Parents at a lower level of consciousness?

[calluna]

I can relate. I've just come through a fairly rough couple of days with my own parents, who have been visiting us since before the holidays.

We're a small family, just me and my folks, and we've always been close -- maybe too close. There's been a lot of alcohol and drug abuse over the years, a lot of "family secrets" to cover up. I've fallen into the co-dependent role (although I hate that term) more than I care to admit.

Growing up, they never liked any of my friends. There was always a lot of subtle manipulation about how this person or that person was using and abusing me. As a result, I've always had trouble building lasting friendships and relationships.

Now I have a husband, and it's even more complicated. They always come to visit at the worst possible times for us, when we're under the most stress and most likely to be peevish with each other, and then use that to reinforce their underlaying negative opinion of him.

I can't even begin to fully explain what happened this weekend. My parents and I had been away for a week, visiting relatives in another state, while my husband stayed home to work. We got home on Friday night, and after he had worked back-to-back 12 hours days and we had just spent 13 hours on the road, we weren't in the best of moods and we didn't give each other the warmest greetings. I could just feel everyone getting more and more tense, I could feel them monitoring us and judging him, and of course, I began to cry. So my parents announced they were going to leave the next day, a day early. I begged them not to, because I didn't want things to end that way.

The next morning, hubby and I still weren't in the best of moods, and when my mom asked again if they should leave early, I said I thought it might be best. I had barely gotten the sentence out, and she went off like a cannon, telling my dad to wake up because they were going. She didn't want to wait until my husband came home, because she said she was too close to telling him to his face that he was selfish and self-centered and rude, and while they packed, she issued forth that she thought he was emotionally abusing me, and that she'd kill him if he every physically abused me, and asked me if I had my own money and offered to send me a couple thousand when she got home, etc.

I can't tell you what hogwash this is. My husband is not abusive, in any sense of the word. We are moody. We both come from emotionally damaged families, and bear the scars. We are under a lot of stress. We're a normal married couple: we snap at each other, we feel bad about it, we make up.

And then they were gone. Without even saying goodbye to my husband, who had hosted them during the busiest time of his work year -- even though they had sort of invited themselves in the first place. They won't talk to him, and he won't talk to them.

My biggest concern is not my parents behavior -- they're 60 years old, they are responsible for what they do and the fallout thereof -- but my own. The co-dependent part of me says this is all my fault, I should had done something or said something to make it all alright, even though I know most of this was beyond my control. That's hard enough to deal with.

What worries me more is that I realized this morning that I had become a chameleon during their visit, letting my mom egg me into saying negative things about my husband and airing my complaints about some of the less happy aspects of our lives, even though I understand on some levels that these issues are transitory. I didn't fully understand that to her, it was grist for the mill. But do I have so little sense of self-worth that I could be so easily swayed? It's not a pretty thought.

Sorry to go an at such length, but I'm still very upset. I worked so hard to make Christmas nice for everyone, I exhausted myself, and in the end, it meant nothing.