Is there someone in my life that can be a little too much? I would say I felt this way about my mother-in-law when I first met her. And I wanna be clear that she’s really wonderful. She’s essentially Buddy the elf from the movie Elf in real life, like subsists almost exclusively on sugar. She was, she was a art teacher. She is just really enthusiastic and excited about everything. And she has very specific ideas about how something should go, like an event, how — what would make something exciting or fun or memorable. And sometimes, that is at the cost — or, the cost is that she disregards what someone wants.
So, an example of this would be my sister-in-law, her daughter, had a baby shower and said, “I’m happy to do this. I just want two things. The first is that all the gifts be secondhand, and the second is that there’s no, um, games. Like, I do not want games.”
So we got there and her mom had planned all of these games and they were, of course, the like really kind of gross ones. Like, they melted or put different things in the diaper, and you had to reach your hand in and like guess what kind of candy bar or what kind of food. So like, really gross. And that’s because her mom felt like that was gonna make the party the most fun, even though her daughter had said she wasn’t interested.
And in the beginning of my relationship with her, I just didn’t know how to navigate that. Because, you know, everything was coming from a well-intentioned, well-meaning place. As I just gave that example — or, as in the example I just gave, I should say, it still can be — it can still not feel good sometimes.