Polar Opposites

It's been about a week since I returned from India, where we went to visit my in-laws. It's an exhausting endeavor just to get there, but done out of love for his family, and done so, willingly.

Nothing really new to report, other than I felt as if I were in an alternate reality, in a time and place with people who truly are interested in being with me, in loving and respecting me, and in return, it's so incredibly easy to love and respect them in return, as they're very good people.  

Lots of good chats with his mom, and I feel his brother and I got closer in the sense of realizing we are cast in the same role, but in different hemispheres on planet Earth. 

His brother, mother, and father, all three having different personalities, each uttered the statement, "She's just like me."  This I found amusing. 

It's such a very difficult and inconvenient and polluted place to visit and live, but in a way I felt like so much emotional garbage was purged or cleansed with this trip. 

I haven't gone into too much detail with Audrey about the trip--the less she knows, the less she is able to mar it. I'm withholding a good amount of what transpired, and holding it close, protecting it and protecting myself.

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday, and much like my niece's birthday two weeks ago, it, too, will go unacknowledged by card or gift or text or call or email. My sister pushed me away, and that's fine. I'll respect that boundary; however, if she's expecting me to come crawling back, begging for forgiveness (yes, I have no doubt that's what she anticipates), or perhaps expects me to do the passive-aggressive route and talk to Audrey or to our aunt, or to our brother, grousing about the injustice of it all, she will have a long wait.  

At one point during the trip, my mother-in-law asked me if I called or emailed my niece to wish her a happy birthday (as even my mother-in-law remembers my niece's birthday), and well, that was enough to break me down into tears. It's frustrating. And upsetting. And upsetting and a bit shameful to be honest. But I will respect that boundary, and in doing so, I'm enabling my sister to continue to use my niece as a pawn.  As I see it, she's been pushing me away for years, and this recent circumstance is just in an official, overt, aggressive capacity, but part of an on-going, 45+ year narrative.

Here I am, eight days home, and eight days out of the bubble of love and respect and constant discussion, and constant supervision of my in-laws. I have no doubt the Germans have a single word to describe the complex emotions afoot, of wanting to go home but not wanting to leave. That is very much at play here. And we went nearly two weeks of others tending to and anticipating all of our needs, bathing us in love, and now, the absence of it coupled up with the backdrop of snow snow snow, is now just depressing for us, and no doubt for them.

My brother-in-law and father-in-law hardly speak (from what I've been told; however, during our visit, they were well-behaved), and the bulk of my mother-in-law's socialization was with us with non-stop conversation and love and laughter. So us returning home has rendered things there back to their status quo. So, no. The grass isn't greener. We each have our own troubles in our own universes, and I am just glad that for a relatively small space in time, we were able to be there, in the moment, loving and being loved in return. Even my taciturn father-in-law summed it all up succinctly, "Was it all a dream?"