Mother-in-law redux

So. We're back from Germany. The plane touched down in DC at about 7:15 last night, and we arrived at our apartment at about 10:30. The three hours in the interim were spent waiting for a tram to take us from our arrival gate to customs, waiting in two separate, very long customs lines (and yes, it so so sucks that we have to go through separate customs lines), waiting for the bus to take us to the Metro, riding the bus to the Metro, taking the Metro and changing lines and waiting a very long time for both trains, then dragging our three suitcases up the street to our apartment. Oh, and it probably took me about ten minutes to wrench our mail out of the mailbox, because it was beyond full and close to turning into a black hole.

But. We are back. Thank god.

Not that the trip was bad, because it wasn't. It was fun, it was interesting, and it was necessary. But oh my god, was it ever not relaxing. Torsten and I are both seriously looking forward to heading down to my parents' for Thanksgiving later this week and spending four days collapsed at their house, recovering from our vacation. My god.

It wasn't really any one thing, except obviously Torsten's dad's fall and subsequent surgery (which went well) and hospital stay (which should be over in a day or two). His mom was so stressed about the whole thing, and she is the type to get really easily stressed out anyway. Nothing with her ever gets done easily. There must always be huge discussion and dithering and repeated questioning, whether it's about what she'll order in a restaurant or whether her husband really needs knee surgery. It takes five minutes just to say goodnight to her, because she'll keep remembering things that she wants to say or ask. At least, that's what I think, but since I don't really understand German, I can't be sure.

It all just felt so noisy. There was always talk and chatter and the TV or the radio on in the background and it was just so different from my family environment that it was really surprising to me. It did help me get a much better understanding of where Torsten comes from, which I appreciate, but wow. It was just so much.

And also, we spent two days at the North Sea just the two of us, and then two days in Cologne visiting Torsten's best friend and his wife, who flew in from England especially to see us. His mother encouraged us to do all this, and yet when we got back, she was furious about how much time we had spent away from her, and what an ungrateful son Torsten was, and what a bad influence I was. And she was passive-aggressive about it, which is so frustrating. Even I could tell she was being passive-aggressive, just from her tone and gestures, and I don't even speak the bloody language.

The weird thing is that his mother is truly a nice person. She means well, and she truly cares about Torsten, and she took great care of us and cooked good food and was generally friendly and open. She's just so much to handle, and such a shock to my system. She's a shock to Torsten's system, too, and he's been dealing with her for 30 years.

I even ended up having a meltdown on Saturday night, which normally never happens to me--we had gone to an Italian restaurant, just Torsten and me (because his mother doesn't eat dinner and doesn't understand why other people do, and his father was in the hospital), and I had ordered one dish and received another, and hadn't realized it until it was too late to do anything about it. And then I got ridiculously, uncharacteristically upset over it, even though I knew it was totally tiny and inconsequential, and ended up crying in the middle of the street, like really crying hard, over some stupid spaghetti but really over how stressful everything was and how frustrating it is and how much I so totally did not want to listen to everyone crying and being all tragic when they said goodbye to us the next day.

And speaking of saying goodbye and crying, remember what happened last time Torsten's mother said goodbye to him? How she told him he could always come home when things didn't work out? Yeah, that's right. She said the same thing again this time, that he was always welcome to come home anytime he needed. Apparently it wasn't quite as direct as last time, and he doesn't think that she meant it to be anything against me, but she still said "you," and unlike in English where "you" can be singular or plural, she used du, which is exclusively singular. Just him. Not me.

Torsten and I discussed it in the plane, and we think the problem is that she just doesn't make me feel like part of the family. And we know part of that is the language barrier, and the distance, and the fact that Torsten has never been as close with his family as I am with mine. But his mother just doesn't view us as a unit. You would think she would, because she had (and has) the exact same problem with her mother when she married Torsten's father. But she doesn't, and it's so clear to me that she doesn't, and it makes me feel like such an outsider.

So it wasn't a relaxing trip. But it was so nice to go to the North Sea, and so so nice to finally meet Torsten's best friend, who will be the best man at our wedding, and also great to see where he grew up and what his house was like. And the nice thing about being with someone you love is that you can never really have a bad time, even if your so-called vacation is stressful, because I never have a bad time with Torsten, ever.

But still. Thanksgiving cannot arrive soon enough.