Don’t… Just Don’t Get Married

If you have read this blog before you will be aware that I am not in favour of marriage. This is not some theoretical opinion either, my partner and I actually got married in December 2006.

This meant that from February (when we announced our ‘intentions’) to December of 2006 almost every conversation with family revolved around the socially sanctioned ritual of transferring ‘ownership’ of, and financial responsibility for, the woman to the man. Why else do you think the bride’s (read “sacrificial woman’s) family pay for everything?

Ah sure, I forgot! We’re supposed to be living in egalitarian times where ‘his’ family share the cost. Good luck telling that to his separated parents who immigrated from England in the 1960s and lived as a pretentious, nuclear family in a major capital city.

I was aware there was a level of need and that his parents/family would need some support. For months before the event, I argued for them to have their meals provided for them whilst they were here – because I knew my family were capable and they weren’t. We didn’t only have to feed them: they had to be assisted to get here and accommodated whilst they were here.

The whole process displaces the identity and possessions of the woman. I gave up my bed and we moved into the spare room. Then, the night before the event/sacrifice, I had to leave my home and go to where my family were staying because HIS family were in OUR unit and my family could not ‘sleep-over’ so I could get up from my own place on the day of the wedding.

Everything was organised to within a second – and all of it organised by me. Yet his family have this “opinion” of me. To them – as has become obvious from conversations with them and things they have said about me: “I am the needy, ‘dependent’ woman with whom their ‘poor’ first born has fallen in love”. (Or, perhaps I am the evil, wicked disabled women who has “trapped their first born”…and they are waiting for me to die or for the spell to be broken.)

I do not imagine this!

His father asked, when I was going to meet him, if I needed “blended food” (Can’t trust those rampant spastic, potential in-laws, they might gag on the salad.). I should have lived up to his stereotypical, preconceived, view of me by drooling on him when I first met him. Instead, I calmly answered questions about “what I would ‘bring’ to the relationship” or “whether I was intending to ‘enslave’ his son as my carer”. I should have followed my instincts and dismembered him at the first meeting. Then he would not have gone on to ask “if [I] was having a colostomy bag put in?” when I had a pain relief delivery system put in for hip pain, or whether this “interfered with my ability to achieve pleasure?”.

You are not misunderstanding the text - this is what my partner’s father said!

Then I e-mailed; the rest of the family advocated; and he apologised.

But there remains this unspoken atmosphere around them and I just wait for the next member of my partner’s family to reject me because I’m “differently-abled” (Polite-speak for “use a power wheelchair”.).

I did not have to wait long. On the same visit to meet the father, we also met my partner’s sister, her partner and their two children. They were away on holidays so we had to drive two hours to see them, then have chips and water on the beach. Of course, we “couldn’t possibly go to [their] house because ‘there are steps everywhere’”.

Yet, when his sister came to see us, in the midst of our moving house, and my family cooked roast lamb, she invited them to visit and drop by for coffee in the “little coffee shop that is near by”. If this is not selective inclusion/exclusion I do not know what is?

As if two family members with their feet wedged in their throat were not enough…..??? No, no, there has to be more…until the last has fallen.

The sister overseas, who I have not met (Yeah, I escaped from one of them!) invited us to meet them in America for Christmas. The airfares alone would cost $10,000 and we have a mortgage. And, after the other incidents, from meeting/interacting with the rest of his family, I not in a hurry to meet another one. I’d rather protect myself from the “slings and arrows”.

Next it was the mother… My partner had been away for work for a week and my mother came to stay. This was partly because we had only just moved into our house and got the toilet seat to be something close to the right height. The shower still was not right and was almost dangerous for both me and my workers.

Oh, did I mention that I have workers who are funded by the Government? They do all of my personal care, cook meals, clean and do the laundry.

Yes.

So, when my partner got back from his work trip, his mother asked “How his respite was?”!!!!!!!!! OMG

No-one has ever been so rude and hurtful to me in my entire life.

This certainly brought out the family’s ‘real’ feelings about me. The brother even defended the mother and proved himself no more aware of his brother and my living situation than the rest of my partner’s family.

When challenged on her illogical thinking that her son is my carer and would need ‘respite’, his mother said that it was a logical assumption because she “does use ‘respite’!”. Let’s not forget that she and her aging husband also refuse any form of home-help that might make her life easier!

Then I tried to “build a bridge”. Now I just want dynamite!

I was chatting to her on-line and she said that I was her [wait for it] “Daughter-in-law” and that she would have never treated her “Mother-in-law” this way and that I should respect her as my “Mother-in-law”.

Aaaah! Aaaaah! Why would anyone want to get married? How horrid that people think they have a right to treat you rudely? Or that they would assume to dictate the way in which you should relate to them?

I have distanced myself from them and will not speak to his family again. But it still hurts. And they don’t see how much they are hurting my partner by utterly refusing to see me as a person – they only see my disability and construct untrue assumptions about our life together.

This is why people should not get married. If we were just “shacked up” they would not have any reason to make such invasive comments. I would not have felt compelled to relate to them and could have avoided them.

This is why we no longer tell people that we’re “m-----d” (I can’t bear to even write the word.). We just say we’re partners………..and, I’m giving the ring a rest in the drawer. The socially constructed expectations that are bound by the little jewel encrusted gold band are too odious to endure.