All that has transpired among my family this holiday takes longer to digest than even the biggest turkey holiday.

My mother and step-father (still getting used to calling this stranger any sort of father) swept through town town in a fit of self-importance, leaving behing gifts from their recent Mexican holiday.

The dishes were barely dry and it was time for a seven-hour drive to upstate NY where my sister and I removed my father's car from his possession for his own safety (dementia has robbed him of his driving skills). We lied and said we accidentally crashed it but actually put it into storage. 

Holidays...what fun. But who had my back through all the bickering and tears? Rob. Gotta hand it to that guy. He's a good one to have aroun.

I promised a report on my latest trip to upstate New York to take of my father who has Alzheimer's Disease, and the level of support Rob mustered around it. In a nutshell: Dad is much sicker, Rob is more supportive.

My father isn't the only one transformed by his disease. I'm enjoying spending time with him, the man who made my childhood miserable. And Rob is stepping up with phone calls to me while I'm away, flowers upon my return home, and the composure of a good listener and sincerely concerned friend.
Maybe being needed brings out the best in us.

My father's need opened my heart and allowed me to see things between him and me in a new way. I no longer resent his past mistakes or withhold my assistance.

Rob sees me sad over my father's messy decline, and he bolsters me up.

It's a ripple effect — the waves gently wash over our resistance, softening us toward each other.

There are moments when Rob is just the husband I need. 

You know how I said having sex was like going to the gym? There's something else that fits the same bill. Visiting the in-laws. A good daughter in-law should make the effort. She may never want to, and may get out of the habit, but once she's there, it can be enjoyable, and she might even feel good about herself afterward.

That was my attitude when I went to see my in-laws last weekend. I made myself go because I knew it was the right thing to do. In fact, I suggested the trip! And it was infinitely bearable.

One major adjustment may have made all the difference: For once, we didn't make an overnight of the trip. Rob's parents live three hours away — a long drive to make twice in one day. But beyond the annoyance of his father's incessant stories, sleeping over in Rob's boyhood bedroom can bring up all sorts of bad memories. Like the time I heard his family talking about me downstairs. Or, so long ago, before we were married and they would let us sleep in the same room, how we had sex in his twin bed and giggled when we looked up and noticed the dusty cross looming above us. (Of course, that wouldn't be a bad memory in and of itself if the days of having sex are so far behind us now.)

But I'm skirting the issue here. The real story is that I was avoiding my in-laws as long as I was seriously considering leaving Rob. As long as we were heading for splittsville, I didn't want to get any closer to his family and run the risk of more heartache (for missing them) when we separated.

I'm switching gears for a bit from the thirtysomething woman who has contemplated separation to the adult child of divorce still dealing with the fallout.

Quick summary: To the extent lines were drawn, I suppose I sided with my mother. She left because when we learned my father cheated on her for 20 years with my best friend's mother. But now she has withdrawn from my brother, sister, and me.

We hear from her infrequently, and when we do, it's never to discuss our lives, but hers, which is moneyed compared to the rest of ours. She has remarried a man we don't get, in the sense that he's from the other side of the political aisle — from us, from her, from anyone I've ever known. (He's off the map. He's against Title IX!)

Meanwhile, my father is progressing into the middle stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and my siblings and I are left to manage his care. My parents defaulted on their shared mortgage around the time of their divorce, we moved our father into a small apartment for now, and there are no assets to help pay for his long-term care. (Phew! Got that?)

Here's the latest kicker — a quiet but ridiculous circumstance that breaks everything open again and makes it hard to swallow. Recently, my father wet his pants for the first time and the family dog, good old Betty — who kept him company and who he walked multiple times a day for lack of capability in any participating in any other activity — died. As this was happening, my mother was preparing to leave on her first cruise, sailing from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, in celebration of her first wedding anniversary.

I'm somewhat resentful and frustrated by aspects of my parents' marriage and divorce but that hasn't blinded me to the lessons to be learned.

I've learned from my parents' marriage not to let a few rocky patches turn into decades of dissatisfaction. Their betrayals of each other — big and small — and their unhappiness across the years show how easily people can get stuck in terribly unhealthy relationships. So with Rob, I've delved into couples therapy. And if that doesn't work, I'm not going to stay put forever.

I've also learned — and this is a big life lesson — how to muster feelings of compassion toward very difficult people. I can't forgive my father for his betrayals, or forget how he could make his kids feel like unwanted nuisances. But as his Alzheimer's disease rapidly progresses and he becomes further forgetful and confused — and, ironically but most helpfully, increasingly nice and gentle — I can let my resentment go and help him. He didn't take care of me so well, but now the roles have reversed, I don't need to repay his unkindness.

In all the crap life throws at us, divorce and disease are up there among the worst. But it is short-sighted to dwell on their difficult aspects only. Lessons to be learned, silver lining, lemonade from lemon, "challenges" — call them what you will — I'm not letting anything get the best of me.

Though...I'm on duty with my dad for the next few days, so let's just wait and see what I have to say after that.

I've blogged about contemplating separation from Rob, but barely discussed how I recently became a child of divorce. After 37 years of marriage, my parents split when a marathon argument revealed the details of my fathers' many affairs...the longest and most significant of which was with my best friend's mother. (What a jerk, right?)

My mother's decision to leave my father did not rock my world at first. I had felt, for many years, she owed it to herself and her kids to get out from under his cloud of darkness. The illogical behavior and unreasonable mood swings grew worse over time. Finally, she was taking action.

The tragedy is this: months after their split, my father's crazy behavior was diagnosed as early-stage Alzheimer's disease.

And just a year later, the disease has ravaged his intellectual capacity and ability to communicate. This once angry man is now a gentle giant in need of my care.

I'll never fault my mother for leaving. But the timing of Dad's diagnosis weighs heavily on her, as if she should have known and stayed to care for him. (Traditionalists might point to marriage vows and agree.)

But I can't spend time helping my mom feel better about herself. My siblings and I have more pressing concerns. My dad, the man who put the anguish and anxiety in my childhood and who betrayed my entire family, now like a child, is a serious responsibility.

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.

Just how central a role do in-laws play in some women’s decisions to stay or go? For 27-year-old Nancy from Ontario, Canada, it couldn’t be simpler. “I considered leaving both of my husbands because of their mothers, quite frankly,” she said.

Indeed, a nasty in-law can be a catalyst for departure. “My current husband is a dream, but if his mother opens her mouth one more time I swear I will walk out until she is dead, and then return after the funeral like it was all an unpleasant dream,” she says.

“I wish I was joking.”

To give up on Mr. Right because of his mother would be a tragedy. On the other hand, three husbands whose mothers drive her crazy? That’s at least bad luck.

Tracy, a 34-year-old Midwesterner, suspects that a man who can’t keep his mother at bay — and out of the most important moments in their lives — might not be worth the trouble.

Her doubts about her husband started just before the birth of their first child.

“There was no way in God’s green Earth that I was going to allow his mom into the delivery room. He assured me he would tell her.”

But he didn’t, and his mother, who had made the long-distance trip just for the occasion, had other ideas.

“You’re going to have to let go of that modesty,” her mother-in-law harped early in Tracy’s labor.

In the end, Tracy had a nurse announce that all guests must leave the room.

Situation resolved.

“But now his mother reminds me of the abrupt realization I had that my husband wasn’t going to stand up for me,” she says, “even when it was incredibly important.”

The feelings about her mother-in-law persisted, and Tracy and her husband are pursuing marriage counseling to help them work through everything.

Last, Part III – Inlaws and Keeping a Marriage Together

Last Christmas, I hid for a few moments of solitude in my husband’s boyhood bedroom, as my in-laws flitted about below, making dinner, greeting guests. Though I had been contemplating a split from my husband, Rob, for months, I was along for the holiday as a favor to him, a good-faith effort that I was committed to getting through our rough patch.

Frustrated with the decision I had made, and feeling trapped in family festivities I didn’t want to be part of, I sat down on the faded rug in his room, leaned back against a small painted desk, and cried.

Voices wafted up from below and I heard my father-in-law say “Now that’s a family with problems.”

He was talking about my family.

My parents had recently divorced and within a few months my mother had remarried and moved far away. I felt his judgment not only on them but on me, as unbeknownst to him, I was thinking of leaving my husband just as my mother had.

I cried harder.

From worrying about what they think of us, to wishing them out of our lives, to not wanting to say good-bye to them, in-laws can loom large in our thoughts as we contemplate separation or divorce.

It stands to reason, since many of us work so hard to fit into our in-laws’ family (or at least make the relationship work on a practical level), that extricating ourselves is not easy.

In Part II – Inlaws and the Decision to Go

The Foils (I first introduced them in "Meet the Foils") recently visited the city for the weekend, two of their four kids in tow.

The Foils are a lovely couple, and they have achieved everything Rob and I cannot — the gaggle of happy and healthy children, the strong family bond, and the clear mission to ride the ups and downs in their marriage, come what may. I can't really relate to all that togetherness, and it gives me serious doubts about my marriage.

Rob and I took charge of the kids Saturday while their parents attended a wedding. We went to the zoo, indulged in ice cream, rode the train (to kids from the country, subways are wondrous), and enjoyed a festive Mexican dinner. An incredible day.

I expect the kids talked about their city adventures during the entire seven-hour ride home with their parents.

Of course, kids must feel safe and secure to enjoy themselves in new territory. That's not easy when you're not their parents. So it's all the more precious that Rob and I pulled that off together. But I still don't want to have kids with him.

I'm in my mid-30s with a bit of time to spare, so perhaps I will be a mother in the next chapter of my life?

Or so I've been hoping. Yesterday a friend in the 30th week of her second pregnancy said she must endure more monitoring and tests this time around because she is considered by the medical establishment to be of "Advanced Maternal Age." What? I guess sooner than later, I need to move on.