I love that liquor is so cheap in America

This July marked my in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary. The fact they have managed to hang in there for that long together without ever once having yellow police tape surrounding their house is impressive to me.

They decided to celebrate by having the whole family join them on their dream holiday.

To the Mall of America.

I’ve only been married for sixteen years, but if by some miracle we manage to make it to the 50 year mark, Minnesota is probably not going to be our celebratory destination of choice.

Nothing against Minnesotaians; they are our American doppelgangers who know exactly why we have a plug dangling out of the front of our cars and have transitioned ‘eh’ into the popular lexicon in the way god intended.

But the Mall of America? For the golden annivesary? After 50 years of marriage you’d think my in-laws would want to up their game a little.

However, I figure an anniversary of that magnitude buys the right to boss everyone around so I just rolled with the punches.

The punches being a 14-hour drive with three children.

Here is the problem - my husband has five siblings and NONE of them have small children. They either have teenagers, young adults or no children at all. So when they plan group events they don’t take into consideration stuff like asking our kids to sit next to each other quietly for the entire waking day is kinda like asking Hamas to lead the campfire sing-a-long at Hebrew camp.

I addressed this situation by buying enough candy to lull them into a diabetic coma and purchasing so much liquor at the duty-free store I was able to build a booze tower between the kids so impressive they couldn’t see or touch each other for the majority of the trip.

And all that liquor came in handy as a week with the extended family was a pretty tall order. Some of the highlights:

- My brother-in-law telling racist and homophobic jokes in public places to the horror of servers and patrons alike. I started writing little notes on slips of paper I could pass to random strangers that read, “I have nothing to do with this guy – I just married into this family and am being held hostage by tradition and obligation to my mother-in-law. She’s actually pretty nice. She makes cabbage rolls and plays the pan flute”

- Staying in a hotel that served gravy for breakfast and smelled like chlorine and old lady.

- My father-in-law barking at my 70 year-old MIL after she fell on the steps coming into the hotel - “If you think you need to go to the hospital, get in the car and drive straight to Canada”. Which, by the way, is a six hour drive from Minneapolis. NICE. You’d think someone THAT cheap would have sprung for travel insurance.

- Paying $9.00 for a slurpee at Valley Fair

Alright, it wasn’t all bad. We did get to meet up with my BFF from Winnipeg who just so happened to be passing through. We had lunch at a Burger King attached to gas station in some small town I can't remember the name of now. I had a Whopper Jr. with cheese.

And I discovered I'm not too fat to ride a roller coaster. That was good news.

But not even ONE time did we run into Prince. I spent all that time practicing my interpretive dance version of 'Raspberry Beret' for nothing.

The W.A.S.P and the Albanians

I don’t have any family in town. Actually, I barely have any family at all. I have a mom, a brother and a tiny smattering of aunts/uncles/cousins who I speak to about twice a year. I’ve tried, a few times, to establish more of an actual relationship with these people but it’s pretty clear they are not really interested. None of them live in the same province as me anyway, and it appears I have cemented my position as black sheep when I was a teenager and now I’m just going to have to live with it. Not even facebook is thawing this bunch. Whatever, that’s fine. I often wish I had some family, but it is what it is.

What I do have are in-laws. LOTS of in-laws since my husband is one of six children. I have been with the same man since I was fifteen years old so I have grown up with my husband’s family and consider them actual family and not just an indiscriminate collection of people I inherited that I need to contend with during the holidays. I love them. They make me crazy because every single last one of them is certifiably insane, but it’s kind of part of their charm.

The large extended family option that came standard when I purchased the Hubby was part of the initial draw. The family I grew up with is considerably different than my in-laws. They are a small group who is quiet and conservative. They eat really nice expensive food, drink good wine and go on a lot of trips. I get the feeling they are somewhere between amused and horrified that I married a Ukrainian (he’s actually Romanian, but it took my family eight years to stop referring to him as Albanian so I take what I can get). They all have immaculately clean houses (like, freakish hospital-quality clean houses) and none of the women have careers. Well, I do have an aunt that is a nurse and a cousin that is almost a nurse, but the only reason they work at all is because they don’t have husbands. Female careers in my family are pretty much unheard of unless you have no one to ‘support’ you. They also have very nice manners and grammar and all family dinners are eaten properly at the beautiful dining room table using the matching china. Kids are trained not to speak or create any noise or generate any mess, and only a few certain people are invited to family occasions at a time. If you had more people than seats or plates, (a) there would be a tragic mismatched dinnerware situation, and (b) an increased risk of sound. There is NO NOISE EVER allowed around my family. They are a quiet bunch who like things proper and orderly and dignified. It's just how they roll.

The in-laws, on the other hand….are....umm..... different. They are loud (like, bag-pipe marching band loud), opinionated, invite whoever is hungry to whatever occasion is happening and all the kids get to talk or make noise whenever they want. Nobody has a clean house and all the women work. In fact, most of them make more money than their husbands. They burn every piece of meat to a scorching chunk of coal and buy whatever red wine is cheapest and then put it in the fridge. They eat food like perogies (SO good) and cabbage rolls (meh). They have random, quirky relatives whose average age is about 97 and when they come over for a family occasion my father-in-law assigns them a seat and proceeds to get them drunk. After a few stiff ones they start telling fart jokes in Romanian. Everyone eats dinner sitting in whatever free space they can find and if you can score a TV table it’s a major triumph. The brothers and sisters speak in these randomly bizarre pretend accents for no reason and play board games after dinner that include actions such as screaming ‘YODI YODI YODI YODI YODI’ as loud as possible while rubbing bums together and flailing arms whenever a team scores a point. There is nothing proper, orderly or dignified about this bunch. I fit in quite nicely.

Because my family doesn’t live near me and I have grown up with the in-laws, my house is a closer reflection of the environment created by my husband’s family than it is my original family. This works for us, but I don’t think it’s advancing my goal of some day fitting in with my original family. The world they live in has very specific rock-solid rules to live by and I don’t live by them. I work a lot, my house is always mess, my kids make noise and act like, well, kids, I earn more money than my husband and I have adopted the ‘more the merrier’ philosophy to hosting. I’ve tried to marry the two families together a few times for various occasions, and…..let’s just say it hasn’t really worked out all that well. That’s okay. I’m making peace with it. I’m grateful to have this ‘other’ family who makes me laugh and doesn’t take themselves all that seriously.

I’m never putting a bottle of red wine in the fucking refrigerator though. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.