Big Red's Tales of the Uncanny

What I did on my summer…er…forum break

Wow, how long has it been? Looking back at my old emails, it looks like it’s been about 17 months or so. One bad thing I’ve done in the last year and a half or so was to somehow lose the document where I saved all my old Tales of the Uncanny. I’m sure it’s around on some flash drive or other PC, but it will take some searching to find it. With the forums 2.0 here, I figured I may as well get another Tales of the Uncanny going. What better way than to bring you all up to speed on what’s been going on with me over the last year and a half or so. The biggest things that have happened have been family things. As you can guess, not all has gone smoothly.

Probably the biggest development for me prior to the forums going away was our 2-year-old being born. She was a huge relief to my wife & me because we’d had a miscarriage shortly before having her. One of the curveballs that hit us right after our miscarriage was finding out just how disgusting and petty some of my family really is. We’ve been dealing with poor treatment from them for a good twenty years now, but in our most difficult, trying time, they sunk to new, scarcely believable lows. Within two weeks of losing the baby, one cousin decided to sign us up for a bunch of baby tracker websites. You know the sort: they send you weekly emails tracking your baby’s progress and serve as a constant reminder of how long it is until your baby is born. Of course, if you’ve just lost a baby, all they do is remind you of your loss. They’re great for an expecting couple. For a couple who have just lost their baby, seeing 3-4 of them show up each week is remarkably painful and cruel. To my cousin, though, it was an “awesome” way to make fun of someone who she felt had more kids than they ought to (for the record, although I could never prove definitively that she was the one who signed us up for those sites, she made numerous, thinly-veiled Facebook comments about us & how disgusted she was that we were actually upset over losing our baby and it wasn’t hard to put two and two together). To drive her point home, she would regularly either sign us up for new sites, or update the information on the old sites to ensure we were getting constant reminders (more on that later). As luck would have it, three months was the interval she chose for her updates. We found out we were expecting our two-year-old about 3 months after our miscarriage, so in an amusing twist of fate, she nearly nailed our actual due date when she signed us up for a second round of baby sites.

After our two-year-old arrived, we knew right away that we wanted another. We tried our brains out for the next year before finally succeeding. In the meantime, while things were going great for us and the younger kids, my family grew crazier and crazier. Shortly before we found out our two-year-old was on the way, we found out that the cousin who had signed us up for the baby tracker sites was sending absolutely disgusting private messages to our son. He’d just turned 18 and, among other things, she was telling him everything he had a “RIGHT” to do in our home, and how we had “NO RIGHT” to expect him to live by our rules (and, yes, she bolded those words and a few other key words all throughout her notes). She wasn’t the only one hell bent on causing problems between us and our son, though, as a couple other cousins started in as well. The bulk of it was them telling him how mistreated he was because we were so abusive and unreasonable. By “abusive and unreasonable,” they were referring to the fact that we expected him to work and pay his college tuition (the other option being that he not work, not go to school and get kicked off a portion of my insurance). They later told him that we should be buying him a new car as well. Granted, none of my aunts & uncles had done this for their children, but us not doing it was abuse. It got even worse once one of my uncles joined in on it. He was even more vocal about it than the cousins were. He was also the one who made sure to show his absolute disgust with us every time either of us discussed my wife’s pregnancy with our two-year-old (dirty looks, sighs of disgust, leaving the room, etc.). It reached a head at our daughter’s first birthday party when he decided to yell and scream at me about our son as I was walking in the door, still holding the baby with the other three kids behind me. Talk about class, or at least something that rhymes with it.

Don’t think my son was the only one they went after. I had one cousin, a guy about 30, tell my then seven and eight year old daughters that they couldn’t sit with the rest of the cousins at a family event because they weren’t part of the family. Another aunt of mine, before we started avoiding her when we had the girls with us, spent about two years trying to convince our girls that they’d walked in on my wife and I when nothing of the sort had ever happened. When my daughters didn’t repeat the story as well as she would have liked, she took to spreading the rumor on her own. She thought it was absolutely hilarious because, with us having that many kids, we obviously devoted all our free time to trying for more so the kids walking in on us must be a regular occurrence. We asked her several times to stop, which she finally agreed to do. However, we later found out that she kept it up behind our backs. Several of my cousins were also regularly excluding my daughters from conversations at family parties when the other kids their age were invited to hang out with the older crowd. One went so far as to physically shove our oldest daughter away from the table and then scooted over to block her from rejoining the crowd. While some may remember from the old forum, I’ll point out here that most of my cousins are teachers which, to me, makes their treatment of my kids that much more deplorable.

My wife and I had more than our fair share over the last two decades, but these last three years have been mind-boggling. A few weeks after our two-year-old was born, we showed up for a family party where one of my cousins and the aforementioned uncle quickly rearranged the chairs at their table so that there were no spots for us. Considering my wife was still recovering from her C-section and had to walk to the other side of the room, I was less than pleased about it. When I later found out that the main reason for crowding us out of the table was so they could badmouth us to our son, I was even less pleased with them. A couple months later, at another family party, not a single one of them acknowledged us when we arrived. We walked in, said hi to the room and you could hear a pin drop. We said hi to several of them individually as we went to find a seat, but they all either stared at their feet or turned their backs to us. It was something else. The kicker was probably Christmas of ’10. We’d considered not returning to the family Christmas parties after someone gave my son a sex toy for his gift in ’09, but we decided to give them one last try. After one cousin made a nasty comment about us as we walked in the door, the bulk of the rest of the family treated us like garbage. One refused to speak to us altogether even when I got right in front of her and wished her a Merry Christmas. Another literally fell over top of someone in an effort to avoid wishing me a Merry Christmas. My wife was told she had to nurse the baby in a tiny bathroom, and when I refused she was stuck in the bedroom where everyone put their coats. A couple cousins thought it would be fun to come and rattle the doorknob & knock on the door while she was in there because, you know, it’s fun to disrupt a feeding baby. One cousin’s husband stood across the room from the baby & I, just out of earshot, making comments distasteful enough that the two cousins listening to him actually walked away from him in disgust. By the end of the night, anytime we entered a room, it cleared. When we finally left that evening I told my wife that, after all her years of pleading, I was finally giving in and agreed that we’d never go back to one of my family’s parties. Things haven’t improved since then as several family members we’d always been close to have distanced themselves from us. I suspect that it’s either due to direct pressure from one or two of the cousins, or out of fear of retaliation. One quit talking to me for nearly six months, going as far as deleting any comments I made on his Facebook page. One aunt no longer posts anything on mine or my wife’s wall (she only communicates with us now via Facebook). She’ll send us private messages but does nothing publicly, even though she still communicates freely with the rest of the cousins. A lot of it is more annoying than upsetting.

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Throughout all that, we did our best to ignore the bulk of what went on with the family. It wasn’t too difficult considering how busy things were. I’ll admit it got pretty stressful at times, but most of it passed fairly quickly. The worst was probably the incident at our daughter’s birthday party. Not only was it her first birthday but we had just found out that we were expecting again and the last thing I needed that early in the pregnancy was to put my wife through a ton of stress. My uncle angered me enough that my intention was to not tell my family about the baby until after she arrived. I would have gotten away for it, too, if not for those meddling kids and their pesky dog…I mean, if not for my mother’s incessant complaining that she couldn’t talk to her siblings about us expecting again. As it was, I waited until after our 20th week before announcing it publicly. As expected, none of my cousins acknowledged the announcement. No emails, no comments on my Facebook post, not even a single like. While I didn’t expect any (they hadn’t acknowledged our miscarriage, or the announcement that we were expecting our two-year-old, or the birth of our two-year-old), you have to understand some of the family politics related to this sort of thing. In the past, my wife & I have been lambasted for our “inappropriate” reactions to various announcements by my cousins. One of them lost a pet. It wasn’t even a dog, so it’s not like it was the kind of pet that counted. However, I still expressed my condolences on their Facebook post. I found out a couple weeks later that my aunt had been talking to all my other aunts and several of my cousins about how inconsiderate we were for not doing more. I don’t know what we were supposed to do—send a Hallmark, perhaps?--but whatever it was, we didn’t do it, which made us a couple of Class-A bastards. Around the same time, another cousin lost her job due to her own grossly inappropriate actions. Before I knew all the details of her dismissal, I told her via Facebook that I was sorry to hear she’d lost her job. In the subsequent discussion where she defended her own deplorable actions and attacked her former employer for letting her go, instead of calling her out as the idiot she was, I simply didn’t reply. I later found out that we’d been criticized again for not being supportive enough. A short time later, yet another cousin’s father-in-law died. I sent an email, posted on Facebook, sent a card and made a donation to the father-in-law’s favorite charity. The funeral was held out of town on a weekend my wife & I both worked. It was also far enough away that all our kids would have had to have missed a day of school for us to go so we stayed home. Yet again, we were portrayed as a bunch of unsupportive cretins. Conversely, when we had our miscarriage not a single one of my cousins expressed any condolences or concern. A few days later, one of my aunts called me to see how we were doing. She asked I’d heard from any of my cousins. I answered honestly and without any animosity. She then said, “Well, I’m sure they’ve sent you emails or at least a message on Facebook.” Once again, I told her no (I didn’t mention the nasty comments one of them was already making about us on there); I even made excuses for them, saying that they might have been too busy, or uncomfortable discussing the subject. After she told me she didn’t believe me, she called one or two other aunts and suddenly word got out that we were petty and ungrateful. Naturally, when a couple of the cousins finally had kids of their own this past year, I simply deleted the posts. I couldn’t bring myself to congratulate them or hit like on their announcements. I also blocked them from my newsfeed so I never got any feedback on what a horrible, inconsiderate person I was for ignoring them.

Anyway, our new baby finally arrived and, as expected, we didn’t get a single word of congratulations from my cousins (I think one of them liked our announcement on Facebook). My goal was to keep her completely away from the family. My wife insisted on inviting my one aunt and uncle over to see her, though, so I relented. This was the uncle who’d gone so nuts at our daughter’s birthday party not quite a year earlier, so I made a point of inviting them over on a night when my son would be working. In the first ten minutes, my uncle asked where my son was three times, growing more agitated every time he asked. I finally told him he wasn’t here to discuss our son and to drop the subject. After that it was awkward at best and slightly unpleasant a few times. When they left, it was a huge relief. I told my wife I didn’t think I could be around anyone from that side of the family again. Sure, there are some I still enjoy seeing, but I can’t think of too many scenarios where I could be around them and not have to see the others.

The new baby, for the record, is wonderful. She’s our fourth daughter and possibly the prettiest one yet, which is really saying something considering how beautiful the other three are. She smiles constantly and could very well be the happiest baby I’ve ever seen. It was a much bigger struggle going from 4 to 5 than it had been going from 1 to 2, or 2 to 3, or 3 to 4, but we’ve adjusted pretty well. Even the little struggles we’ve had seem pretty insignificant when consider what a blessing she’s been.

When our two-year-old was born, one of the first conversations we had in the hospital was about how soon we’d been trying again (the answer, of course, being “immediately”). With the new baby we had similar discussions but decided we wanted to wait a while. We knew we wanted her to be a big sister at some point, but our plan was to have that point be a bit further out. Being practicing Catholics we decided to take Natural Family Planning classes so we could space the next one naturally (not that we’d been doing anything unnatural for the last decade or so, but we’d either been half-heartedly not trying, trying, or pregnant for so long that it was something we hadn’t gotten around to yet). In an odd twist of fate, it turned out we were already expecting again before we took our first class. While we were thrilled, we both agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone for a few months and that, this time around, we wouldn’t tell my family until just before the baby arrived, or possibly later. We didn’t any of their nasty comments getting back to us while we were expecting, and we didn’t want to give them the pleasure of knowing something had gone wrong if something did go wrong. While my parents have said several times that my cousins can’t possibly be as awful as I’ve portrayed them, I’ll point out that my cousin who signed us up for the baby tracker websites has either signed us up for new ones or updated the profiles on some of the others at least once every three months for the last three years. While she was clearly doing it as first to rub our nose in the fact that we’d lost our baby, I think she kept it up as a way to show her displeasure with us having more than 1.2 kids. Whatever the reason, the fact that she’s dedicated enough to being such a bitch that she’s carried this on for three years tells me that she’d take great delight in any new misfortune that might befall us.

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Sadly, my worst fears materialized two weeks ago. We went in for the standard first trimester ultrasound and there was no heartbeat. Oddly enough, when we got up that morning, my wife and I both knew, although neither of us said anything to one another. Still, when the doctor came in and confirmed what had happened, we were devastated. Once we were able to, we talked to her doctor about our options and finally decided to go with a D & C. We could have gone home and waited for the baby to come out on her own, but we didn’t think that was a good option with the kids. We went in for what should have been a routine procedure. Without getting into all the details, things were anything from routine and I almost lost my wife as well. We’re still dealing with some outstanding issues from that. We’ve managed to bury our baby and were lucky enough to have her just a few feet from the baby we lost a few years ago. We’d told much fewer people than last time and most of them have been very supportive. A couple members of my immediate family have asked for permission to tell the rest of the family (several of them were told my wife was having issues without any elaboration), which we absolute would not give. When it was made clear that we didn’t want to provide additional details, only one was still willing to show any concern.

All of that brings us to today, Thanksgiving. I got to have dinner with my family before having to work all night, so at least I got to celebrate the day with loved ones. Predictably, it wasn’t without a family-related hitch. I’ve suspected for a while that two of my cousins--one of whom has been one of my closest friends my entire life--have been ordered by their sister (the cousin who’s the worst of the bunch) to avoid my wife and I entirely. They both live out of town but managed to make it in for Thanksgiving this year. They called my brother earlier and said they wanted to stop by my parents’ house to see everyone. They called back a bit later to say they were on the way and less than 20 minutes away. My brother told them to hurry because I was leaving in 45 minutes and he wanted to be sure they got to see me. Somehow, they managed to not show up until two hours later just as my wife was leaving. Neither of them said a word to my wife, or even made eye contact with her, despite her saying hi and wishing each of them (including the wife & girlfriend) a Happy Thanksgiving. What it essentially comes down to is that I’m effectively and/or literally estranged from the branch of the family with whom I was closest the first half of my life. Some of them we’ve chosen to actively avoid not just for our sakes, but for the kids as well. Some we have no choice to avoid, mainly because there’s no way we’d be able to see them without seeing the others. Finally, we have no real choice but to avoid the few who are left due to the fact that we’re extremely confident they would be ostracized or retaliated against in some other fashion should they continue to keep in contact with us.

The bulk of my family values and positive family memories came from these people. The main thing I was learned from a variety of these family members, and it was repeated over and over through the years, was that we should always put family first. Amusingly, three of the four of us who most bought into this idea have now cut ourselves off from the majority of the family. One did so for other reasons, but two of us did so because of similar types of treatment. I know most of the reasons why this other person is treated the way she is. That doesn’t justify it, but at least there are some concrete issues these others can point to to validate their asinine behavior, even if just to themselves. As far as we go, however, I’ve never been able to fully wrap my head around why we’re such black sheep. We’ve been as supportive as we can possibly be over the year, helping many of them in a variety of situations with and without being asked, and we’ve never mistreated any of them. I know there are several areas where we’ll never see eye to eye and a few others where they’ve made it clear they take issue with us (we don’t drink, didn’t live/sleep together before we got married (this seems to be a huge sticking point for a couple of them and years ago led to all manner of nasty rumors spread about us, even to one of my employers), have more than 1.2 kids, aren’t ridiculously materialistic, go to Mass every Sunday and actively live our faith as opposed to using it as just another means by which we can look down on others), but I think it mainly boils down to an issue of elitism. They view themselves as better than the rest of the world, and if you don’t measure up to whatever arbitrary trait they want to judge you on, you’re scum as far as they’re concerned (I’ve seen a few of them turn on friends on Facebook over minor disagreements, so this is pretty evident). One really frustrating thing is that the rest of the family has been treated to either witnessing or being on the receiving end of their venomous behavior over the years, yet they always give it a pass--so much so that the people on the receiving end of the bad treatment have often been portrayed as the instigators after the fact (the most egregious example of this was back when they were all in high school and three of them ganged up on one of the cousins and spent over a year ruining her reputation and driving most of her friends away from her, which prompted a couple of the aunts to blame her and say she brought it on herself). I personally bent over backwards trying to smooth things over and helping to hold the family together over the course of several years, but these last few years have shown me that it’s pretty pointless. Sadly, my kids (especially my youngest) will miss out on the raucous, big family parties I grew up with, but I’d be a fool to keep taking them around those people.

This all left me thinking about what I have to be thankful for today (well, yesterday now). I have a beautiful wife and wonderful kids. We’re still facing some big hurdles but we’re hopeful that my wife will recover fully and we’ll still be able to try one more time. My kids are all doing well, despite the occasional problems, but few of those are big enough to lose any sleep over. We’re generally healthy (recent issues aside) and we’re both employed. We also have Christmas just around the corner, which is always one of the high points of the year for me. We’re more prepared for it at this stage than we have been in years and are looking forward to getting our tree and putting up all our decorations tomorrow. And to top it all off, the GH forums are back online. All may not be right with the world, but it’s still pretty dang good.

Wow. Makes the scuffles we have with my wifes step brothers and stisters seem pretty insignificant to your stuff. The only thing I forsee is having to answer your kids questions on how come they don't get to hang out with their family like thier cousins do. I sorta get that same question but it is only because we live in central Wyoming and thier closest cousins are in Lincoln Nebraska, their next closest cousin is in Texas.
Hope your wife makes a full recovery from whatever whent wrong.

P.S. I give my buddy a lot of crap because he and his wife keep popping out kids, but it is all in fun and If anyone here does it to you just remember its because your liked and just being ribbed on.

P.S.S. Man I didn't realize how much I misses reading your rantings. You guys should just move away.

I'm still kind of scratching my head over my cousin's snub on Thursday. He never told me he was coming to town, made no mention of it on Facebook and has made no effort to contact me. As rude and out-of-character as it was for him to ignore my wife, I found out the next day that he also avoided my son. They've always been very close, so that actually pisses me off more than him ignoring my wife & I. He's always been the sort who thrives on acceptance, though, and he's done a lot of out-of-character things over the last few years in order to stay in good with the nasty crowd. This has included badmouthing my sister and a couple other cousins and telling several huge lies about me. We made amends after one nasty incident but now it seems as though he's avoiding me to stay in their good graces. When I brought this up to another family member, they scoffed at the idea that his sister could be holding such sway over her brothers. Years ago, it wasn't something you'd ever believe could happen, especially with the older brother. There was a major blow-up with them on Facebook a few months ago, though, that really solidified my view on the situation. Politically, the older brother is diametrically opposed to the rest of them although it's not something he's ever really been open about. He made a couple of very vocal posts on Facebook, including links to a few videos. I was fairly surprised since it was the first time I'd ever heard a peep out of him in that regard. I went to check the comments a few hours later and found they were all gone. I clicked on his wall and found that he'd received a virtual shout-down from his sister (the youngest of the bunch by several years, by the way), telling him what a disgrace he was to the family and essentially threatening that if left those comments up or ever made them again, his children would never be allowed to see their grandfather again. It was pretty insane.

My girls have already asked about why we've stopped going to the family things. We've arranged other plans around a few of them so we had a handy excuse, but otherwise I told them that we just weren't going. I've talked to my son about it quite a bit. Some of it being the angry shouting matches that resulted from the garbage my family was telling him, ("Oh yeah? Well even your uncle and cousin agree that if you two were good parents, you'd buy me that $40,000 car and pay my insurance on it!"), while others have been level-headed discussions about what's gone on and why we no longer see them.

Something that really gets me about all this is that my wife's family has done some horrible things to us over the years. One side conned her grandmother into signing over all her assets and power of attorney, essentially robbing my wife and her dad of their inheritance. We had people actively campaigning to end our marriage, making various threats against us and overall just treating us worse than I'd treat my worst enemy. The other side of her family wanted nothing to do with me for years, to the point of whole rooms emptying when I'd walk in, people turning their backs on me and whole groups refusing to speak English around me. Despite all that, I'd never expect any of them to do some of the things my closest extended family members have done to us in the last few years.

As far as how many kids we have, I don't mind the good-natured jokes; it's the nasty, spiteful, hateful treatment that gets me. It would be different if they weren't family and if we were neglecting our kids. I could also understand some negativity if our kids were ill-mannered, disrespectful and rude. Our kids are very polite, well-behaved, great kids. And unlike most of my cousins' kids, they're not vulgar and disrespectful (a fact which has gotten them mistreated by my adult cousins on numerous occasions--to be clear, my adult, teacher cousins have treated my children bad because they were sweet, well-behaved kids who refused to repeat bad words or act in other vulgar manners). The bulk of them are the sort who spent their 20's and most of their 30's partying before finally trying to have their token offspring. They tend to look down on anyone who hasn't done the same, particularly if they don't follow their one-child rule, engage in an approved profession or vote for their approved party. Also, despite all of us being raised Catholic, the bulk of them have a surprisingly vicious distaste for anyone who is a faithful, practicing Catholic. Don't get me wrong, they all still claim to be Catholic and occasionally set foot in a church on Christmas and possibly Easter, but anyone who does anything more than that deserves to be an object of derision. The fact that we're actively practicing our faith, especially those parts that tend to lead to us having five kids, is something that clearly disgusts a few of them. One of the things that's made it easier to cut ties with them is the fact that a couple of them have made it clear that they're unhappy with or disgusted by the fact that our two-year-old even exists (I haven't been around them enough in the last year to know if they feel that way about the baby, but one would have to assume so). I figure if someone hates our children just for existing, that's not an environment we need to expose our children to.

Believe me, if we could move away, we would. Anymore, we only get invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas, so if I were the sort who favored coming up with excuses, I wouldn't have to come up with many. I've avoided being blunt with them about our non-attendance until now for my parents' sake, but I refuse to fabricate reasons when we decline those invitations. It does annoy me that my parents still show up to all these things, mainly because, whether it's within their earshot or not, I know we're a topic of discussion (one of the family's favorite pastimes, especially after the alcohol starts flowing, is to gossip about the family members who didn't show up and to badmouth them for whatever their reasons were for not attending). For us, though, not attending has reduced the holiday stress a great deal.

I would suggest quitting Facebook, but thats just cause I still refuse to get involved in that type of 'social media'. Anything that reduces stress is a good thing. Hopefully you raised you son the way you hoped and he will 'wake-up' to reality. During college, my parents did pay the insurance for my vehicle, but it was a very cheap vehicle, One I could afford bagging grocerys at a grocery store.

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Originally Posted by figureaddict

Wow. Makes the scuffles we have with my wifes step brothers and stisters seem pretty insignificant to your stuff.

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My thoughts exactly! I don't know how you are able to put up with it BR!

I haven't had any negative experiences with FB yet, so I don't usually know about the "FB drama" people always talk about, but I would say you sure do. :/

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Originally Posted by figureaddict

I would suggest quitting Facebook, but thats just cause I still refuse to get involved in that type of 'social media'. Anything that reduces stress is a good thing. Hopefully you raised you son the way you hoped and he will 'wake-up' to reality. During college, my parents did pay the insurance for my vehicle, but it was a very cheap vehicle, One I could afford bagging grocerys at a grocery store.

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While I haven't deleted them from Facebook (I did block the one cousin from my son's account), I've adjusted my settings so their posts no longer show up for me. As soon as I delete them entirely I know that will cause some major drama. Amusingly enough, after one of them had their first kid, they blocked me from seeing any pictures they posted (I realized this when the pictures and some posts were showing up on my wife's account but not mine). Naturally, I got a call from another family member asking why I was being such a jerk and not liking or commenting on their baby pics. :rolleyes:

My son's catching on to a lot of what's going on with them, although when he's around a few of them (like the cousin who ignored him the other night) he tries to fit in and be part of the crowd. I think he's most at risk of major problems with them, either from the lies/badmouthing they do about us, or from him being hurt when he sees how much they're using him. While the girls' feelings would be hurt by some of this stuff, he's probably the one I want away from the most due to the fallout.

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Originally Posted by Jodo

My thoughts exactly! I don't know how you are able to put up with it BR!

I haven't had any negative experiences with FB yet, so I don't usually know about the "FB drama" people always talk about, but I would say you sure do. :/

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I've always been more of a peacemaker instead of confrontational or an instigator. Combine that with me putting such a high value on keeping family first and you end up with me making lots of concessions and bending over backward to keep the peace over the years. To be honest, when it was just my wife and I on the receiving end, it mostly just rolled off my back. They started dragging the kids in on it right before our first miscarriage. That would have been the breaking point under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, when we lost the baby, I was in a much different place spiritually and emotionally than I am now, so I took a very forgiving stance on the things that happened the first several months. Things escalated rather quickly after that, but it wasn't until the Thanksgiving party when my one uncle listed everyone who'd lost a loved one that year and made a point of leaving us off that list that I decided we weren't going to put up with it anymore. I talked to my priest a short while after that and he said loving your neighbor doesn't mean you have to like them. I took stock in what they'd done to us and a couple other family members and decided we needed to cut back on how often we saw them. This didn't improve the situation--made it worse, in fact--so we finally decided to quit seeing them altogether. Interestingly enough, several of them still suck up to my parents quite a bit so we'll hear about how so-and-so really misses one of our kids and always thought they were sweet/funny/awesome/whatever. I keep pointing out that the one who does this the most is the same person who once shoved our daughter away from a table and out of the "adult" conversation because she refused to repeat a bunch of vulgar phrases, and who on another occasion refused to acknowledge the same daughter she always claims she's so fond of when we ran into her at a store. I'm sure things will come to a head at some point, but for now I'm content not having to see them.

After talking to a friend last night, I thought I'd preemptively clear up a misconception. I've mentioned religion several times on here and how that's one of the issues some of these folks have with me. This friend of mine seemed to think it was because I was shoving it down their throats, rubbing it in their faces, etc. If you'd hear some of what they've said about it, you'd likely get that impression as well. The truth of the matter is that nothing of the sort has happened. I did get into an argument with one family member (not one of the problematic ones) about some ignorant comments he made (after going to his parish's Oktoberfest, gambling away a ton of money and drinking himself silly, he told a mutual friend that the very existence of the Oktoberfest only served to illustrate the hypocrisy within the Catholic Church which, according to him condemns all gambling and drinking as mortal sins; I simply pointed out to him that nothing could be further from the truth, that both are fine in moderation, and that if he truly believed they were mortal sins then he was the actual hypocrite for overindulging in both), but this took place after we'd decided to cut ties with the other family members and didn't go any further than that discussion.

I will point out that I'm much more active and stronger in my faith than I have been since I was a kid. This isn't something I've talked about with these family members, and my reversion actually took place after my "extreme" religious views were already a topic of gossip among them. Their caricature of me was based on a handful of unrelated incidents from which they made a bunch of assumptions then later set these down as gospel truth about me. The first one took place several years ago at a family party. They were having a conversation of a contraceptive nature in earshot of several of the youngest girls in the family, including my two oldest daughters. The particulars of the conversation were such that I'd never be able to clean it up enough to give an accurate portrayal here, especially considering that Jodo might read it. When I saw that at least some of what they were saying was catching the attention of the 6-10 year old girls, I told them I thought it was a little inappropriate considering the audience, then took my girls in the other room. I didn't mention religion at all and would have done the same had they been talking about any other inappropriate topic. They took what happened and put a religious spin on it, then told a bunch of others in the family about our extremist views and reckless behaviors.

A short while after that, we announced we were expecting (this ended up being our first miscarriage). This helped to confirm the stories they'd concocted previously. It also brought out the really nasty anti-large family comments and comparisons to various extreme breeding movements and reality show stars. We'd been hearing the occasional comment ever since our first daughter was born (our second child), but with us "foolishly" embarking on a fourth pregnancy, their claws really came out. Our decision to get pregnant that time had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the fact that we'd been planning on having another since our third was born but hadn't gotten around to it yet. Once again, no mention of religion on our part, but a whole bunch of assumptions on theirs.

A third instance which helped to fuel the fires was the fact that I made Facebook comments about going to church two weeks in a row. If I remember right, the first one was a complaint about something that had happened at Mass. I don't recall the particulars, but it was entirely about someone being a jerk and annoying me; it just happened to take place during Sunday Mass. The following week I made a positive comment about attendance that week. We'd been hearing rumors for over a year that our parish (including the school) were going to be shut down and absorbed into another local parish. I'd expressed concern over this several times, mainly because we didn't want to have to move the kids to another, more expensive school, and we like having our church within walking distance. We'd recently gotten a new priest and a lot of people believed that his main duty was to come in and gracefully transition us over to the other parish. On the contrary, he worked his tail off to save the parish and that Sunday was the first time I'd seen the church that full outside of Christmas or Easter since we'd become parishioners. Amusingly, we now regularly get much larger crowds than that at one of our normal Sunday Masses; however, at the time, I was excited because it seemed like things were starting to turn around for the parish. Yet again, there was nothing overtly religious about what I posted, but that didn't stop them from once more twisting what happened into a story about how I was a religious nut and trying to force my views on them.

Another amusing aspect of all this is that when I heard some of the stuff they were saying about me, I thought they were kind of nuts. For one thing, at the time this all started, I was a semi-regular church-goer at best. I wasn't clear on a lot of the Catholic church's teachings and while I was trying to get my family to go to Mass more regularly, it wasn't a huge part of our lives. Since then, though, I've actually become much more committed to and active in my faith. In doing so, I've made a bunch of changes in some of the little things we do and now have some different motivations for some of the things we were doing all along. This means I'm actually a lot more like the person they claimed I was several years ago, although their characterization of me is still nowhere near factual or accurate. At the same time, it's exposed a much deeper level of hypocrisy on their part. One of the things several of them are fond of doing is pointing out what great, faithful Catholics they are, especially when compared to others (not just myself, but I would regularly see nasty comments along these lines directed at me). They don't go to Mass regularly (if at all), don't actively follow most of the Church's teachings and actively speak out about others. This somehow makes them better Catholics than my wife & I, who go to Mass regularly and follow the Church's teachings (and, for the record, that didn't cause us to have five kids now, but it helped give us the confidence to keep trying). We seldom expound upon faith matters outside of our own home, though, and never use religion as a tool to attack people on Facebook.

Long story short is that their animosity toward us over our religious behaviors sprung from their own assumptions and not from anything we actually did or said.

Just be you. Anyone giving you grief about your being active in the church is probably just mad your making them look bad for actually doing what they say they are doing. My wife was raised catholic and it is a bane to my in-laws that I'm not and don't plan on ever being Catholic. Im a god fearing Jesus loving christian and Ill just stick with that.