Meeting the Parents Redux

I think perhaps that I was freaked out about the whole meet the parents thing (see below) because of previous experiences. I was in a pretty long relationship with a guy we’ll call Mr. Ex. During the approximately 5 years we lived together, our parents met maybe three times. The first time they met my mother, we went out to dinner, and they mostly talked about us kids, so it wasn’t so bad. The second time was pretty painful. Mr. Ex’s mother invited my mother to have dinner at their house. Mr. Ex’s mother was the casserole/crock pot/Good Housekeeping recipe type. She even had little recipe cards printed that said “From the kitchen of [name].” My mother can make maybe five recipes. None of them involve casseroles. When I was growing up, we ate out at least a couple of nights a week. The rest of the time, well, let’s just say I am intimately acquainted with the gastronomic delights of Stouffer’s.

Mrs. Ex spent most of dinner telling my mother about the wonders of casseroles, and how, since she had become a vegetarian, she had learned to make them all without meat. She tried to pawn off a couple of recipes. My mother just smiled and nodded politely. There were lots of awkward silences. Luckily, she got along much better with the father, as they had the common bond of having lousy employees that they couldn’t fire for one reason or another.

They only met my father once. A bit of background. Because I was young and bad at communication, I hadn’t exactly told my father I was moving in with Mr. Ex. I had just danced around the subject, figuring that he would figure it out. When it came time to move, my father hadn’t offered to help. (To be fair, I had never asked him for help, and I didn’t tell him the exact day I was moving.) Moving was a disaster. My mother wanted to pay for movers, but the Ex family didn’t believe in hiring someone to do something you could do yourself, even if it was August and 100 degrees and all you had was a small truck and you had to make about eight trips from Northern Virginia (self-sufficiency is such a drag, no?). Mrs. Ex apparently couldn’t believe that I had such an awful father. When she finally got a chance to meet him, she told her son that she was looking forward to “meeting the man who wouldn’t help his daughter move.” So, as you can imagine, that meeting went really well. Luckily, it happened at a crowded gallery opening, and it was too brief to be horribly awkward.

I suppose the eventual demise of that relationship shouldn’t really have come as a surprise.