since this came up. I don't think I'm wrong, but they don't think they're wrong, either, and maybe neither of us are.
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Post by Ask Anon on Nov 26, 2018 4:13:51 GMT -5
From across the Atlantic, we can see that Thanksgiving is a major ritual, and every ritual has its own rules - even if they don't exist in print.
I don't know what those rules are, but I'd be pretty confident that having arranged - and invited people - to your own, you have a cast iron reason to decline invitations from others.
In this case, you haven't actually had an invitation from the hostess, so they really are looking for something to be upset about, aren't they?
Of course the 'Missing Rule' from all rituals, is that attendance is optional. No-one, ever, should even try to guilt you out for declining an invitation, without an excuse, reason or explanation. But of course they do.
As so often in families, this is about power and competitiveness, and while no-one wins, the ones who opt out have a better life.
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Post by jillster on Nov 26, 2018 10:38:01 GMT -5
The ironic thing is that we had all just attended our cousin's wedding the previous weekend, and the overwhelming theme of that get-together is that our side of the family is so small, and we are all we have left.
My sister's husband is an only child, though, and their daughter is an only child, and I think they'd be happier if my sister was an only child as well. :/
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Post by Gina99 on Nov 26, 2018 19:57:41 GMT -5
Oy family! If you already had plans to host other people then it is perfectly reasonable to keep your obligations to your invited guests. Do you normally host your husbands family? Did your niece invite them? Is this typical behavior/expectations etc from your sister and her daughter?
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Post by jillster on Nov 27, 2018 13:13:24 GMT -5
We have hosted Thanksgiving for my husband's family since we bought our house in 2009. On even-numbered years, two of my husband's sisters and their families spend Thanksgiving with their husbands' families, so we alternate between "big years" and "small years," but it's always at our house. Niece did not invite them to her dinner (although the one sister-in-law did joke about crashing their feast, which I thought was funny. I didn't pass that on, though).
My sister has a long history of treating me with subtle disrespect going back to our childhood. She is four years older than I am, and I'm not sure she is usually aware of how she treats me since it is such old hat. Her daughter has learned that it's okay to be disrespectful to me because whenever she is rude to me, my sister just laughs it off. Things have never been this bad or blatant before, though, and it just makes me revaluate just how close my sister and I really are, and/or how much my bro-in-law and niece value me, too.
So either my niece was incredibly thoughtless and just didn't factor our commitments, or she set this up to purposefully exclude me and my husband. Neither possibility is very good, since my sister could have had some influence either way and didn't bother.
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Post by jillster on Nov 27, 2018 13:15:43 GMT -5
(So hurtful to hear her gush about how excited they were for my niece's first Thanksgiving while we were at the family wedding. Just wanted to say "Hello...I'm right here....")
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Post by Ask Anon on Nov 27, 2018 14:57:17 GMT -5
When family is good, it's very very good.
When it isn't, it pays to remember that the relationship is not something you chose; from your standpoint, it just happened. Whereas you do get to choose your friends.
My family, like so many others, has a long tradition of simply cutting people. Either it blows over with time, or it doesn't. The brother I was closest to went through a period of severely disrespecting me. I told him enough was enough, and we haven't spoken since. It's now over ten years.
Yes, it's a shame. But I'd choose that ten years with him - and of course his own family - out of my life, than have had ten years of bickering. Life's too short.
It would be nice to be on better terms, but blood can be just too thick. Friends tend not to take you for granted in the hurtful way that family can.
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Post by jillster on Nov 27, 2018 16:38:54 GMT -5
Polite emails are starting again. Maybe things will blow over, although I'm sure I will never get an apology.
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Post by Gina99 on Nov 28, 2018 15:13:49 GMT -5
"My sister has a long history of treating me with subtle disrespect going back to our childhood. ..........Her daughter has learned that it's okay to be disrespectful to me because whenever she is rude to me, my sister just laughs it off."
There is your answer and the explanation for why Thanksgiving happened the way it did. Sounds like you know what to expect and how to react unfortunately. And you know she won't change.
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Post by jillster on Nov 29, 2018 9:57:51 GMT -5
All true, sadly. I have never had such a blatant slap in the face, though, and it really does change how I feel about both my sister and my niece.
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