Just to clear a few things up:
Steve lives in my husband’s hometown over a thousand miles away from our place, and he’s always on about how he hates my home city and everyone who lives here. So luckily we’ll never have to deal with him coming here. WHEW!
I don’t have children, so there’s nothing to worry about there. I have a genetic medical condition that is the number one cause of subfertility and infertility in women, so it’s just never happened. But we have three beautiful nieces on my husband’s side: two teenagers, and one five years old.
There is no father-in-law in the picture, as my husband’s father died many years ago when my husband was just a toddler and Steve was about 12. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if having such an ultra-indulgent, all-forgiving mother protecting him from the consequences of his actions, and never having had a strong father figure showing him how a gentleman treats women might be some of the cause of Steve’s socially challenged behavior.
But seeing as how my husband and the middle brother were both far younger when they lost their dad and have both turned out to be wonderful, decent, good men who cherish their families, I’m not willing to cut him too much slack there. By all reports my late father-in-law was a paragon of a fellow, fair-minded and deeply devout, so Steve obviously doesn’t get his churlish ways from his father’s example.
My husband is completely disgusted with Steve and has decided to go to no contact with him. He will only see him at family events that he attends solo from here on in – I won’t stop him from visiting his family, but I won’t attend with him. I told my Mr. that I won’t buy an expensive plane ticket and make a long exhausting journey just so I can get picked on at best and sexually harassed at worst once I arrive. No way, Jose!
He agrees COMPLETELY.
While my husband is very deeply disappointed that his mother has decided I’m some kind of hard-hearted villain who’s being too hard on her Poor Misunderstood 53-Year-Old Baby, my husband isn’t willing to cut off contact with her, as she’s in her late seventies and in poor health.
This isn’t the first time my MIL has ignored a blatant problem in one of her children, though – one of my husband’s sisters had an obvious alcohol problem when I first met her. During family events she’d be stumbling around slurring drunk by mid-afternoon, often saying rude things and insulting people. During our wedding she was out of it by 5 PM (the reception started at 3:30) and started telling members of my family how much “better” her family was than mine. My father went to my MIL and told her that she REALLY needed to have someone take her daughter back to the hotel, because she was very drunk and being very rude and making a spectacle of herself.
Guess who ended up being the bad guy in that situation? Yes, you guessed it – my Dad.
MIL complained about him for literally YEARS, no kidding, even though SIL went on to pull similar stunts at her other brother’s wedding, a cousin’s graduation dinner, and our niece’s baptism reception (!!!) MIL didn’t accept that her daughter had an alcohol problem until about three years ago, when a state trooper pulled my SIL over on a country highway and discovered she had a blood alcohol content over twice the legal limit, after which she ended up in court-ordered rehab. SIL is all dried out now, but rarely visits the family because they all still drink heavy. But to this day we’re still hearing complaints from MIL about how the judge was Just Too Hard on her.
I sent my brother- and sister-in-law the letter describing the under-the-skirt incident, and she and her husband are pretty much the only ones that understood my side and offered sympathy. I would definitely still visit with them if Steve wasn’t there, especially since their little daughter is very cute and just loooooooooves her Auntie G.
The only part that still worries me is that at the grad party, I saw Steve go up and grab my younger teenage niece (she’s 16) in the same way that he used to grab me, and just yukked it up when she acted annoyed afterwards. Problem is, their parents have the same “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” attitude regarding Big City Dwellers as Steve does, and I’m not sure if they’d even believe me if I told them they might want to watch out for the way he treats their daughters.
Thing is… there’s a definite cunning to the way Steve chooses who he can and can’t grab. He won’t do it to his mother and sisters, and I’ve never noticed him hassling one policewoman cousin, or two other cousins who are married to big stocky Marines. No, it’s always lower-status females like sisters-in-law or young girls like the teenage nieces, who are all under pressure from MIL and the rest of that massive clan to Play Nice with him.
Well, I’m DONE playing nice with him. I swore to
love, honor, and cherish, forsaking all others, and that includes big ol’ socially inept brothers-in-law, thanks!
:knight2: