Rejection

Richie I'm sitting home alone on Easter reading the pain in your oost. I feel horrible for you. For a few minutes after my wife took the kids to her brothers before the dinner out, I felt bad about not being invited. But upon reflection, it's not about me, it's about their need to either adjust to the truth in order to move on. I suspect it's a similar story for you. I have faith that it will be better in time. Hang in there. (*hug*)

 

Maybe because you feared it for so long, you are allowing it to happen now. It's the prescribed course of things that you had in your head. Maybe they weren't rejecting you but you got that impression because this is what you were expecting all this time. Maybe excusing yourself and leaving was the wrong thing to do.
Anyway, even if you are unwanted, the fact that you are on great terms with your wife is good, she will show them that she is ok with who you are and that so should they. Give it some time. Older people are usually more 'traditional' and hence, more homophobic.

 

What about your own parents, if I may ask?

You mentioned that your in-laws were more like family than your own. Can you "bump up" the status of the relationship with your own parents, if they are still with us and that is possible?

If you felt rejected, I'm thinking you were picking up cues. I once went to a meal with a parent to someone's house for a family event of theirs, and I felt very uncomfortable. Their kids my age were all there, they were all married, and they all had kids. What made it worse is when I went outside to get air (literally) and one of their daughters' kids was on a banister on the outside patio, preparing to slide down and I told him "No!" That daughter came out of the house and looked at the kid and also looked suspiciously at me. Sorry, but your youngster doesn't look like or isn't as old as Scott Bakula, Chris Meloni, Anthony LaPaglia and others like that, so don't even go there! By that point, I was disgusted with the situation.

It could be that you're overreacting, and that I was overreacting as well, because of the vigilance that comes on. If you had enough cues to suspect rejection, it might be valid. If there were no cues, then there may not have been rejection.

Either way, it's not a good situation to be in for what might have presumably been Easter dinner. I had my own battle this weekend and it gave some credence to the notion that "you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." I did not spend it with family, either.

 

Richie -

This was the 1st holiday that I spent without the kids or my wife the whole day. We had brunch and baskets together. I was not invited to easter dinner. It hurts like hell.

Be grateful for your parents. My family has been my wife's family. They've not spoken to me, since I came out to my wife. My parents are dead, I'm an only, and am caught between two generations of cousins; the "brat" to one and the "old man" to the other. So it could be worse.

If your parents are accepting of your situation, I'd begin developing a closer relationship to them.

If not here are two different possible senarios:

A. Go it alone. Let's take Easter for an example. A friend of mine lives in Boston. He got up went to church. Went to brunch at a gay club, had some beers, played pool, and went home. Now his sons are older and away at school.

B. Spend the morning as I did. I then had a long drive to a gay married couple's home who live at one of their parents house. I cried all the way out there approx 45-50 mins from my home from welling up to sobbing...my choice of music didn't help. On the way out I debated calling them and bowing out. I pulled in the drive and saw more mini-vans than a day care centre. Teddy came out to greet me notice how red my eyes were. gave me a hug and a kiss. I met an amazing family. In a small village, they accepted their gay coterie of a few friends as if we were family. It was amazing to see this interracial couple with their family, a family comfortable with talking how you're doing with coming out, asking about you kids, making you feel so very much at home.

I'll admit this was unusual, but I could have been a part of a number of other people's celebrations and counted myself lucky. Here's the thing. You can mourn for what you lost, and be justified in doing so, but you wife's family has made it clear you're an unpleasent reminder to them of what they my may perceive as a betrayal of their daughter and their own affections for you. You've turned the world upside down even if you and your wife are still on affectionate terms. You are now part of their past, not their future. You need to do the same thing, remember to be kinder to them than they were to you.

Change is a bitch. Just tuck and roll.

 

Richie,

I feel really terrible for what you're going through, and I've been there. You're describing exactly what I felt like when my marriage suddenly ended 6 years ago.

It felt like the end of the world. I frankly didn't care if I survived it.

But I did, thankfully. And things got better. And at this point in my life, I'm actually feeling optimistic for the future.

You have to have faith that it will get better for you too. You will not be alone forever. There's a saying that when a door closes, a window opens. In my life, I've found that to be true. Things that felt at the time like horrible crises turned out to be blessings in disguise. But it never feels that way when it's happening.

You're still a young guy. You've got a lot of life ahead of you. As my dad used to say, "This too shall pass."

 

So sorry for what you're going through, Richie. The idea of being alone always scared me, in a large part because I was never really comfortable with myself. I always relied on having a strong (or seemingly strong) person to lean on--it certainly was part of what made me marry who I did. She seemed to have the confidence I lacked, and the close family ties that seemed to be slipping away in my life.

In the end, though, I still felt alone in a way, even when I was with all of them, because what I really needed was to start figuring out who I was and what was really important to me. Time alone, particularly around holidays, can be painful, but it's a good time to consider what you want out of life and to think about what you might be able to change to make it better. I can tell you that almost as soon as I decided to just be myself, and go it alone if need be, rather than cling on to other people for my security and well-being, good things started to happen. A little self-confidence and self-acceptance goes a long way. You may have a bigger reserve of strength than you realize, and you might be surprised to discover that someone actually wants to be able to lean on you, instead of the other way around.

If you're not happy with where you are, maybe you're expecting too much. Or expecting the wrong things. Sometimes the best things happen when we're not looking for them or wishing for them. Be happy with yourself, or with what you're doing, and you'd be surprised at how quickly it gets noticed. And suddenly you're not alone at all.