Shockingly I care about acknowledgement of my marriage / OR: advice for hets introducing gay people

[cimorene]

I actually enjoyed myself at Wax's paternal grandmother's family reunion this afternoon, in spite of the fact that (1) it was rainy and (2) like 15° C/50s F and (3) outside in a tent. Said granny¹ is one of 14 siblings and grew up in Pargas, the 45-min-distant town where I attend my classroom assistant courses and where we plan to eventually settle. I bundled up, and it wasn't too cold, and the atmosphere was also quite relaxed and friendly. But the unfortunate blot on a good day was that this also happened... and I don't really know what to do with it. I'm pissed off, yeah, and righteously so, I feel, and also hurt. But at the same time, I feel a bit helpless (and don't intend to do anything about it at this time, at least).

WAX'S DAD'S COUSIN: So who are all of these [waving at Wax & me, sister-in-law & nieces & nephews]? How are they related?
WAX'S MOM: They're all mine! This is my daughter, Wax, and these four are my grandchildren - Brother Metal's kids - and this [pointing to sister-in-law] is my daughter-in-law.

No introduction for me.

The thing is, I know she doesn't consider me not a part of the family; she organized the "Welcome to the Family" party that I got after our elopement last fall. (Though now I'm a little less sure about whether she regards my marriage as legitimate.) She's not a homophobe and has always been perfectly welcoming, and I even know that she likes me, though we kind of rub each other the wrong way and we have to grit our teeth a lot, but we try. (I'm given to understand that this is not unusual for mothers-in-law. IDK, I'd never seen it in person before.)

Wax's theory is extreme social awkwardness and being ashamed in case the people she was talking to would get offended. (I can't say it's not plausible.) But the thing is... it still pisses me off.

The pronoun game pisses me off. Euphemisms piss me off. Pussyfooting pisses me off. "Wax's friend" pisses me off. "And this is Cim... she's, uh, from America" pisses me off. If I were happy to keep playing the pronoun game at parties, I wouldn't have gotten married. We did it in Iowa precisely because we (shockingly!) feel strongly about the importance of our marriage being recognized as legitimate: because in Iowa they have marriage, but in Finland we only have "registered partnership." So if the two brothers' het marriages produce daughers-in-law but Wax's marriage produces just an untitled English-speaking appendage, then, yeah, I have a problem.

From a stranger who might not even know that we're married, I'm willing to swallow "Wax's... friend" without correction. But from someone who knows that we're married and has heard us refer to each other as "wife" in two languages, there's no excuse.

That kind of awkward stumble, that panicked "What do I call them?" hesitation in mid-sentence has happened to pretty much every gay person ever, I'm sure. The thing is, while for you-the-stumbler it's infrequent, and you weren't prepared, and that's the whole source of the problem - for us gay people, it happens a lot, and the repetition gets kind of painful. It frequently comes with the best of intentions, and we're all very accustomed to dealing with it, albeit probably in different ways and with differing success. But it's hurtful.

So if you want to be a loving/supportive/not-a-dick parent/family member/friend, then it's your responsibility to get over the awkwardness. Suck it up. Cut that shit out. Stop giving the impression that you're ashamed, because it is just as hurtful even if you're really not. If you genuinely don't know how to introduce someone because you don't want to offend them, just ask them, "How would you prefer I introduce you?" If it's because you don't want to offend someone else, then please realize that it's not your business to euphemize/pussyfoot/pronoun game for them, because their being out or not isn't your decision. It's theirs. And if you're uncomfortable with having a gay child/relative/friend - even if it's just in public - you should work on getting over it and keep your issues to yourself instead of making it their problem by getting all gross and weird about it. Your child/relative/friend doesn't have the resources to spend on educating you (they might try anyway, but believe me, having to help someone accept them/respect them/treat them with common decency is the last thing they need).



1. Yes, the one who was my Enemy, but a detente has been forcibly imposed by Wax's favorite aunt and I am now allowed in her house. She just doesn't talk to me, or more than monosyllabically to Wax in my presence.

Comments

[pierydys]

*growls*

Is it something you guys can talk to her about in private afterwards, since she's trying to make an effort?

And hey, not that it's the same thing, but the whole social awkwardness thing with parents? Wouldn't know what life was like without it, especially since mine are stuck a generation before most modern people their age. They wouldn't even mention Tommi to my grandparents until this year, when my grandmother was on her deathbed, because of three strikes -- he's white, he's a foreigner, and we've been living together without being married for years. I wouldn't have even tried to introduce anybody to my family unless we'd been together for over two years. And my past girl-dating will probably never be mentioned to the family in this lifetime because it would make their heads implode.

But hell, you guys are brave and out and I'll be proudly introducing you to my parents as my most treasured friends AND wife & wife :-)

[marshtide]

Heh. God, that.

Both my immediate families (Val's parents, siblings and favourite cousins; my parents, siblings, sole surviving grandparent and favourite cousins) are, I'm glad to say, extremely open and blunt about it. I've been told to attend my cousin's wedding next year and bring my partner, so we'll have to see how it goes with more distant relatives... but this is something I'm absolutely grateful for. We have great families in this respect.

(We also decided that if we get married - which we might eventually, largely for practicality - we're doing it here, where there is marriage, rather than in the UK, where there is civil partnership... the whole partnership thing is just vaguely patronising. I shall have none of it, since I have a choice.)

& this is much more petty than family stuff, but a guy in my class asked me why I moved here. I told the truth because I do not have the patience for thinking about everything I say and carefully filtering. It's all ridiculous. But he is apparently selectively deaf anyway because he refers persistently to my "husband"... (OK. Val's name is not obviously masculine or feminine to some people who aren't fluent in Swedish, maybe. College friends of mine who just saw my relationship status on facebook or whatever have had to ask. But "sambo" is not "husband" anyway, and I'm pretty sure I've been blithely using gendered pronouns. Maybe he actually thinks that despite having made it to the top class I just don't know the difference between "hon" and "han". He's patronising enough about my ability to say anything in Swedish in other respects. Which is a whole other rant. -_- )

[northern]

That sucks. I know how you feel.

[phineasjones]

amen.

rach's mom often introduces us to people as, 'my girls.' considering rachael and i are often mistaken for sisters (don't even get me started on that one) and that i look as much like her mother as she does, the obvious assumption is that we are both her daughters. i HATE it when she does that.

of course, this is the woman who recently told rachael she can't wait for her to have a baby because then she'll be related to it. so we can't really expect much.

[sherrold]

I hear you. My dad calls my partner his daughter, so he doesn't have to think about it, and I'm sure he feels like he's doing me a favor. (Not that we have completely managed the 'legal' yet, due to our stubborn determination that we're going to get married here in our state: Washington has domestic partnership that is "all but marriage". yeah. right.)

And I don't know whether thefourthvine is on your reading list, but she had a lovely essay on the same issue today, here:
http://thefourthvine.dreamwidth.org/125517.html?style=mine

[cimorene]

We actually have a history, with Wax's family, that - well, her Mom is in some ways our biggest ally. I mean, in spite of how she is clearly biting off her tongue because she doesn't really understand the existence of culture barriers so to her it comes across like I was reared in a barn and all our attempts to explain that people don't have the same ideas in America... fail. Really that just makes her support a bigger deal. She tries really hard. She made me welcome in her house (albeit not exactly feeling welcome thanks to said fur-ruffling, which definitely goes both ways, but she did explicitly TELL me I was welcome, so I knew it was factually true) from the first day I visited Wax in Finland, before I even moved here, when I was still the long-distance girlfriend she met on the Internet.

But at the same time, she is always more worried about what other people will think than necessary. Like when Wax's brother got married to a Finnish-speaker, and Wax's mom took it on herself to tell Wax that she might not be allowed to bring me to the wedding (without consulting the brother or his fiancee), because his fiancee's family were serious churchgoers, which she just assumed meant they would be homophobic. (They actually were really, really friendly and welcoming and keep sending us Christmas cards and stuff, though they live most of the way east to Russia.)

When I first moved here I had trouble coming out in Swedish class as well - having "hon" corrected to "han" wasn't super insulting since I had only been here for six months or so, even though I was fully capable of reading and conversing in Swedish by then so it wasn't actually a plausible error. I had to repeat myself a bit and give Wax's name and go to English for good measure. But having people try to correct 'hon' to 'han' and (one time 'fru' to 'man'!) more recently, when I converse easily, does kind of piss me off. They know that I studied social science at Åbo Akademi for three years! How do they think I passed theoretical essay exams in Swedish while somehow not grasping basic pronoun usage?

And on the subject of condescension, I think that Anglophones have a really bad rap in Europe wrt language abilities. I mean, it's not wholly undeserved in the case of America, where foreign language education is rare and shitty, and most people are therefore monolingual. But I think this rather exaggerated stereotype leads them to assume all Anglophones are somehow naturally untalented at at learning other languages, which leads to amazement at any sort of accomplishment at all even though most of them have a rudimentary-to-pretty-great grasp of two or three other European languages. I have had good results (if by "good" you mean "they shut up") from saying wide-eyed that Swedish was easier to learn than the other languages I have studied, but perhaps you want to avoid sinking to his level.

[cimorene]

Oh, dear. That sounds like... some good intentions and a whole bunch of completely unexamined homophobia. She probably is pleased with the expression "my girls", right? It sounds like the kind of thing that people enjoy saying. Gross.

[cimorene]

It really does. I am sorry to hear that you've had to feel it to. On the other hand, I know I'm so lucky that the family are supportive and accepting and trying that I don't think I could ever try to confront her about it.

[cimorene]

"All but marriage" is one of my most enraging pet peeves. That's a bit of privilege there, since I know so many couples living in places where they don't even have the registered partnership option. But I just thought we established - kind of famously! - that separate but equal is not equal several decades ago. Even though our legal rights might be exactly the same this way, the condescension and judgement in that "registered partnership" label just makes steam come out of my ears. In fact, because of Finland's progressive common-law applying to gay couples as well, we wouldn't have had to register at all - we were already getting all the legal benefits. It was basically label rage combined with the escalating US battle for gay marriage that motivated us to do it in the first place. The piece of paper isn't giving us anything, but at least we're now a legal statistic in Iowa.

Also, yeah, I just read TFV's entry and was all :O-face. Like she read my mind!

[cimorene]

:/ I really wish we could talk to her about it in private, but I don't think it would work. Unfortunately, Wax and I are really bad at that - explaining things, relating things to other people's viewpoints, staging an intervention, whatever you like to call it. And to make it worse, her mom is like the worst person to stage an intervention with. She has some complex inferiority complexes and panic reactions and is practically the most defensive person I've ever met. She just freaks out and flails around and yells and bursts into tears and then doesn't actually absorb anything that you've said to her, usually, and that's even when the conflict was only a big confrontation in her imagination and everyone else was just trying to have a normal discussion.

Your grandparents story: o_O!!!!! Okay, wow. That reminds me a bit of Wax's grandmother! Nobody was keeping any secrets from her - I don't think that is the Finnish way or something. But when Wax's brother got married after living with his girlfriend for maybe three or four years, her grandmother said to him (AT THE RECEPTION TABLE) that she was so glad he had gotten married instead of just living in sin, while his cousin (her other grandchild) was sitting on the other side of her, having been "living in sin" with her dude for... well, longer than that, anyway.

[sherrold]

Beautifully said! I read this aloud over breakfast, and B started yelling, "Totally" and "Grrr" from the kitchen.

[foursweatervests]

I'm really sorry you had such a crappy thing happen to you. Even if your mother-in-law didn't mean it, etc, etc, it still really hurts to be dismissed like that. You deserve a noun, and an introduction by name at the very least.

[cimorene]

Thanks. :) It's tough because when it's someone you care about, you consider the intentionality of their actions - you have to really - but ultimately, it's still the effects of their actions that matter.

[foursweatervests]

it's still the effects of their actions that matter.

Yeah, it is. And of course you want to find something about them that says they didn't mean to hurt you, but the fact remains that they did.

I don't know, even if your mother-in-law isn't great with confrontations, maybe you could just say you were hurt by not being introduced as her daughter-in-law and leave it at that. You aren't looking for an apology or an explanation, you just wanted to tell her because you know she didn't mean to hurt you. If she's capable of just listening, and she's truly got your best interests at heart, I bet you'd get introduced emphatically the next time she runs up against something like this. It's worked for me in the past - not in this kind of situation, though - but obviously I have no idea if it would work for you or not. Either way, I hope you're able to communicate something to her so that she doesn't hurt you like this again.

[foursweatervests]

Erm, I linked to this post in a post before I realized that, even if this wasn't f-locked, you might not want randoms dropping by. Would you like me to take that part of the post down?

[cimorene]

No, that's all right. It's a free internet! I decided not to lock it, so I am already at risk of drive-bys via Network or whatever!

Edit: Although as it happens, I looked at your post and your actual link to here is broken!

[foursweatervests]

:-D Feel free to rescind that permission anytime, okay?

[foursweatervests]

I did see that, and I decided to leave it that way until I got your permission. Thanks for mentioning it; I'd totally forgotten!

[cimorene]

Understood! Since the post is a bit old now, it's much less likely to result in an influx of traffic I think. :)

[foursweatervests]

True. And it was probably less than three people in the first place. :-D

[foursweatervests]

Ahem. "Fewer" than three.

[cimorene]

LOL!

A collection of Language Log posts on "less" vs "fewer"

[foursweatervests]

My mother coming through. ::grin::

Ohh! Excellent link.