I’m pleasantly exhausted
after a week-long family gathering at my house in California. Friends lent us their house to bed down six people;
the other three stayed with my husband and me. My house was the center of activity for eleven of us for seven days, together! The success of the event and the
even-temperaments of everyone, despite the inevitable conflicts about where to
go and when to go…made me remember reunions that weren’t quite so perfect, with
the relatives from hell who put the ‘t’ in turmoil. Are you thinking of one right now?
-the drunk
-the controller
-the loud-mouth contrarian
-the passive aggressive one
-the annoying prankster
-the one who refuses to do
anything
-the pouter
-the complainer
-others?
My deceased aunt Frances
(Frannie), comes to mind - unmarried PE
teacher and tap dance instructor, prematurely wrinkled, hair askew, and always
racing from one place to another. A know-it-all;
a conniver. She had to be in charge at
every reunion; if it wasn’t her idea, it wasn’t worth a cent. She used her last will and testament, the promise of an inheritance, to keep her nieces and nephews in line.
I called her on her manipulation tactic; I got none of her tainted
money.
The good thing about
Fran? See, I’m an organized, plan-ahead
kind of person, so I have to be careful I don’t become the ‘Fran’ of our yearly
reunions. I ask family members ahead of
time for activity proposals and once we’re all together, we make sure the
schedule is flexible with each person’s interests met. This takes good listening skills and means
the whole group won’t always be together, but everyone has a good time. And no, I’m not holding out an inheritance as
an enticement for my nieces and nephews to be nice to me. Instead, I give each a certain amount of
money at the end of each college term, if their grades are good enough AND they’ve
signed up for the next year.
So here’s your chance. Describe your relative from hell…and the
negative lessons she/he taught you.
And if you want to read about an interesting family dynamic in Petersburg, Alaska, LIE CATCHERS is for you. Liv has returned to her home town (where her brother is the sheriff) to help her mother save the family business.
Here
are the Amazon and Wild Rose Press buy sites:
