When her marriage started to falter, Kara, a 35-year-old Bostonian, hoped her in-laws would provide the glue that might hold everything together. While they had fought the intercultural relationship at the beginning (Kara is of European descent and grew up in the Midwest, and they are Lebanese Christian), marriage changed everything.

“They were totally accepting once we married,” she says.

And they didn’t believe in divorce.

“When I didn’t want my marriage to end,” she says, “I knew my in-laws would be helpful in trying to preserve it.”

Despite their help, Kara and her husband eventually parted. Because of the family culture, and its views on divorce, she knew she would lose contact with most of them forever.

She would especially miss her nieces and nephews — in Lebanon and in the States — and asked her husband to tell them she loved them.

“I knew it would be like I had never been there, part of the family,” she says. “But I had.”

Perhaps that’s what I was feeling up in my husband’s old bedroom last Christmas. Reeling from my father-in-law’s comment about my family and -- by extension -- me, I vowed never to return and, without really thinking, picked up a pencil from the floor and scratched my initials on the soft underside of the desk as if to indicate “I was here.”

It was out of fear of losing the connection she had with her in-laws and their world that Dani, also a 35-year-old Bostonian, stayed in her relationship for too long.

“I used to talk on the phone to [her husband’s] mom, who was so different than me,” she says. “She grew up on a reservation, and I loved the connection to the culture, the people, the geography that I had through her.”

Dani also worried Walter’s family would think poorly of her, because Walter had left his life out West to move to the Northeast to be with her.

“If it weren’t for those misgivings, I’d have left him six months earlier,” she says. “Probably should have.”

Liz, a 28-year-old New Yorker, says she never had much to do with her in-laws, which sounds like it might have been a good thing. They were not a factor during her marriage or in the separation at all, but she did not get away unscathed.

Once the divorce was in full swing, they helped their son hide his money, and she has been left struggling to raise her son with no support.

Despite the hurt I’ve felt from my in-laws’ attitudes, and my vow in the little bedroom on Christmas Day to never return, I have been back.

I went upstairs, to my husband’s old bedroom, and passed my fingers along the underside of the desk to feel the impression “M.H.” that I had left there months before.

Even if the day comes when the Hammersleys and I are no longer part of each others’ lives, there is no mistaking that at one time, and sometimes under great stress, I had been connected with them.