Many people feel enormous pressure to make their in-laws happy, and will do whatever it takes in order to win their approval. They will change their habits, eat foods they detest, and edit what they say in order to not cause waves.
My wife is not one of those people.
She loves my parents, and my parents love her, but initially mixing them together was like adding a drop of vinegar to a bowl of oil. I take full responsibility. My parents are good people but they come from a different time and place, and simply weren’t ready for her. I should have given them a little warning so they could’ve prepared themselves and been more careful about saying the wrong things. I assumed they were more progressive but, as it turned out, I blindsided them and, without any warning, I brought home—a vegetarian.
My wife stopped eating meat when, as a teenager, she connected in her mind that meat came from animals. She really likes animals, considers them her friends, and this realization made her extremely uncomfortable. She decided to never eat meat again. Conversely, my family has been eating animals forever. A lot of animals. Sure, they consider one or two of them to be their friends, but the rest they see as the course that comes right after the pasta.
The thing about an Italian family is that eating is a way of bonding with each other. The sharing of food, or rather the force-feeding of food, is the way that you show your love. An Italian mother greets you by telling you that you’re hungry.
“Mom, meet Cindy.”
“Nice to meet you. You look hungry. I’ll get you something to eat.”
This was the loving way that my mother welcomed my wife-to-be. It was a sweet introduction that went well until my mother brought out a plate of meatballs, pasta with meat sauce, sausages, pepperoni, chicken parmigiana, and prosciutto with melon. And this was all before the meal even started.
My wife looked at the food, looked up at my mother, and said, with unflinching confidence, “Thank you, but I don’t eat meat.”
Have you ever been smacked in the face? It hurts, but even more than that, you’re stunned. There is a moment when you don’t realize what is happening. You freeze. Your eyes go crossed. Reality is turned on its head and you reach out for something to take hold of while you try to make sense of what just happened. That’s how my mother felt when my wife delivered this news.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I don’t eat meat.”
Someone dropped a plate.
This is like telling a lifelong democrat that you voted for Trump. It’s like telling a Red Sox fan that you love the Yankees. She may as well have said, “I’m not really into this whole Italian thing that you’ve got going on.”
At first my parents didn’t even know what it meant.
“You mean you don’t eat steak, but you’ll have meat sauce?” asked my mother.
“No, no meat,” my wife replied.
“But you’ll eat meatballs.”
“No.”
“So you just want the sauce from the meat sauce?”
“It can’t be made with meat.”
“Just a little meat?”
“No meat.”
“Chicken?”
“No.”
“Pork?”
“No.”
“Bacon?”
“No meat.”
“Well, how do we make the sauce with no meat?!”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Tommy, what have you done?!”
My father eats sheep heads. He eats the eyes out of fish. He is a monster. He has a drawer filled with T-shirts that he won as part of meat-eating contests. He stops at White Castle for a dozen burgers on his way to a steak house. He looked at me and rolled his eyes, as if I, too, was hearing this for the first time.
I’m a bit of a chameleon. I’ll change, adapt, and make stuff up just to avoid any tension. Maybe it’s the performer in me, but I aim to please. My wife aims to kill. Not out of ill will or a desire to hurt, but she is going to stick to her position no matter what. I think it’s called a belief system. When I’m uncomfortable, the only thing I believe is that I should be going.
My wife held her ground despite many meals and even more comments. Seeing that she wasn’t going anywhere, my parents tried to bend the rules any way they could. My mother scraped tomato sauce off the top of the meat sauce. My father put a plate of salami near her, as if that would tempt her into seeing clearly. They would lie about the ingredients of dishes.
“No, there’s no meat in that lamb chop.”
“It’s made with lamb.”
“Is it?”
And they didn’t even consider mentioning chicken stock, fish, or shrimp because, “Come on, those don’t count.”
It’s a battle that continues to this day. Now that my kids are vegetarians, as well, my mother tries even harder. “How are they going to get their protein? They need protein. Here, kids, take this hot dog with you, put it in your pocket, don’t tell your mother.”
To her credit, my wife didn’t fight them or get annoyed. She was used to people’s confusion and frustration about the way she ate. She just smiled and ate the salad, in-laws be damned.
However, my wife did not prevail in the battle with my parents over her privacy. She grew up in a family that had things like alone time, short visits, and separate vacations. She married into a family that has none of that. My family has no secrets. Zero. That’s a nice way of saying that everyone is constantly in everyone else’s business.
“Get over here. Tell us everything. Why haven’t you called? Where have you been? We haven’t spoken to you since lunchtime!”
This was a shock to my wife’s system. She was just getting to know me and now she had a houseful of crazy people interrogating her. Her family didn’t ask each other intimate questions at all, let alone scream at them across a crowded dinner table.
“How long have you been sleeping with my son? Is your father an alcoholic? What kind of name is that? What are you, Polish or something?”
She was shell-shocked. Her family didn’t even celebrate holidays. Not for religious reasons; they just didn’t see the point. My parents asked them to come over on Thanksgiving and Christmas, ten years in a row. They declined every time.
“But we’re family!” my parents would yell with a mouthful of spaghetti.
Their silent response was, “No, we’re not.”
Don’t get me wrong, this made the holidays very simple for my wife and I. We avoided all the complications and endless driving between family celebrations. It was one stop at my parents’ house for Christmas and then we’d see her family at a diner on some random Tuesday when they were nearby doing something else.
But for all the convenience, my parents didn’t like this at all and decided they had to double down on the family events, insisting we get together for every holiday, birthday, and any other reason they could come up with. They saw it as their duty to show my wife that they really, really loved her by pulling her in closer and learning every detail of what she was thinking.
At first my wife tried to get out of it. She would come up with what she thought were clever excuses, but when it’s one person against an entire family she stood little chance. And once we created grandchildren for them, as the Jersey Italians say, “Fuggedaboutit.”
So she goes, and with each year she seems to enjoy it more and more. She has come to accept this incredibly intrusive amount of togetherness and their relationship works. But no matter how many times they tell her that a meatball doesn’t have meat in it, she knows better.