Excerpt: I Heart My In-Laws

The following is an excerpt from the book I Heart My In-Laws
by Dina Koutas Poch
Published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC;
June 2007;
$15.00US/$18.95CAN;
978-0-8050-8279-1

Copyright © 2007 Dina Koutas Poch
Regional Guide to In-Laws

There are seven territories of in-law personalities in this great country of ours. Each has its own unique flavor.

1. West Coast In-Laws

( California , Oregon , Washington )

Three words: Burning Man Festival. Your in-laws live where Manifest Destiny carried them. They come from a long line of gold hunters — those in search of a truer, richer way of life. Every single Napa Valley wine they uncork, or Starbucks coffee they brew; or macrobiotic muffin they bake, they judge you for not living the way they do. “Oh, West Coast people are more laid back.” Really? They’re ultra-aggressive about lifestyle choices and the 40-hour workweek! How do you deal with your West Coast in-laws?

Compliment their tan. Their sunglasses. Their shapely mountain-bike sculpted legs. They’ll eat it up (those egotists!). And coo when they mention how they fly seaplanes to their island house, and how the orca whales and “pristine wilderness” are their backyard. Blah, blah, blah. Make sure to note how very fresh the air is, even if it’s making your allergies act up.

Read up on renewable energy resources: wind power, solar energy, and corn-powered cars. Tell them that you’re already on the waiting list for one (a waiting list made of recycled paper, no less).

How to dress: In flannel and Tevas with thick socks.
What not to do: Smoke cigarettes. Joints, however, are cool.

2. Rocky Mountain In-Laws

( Colorado , Montana , Idaho , Utah )

Your rugged in-laws know a thing or two about machinery. They can plow. They can drive a tractor. They can dig a deep hole with a backhoe (and I’m talking about Aunt Trudy on dialysis here). They can also wrangle sheep on a mountain without the help of a gay lover (no matter what that movie said). How do you impress in-laws that live in winter for nine months a year and are known to wrestle bears for sport?

If your weenie job as an economics professor hasn’t prepared you for life with these in-laws, buying a picture book about tractors and trucks — something a five-year-old boy would drool over — will help. At least you’ll know your trenchers from your dozers and your grapple log skidders from your pipe layers.

Pick an alpine sport: ice climbing, fly-fishing, kayaking, mountain climbing, trekking, snowshoeing, skiing, or mountain biking, and excel at it. It doesn’t matter if you live in Florida , you need to train so you can join your in-laws in death-defying “leisure sports” at high altitude (with no bleeping oxygen!).

How to dress: In jeans and a warm jacket, because you’ll be outside shoveling hay.
What not to do: Mention how your gay brother in Boston just got married and a drag queen performed the ceremony.

3. Southwestern In-Laws

( New Mexico , Arizona , Nevada )

There are two kinds of ex-hippie in-laws in the Southwest: those with boatloads of money and those with a jar of pennies. Figure out which one your in-law is. The former has a perfect golf swing, and the latter reliably has peyote.

When your Southwest in-laws hug you, they practically blind — the sun glints off their turquoise jewelry and belt buckles, sending signals miles into the sky. (Duh, that’s how the aliens found Roswell .)

Your in-laws are into spirituality with a capital S. Every inch of wall space is covered with pottery depictions of Kokopelli and watercolor drawings of pueblos and adobe homes in rust and muted orange hues. They subsist on roasted green chilies and yerba mate. They also don’t age. Is it the desert? The dry heat? Each time you see them, they’re younger. In fact, they’re twenty-five years old right now. It’s terrifying.

How do you ingratiate yourself with southwestern in-laws?

Go hot-air ballooning with your in-laws! Everyone in the Southwest does it. How else do you pass the time in l00-degree heat? Remember, hot-air balloons aren’t just for Dorothy & Co. They’re for you, your in-laws, and nineteenth-century explorers.

Vegas, baby! Anyone? Slot machines? Showgirls? People-watching? Shark tank at Mandalay Bay ? (These are rhetorical questions. You don’t have to answer them.) But you may want to propose them to your in-laws, when they bust out the tarot cards — again. Hey, why don’t you use those tarot cards to predict some winning hands of blackjack? As they say in the movies, it’s just crazy enough to work, boss.

How to dress: A brightly patterned sundress and a necklace made of the largest beads known to man.
What not to do: Say you prefer modern art.

4. Texan In-Laws

Your Texan in-laws are smug about one thing: being Texan. We know you were once a republic! And everything’s bigger! Six flags, the Alamo , that 72-ounce steak, and especially the hats. Fine! Texas is big, “American,” flashy, and the center of the world.

If your Texan in-laws aren’t gorgeously well-manicured people from Houston or Dallas, or cultured Austinites, they’re ranchers and they don’t give a damn about you, “the en-vi-ro-mentalists,” and “the gov’nment.” After all, the rest of the world is just not Texas .

Of course, you’ll meet a second cousin-in-law that uses her panty hose to strain motor oil, but the rest of the family isn’t too proud of her. So how do you deal with the Texan in-laws?

Accept that a lot of people you’ll meet in the Lone Star State will have nicknames like Joe-Bob, Billy-Bob, Jim-Bob, Little John, Big John, etc. You’ll be expected to know about their souped-up truck and new gun rack in intimate detail.

Respect the laws of the Barcalounger. Your Texan in-laws don’t have normal chairs; they need something with a footrest. Succumb to the relaxation factor of holding conversations while horizontal.

How to dress: A “Don’t Mess with Texas ” T-shirt with a Stetson hat, only because your in-laws gave them to you upon your arrival.
What not to do: Forget to send good wishes to your in-laws on Texan holidays like Texas Independence Day, the start of Deer Hunting Season, the Opening Day of high school football practice, and the day the new model year of Ford F-150s hits the market.

5. Southern In-Laws

( Arkansas , Louisiana to Florida , and up to Kentucky and Virginia )

Your in-laws love NASCAR. If they don’t, their neighbors do. Your southern in-laws are either “refined city folk” or “simple country folk,” and they’ll want you to know the difference.

Your southern in-laws are suspicious of you. It’s not just you — it’s anyone outside their state. Your in-laws have never been “North,” and by that, they mean Delaware . It’s not that they don’t want to go, just why would they? People have been in their town for generations. It’s home, which is why you should move there. When you’re south of the Mason-Dixon Line, do as those who live south of the Mason-Dixon Line . . .

Learn the key players in “the Confederacy.” How many times have you met a southerner named Jefferson Davis? Billions? Every street, building, and public school is named after these folks: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Alexander Stephens, P. T. Beauregard, or Nathan Bedford Forrest. But please never, ever mention the Destroyer-of-the-South, Yankee General Sherman. He’s still on their “list,” 150 years later.

Talk the talk. Know southern sport rivalries and which side you’re on with the Tar Heels vs. Blue Devils, LSU vs. Ole Miss, and Tennessee Volunteers vs. Kentucky Wildcats.

How to dress: Something bright and feminine from your mother’s closet.
What not to do: Don’t call it the “Civil War.” It’s the “War of Northern Aggression.”

6. Northeast Corridor In-Laws

(Ohio, Pennsylvania, and up through Maine )

If you or anyone you’re related to went to a fancy school, now’s the time to mention it. New Englanders love to think “they know better” and that “they are smarter” and that they “vote correctly.” They can push up their dark-framed glasses and snub you with their “Plymouth Rock” crap.

The crowded cities and suburbs of Philadelphia , Washington , D.C., Cincinnati , New York , and Boston mean one thing — your in-laws are the diversity in America . They smother you with affection because a hundred other relatives live down the street.

Join the rat race. You must keep up with the Joneses — the family that you can see from the bay window in your in-laws’ kitchen. Last week, the competition was about the house gutters. They won. This week it’s about you. Who has the sweetest daughter-in-law?

Your northern in-laws have summer homes in non-warm places like Nantucket . What’s the point?

How to dress: Like you just fell out of the J. Crew catalog.
What not to do: Mention that you didn’t vote in the last election

7. Midwest In-Laws

(Indiana to Missouri, up to North Dakota and Michigan )

If a giant, two-headed reptilian monster was heading toward your in-laws’ subdivision, they would smile and wave. Your in-laws are that friendly and nice. Sometimes it’s creepy. Like the time they offered a teenager a ride back to his college campus — it looked an awful lot like kidnapping.

Between the ice fishing, apple-pie baking, and dining at Perkins Restaurant and Bakery (which they nicknamed Pukins), your big-boned in-laws spend a lot of time driving (8 hours is short haul), using terms like “who gives a flying fig,” and asking “how ya doing?” followed by “okey, dokey!” So how do you get ahead with them?

Dig into dishes that involve massive amounts of melted cheese. Your in-laws will prepare cheesy potatoes, cheesy broccoli, cheesy asparagus, and fried cheese curds — which sounds awful, but c’mon, let’s admit it, a little melted cheese makes everything better.

“Live simply, so that others can simply live.” If your in-laws aren’t city dwellers, they’re farmers and they know how to birth a cow, mend a horse, or feed a pig. If you know zilch about farms, don’t fret. Praise the good bugs — ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and honeybees — and chastise the potentially bad bugs — flea hoppers, lygus bugs, aphids, and mealy bugs. Impress your in-laws by differentiating good stinkbugs (they’re green) from bad ones (they’re brown).

How to dress: Something with an elastic waistband.
What not to do: Take shortcuts. Using life’s conveniences (leaf blower vs. rake, microwave vs. Crock-Pot, etc.) only means you’re not working hard enough!

Copyright © 2007 Dina Koutas Poch

Author Dina Koutas Poch holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University . She is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City with her husband. Her in-laws live in Connecticut .

For more information, please visit http://iheartmyinlaws.com/

First Comes Friendship, Then Comes Marriage

By Aurelie Sheehan
Author of History Lesson for Girls

This month my husband and I are celebrating our eighth anniversary -- safely and well beyond the Seven Year Itch. We have a good marriage, and much to celebrate. What makes it work? I don’t know -- luck, probably. Or maybe it’s because it resembles, more than the relationships I’ve had with some men, the neglected, yet deeply important bond I shared with my childhood best friend.

It’s Jenny -- not Jim, Joe, Jack, John, or Jasper -- who gave me a sense of what is possible in love (minus, as they say, one thing).

1. Conversation before, during, and after school

As teenagers in a suburban Connecticut town in the seventies, Jenny and I were completely baffled, often quite amused, and sometimes horrified by what we saw around us. What could we do about it? Not much -- except we could talk.

Talking is how we made sense of things: seventies-style foibles, marriages gone awry, a school full of aliens from outer space. We laid out plans for the future, we contemplated the Essential Truth of Jim Morrison (and Jim Morrison's leather pants); we talked about poetry, mascara, and everything in between. Words were our currency, and with them, we remade the world.

My husband and I also remake the world through talking. Our world has gotten a little wider, perhaps, but we still analyze and discuss the heck out of it to make sense of the thing. We’ve got certain spots for certain kinds of discussion: the Big Topics often require the chairs in the living room, the Tense Topics are done on the fly (room to room, too hot to sit for long), and the Fun Topics are done during dinner prep. At lunch, we talk about the news of the day. And at night we talk about all manner of subjects (though he’s currently wary of revealing important new plans to me at this juncture, for once or twice my ever-lengthening silences have turned into sleep.)

Soon after we met, I told my future husband that I wished we could take a train together, a long journey, so we could just talk and talk and talk. He smiled at me. He said he likes trains, too. And he didn’t have to tell me he likes to talk. A few months later we rode our first train together, a dream come true, two very chatty people in seats 2A and 2B.

2. A whole bunch of sleepovers

They were about time, of course. Time to talk (definitely), and time just to hang out. And also my sleepovers with Jenny re-energized the most basic routines of life. A slight bore on its own, brushing my teeth became incredibly fun when we were doing it together, when a toothpaste glob had trickled down her chin, and we were nearly dying of toothpaste asphyxiation while laughing and doing a chicken dance in our Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns.

When my husband goes away, I realize how simply having company for all the mundane and everyday chores (going to Home Depot, making dinner, taking plates out of the dishwasher) makes each thing a lot more fun. Not that I always appreciate it -- it’s an embarrassment of riches, now. Do I get worked up with joy over going to Home Depot to pick up a new mop head? Not totally. But were we to do the chicken dance in the parking lot.

3. A second pirate in the Caribbean

A few months before we got engaged, I was applying for an important job. Right before the interview, my husband said: “Okay, so listen. Helen Keller once said: ‘Life is either a grand adventure or nothing at all.’ So go get ‘em, honey. You’re going to do great.”

I got the job, but more significantly I got the concept. I like to think of this marriage as a grand adventure. Yes, we’ve got the Home Depot runs and the domesticity, but the fact is, ever since I met my husband, I’ve had a conviction that our life together is full of possibility.

It’s a feeling I remember from high school, when Jenny would look over at me, we’d lock devilish stares, and then go out and do some incredibly stupid thing. But fun thing, usually. We gave each other chutzpa. We said yes to galloping our horses down the road at top speed, yes to the next party, yes to skipping algebra. Yes, most of all, to life.

4. A secret language

Jenny and I made one up and used it whenever necessary. It was an offshoot of a language she used with her dog, a waddling little Pekinese called Tammy. “Hey, Beeyoqueen, I sib suddo,” one of us would say. It was cool to have our own secret code. We felt it would be useful should we ever get arrested, for instance, which we, well, were. (It wasn’t quite as fun to chat in the back of the cop cruiser as we’d imagined it would be.) But even a simple interaction -- asking for a match or a sip of Seven-Up -- changed if we spoke our own language; it became consecrated, wholly our own thing.

My husband and I have our own language too. Sure, we’ve got your classic marital grunts and shorthand expressions to get us through before the second cup of coffee. But we’ve also developed a fascinating franglish to deploy when trying to baffle our seven-year-old. “Success a la Target purchase? Le puzzlement de la petit Potter?” he might ask, to which I’ll gesture in a quite Parisian fashion. (The kid is catching on, by the way.)

5. A place to stash my (proverbial) cigarettes

I had secrets then and I have secrets now. Back then, they were easy -- externalized, something to hide in a drawer. I don’t smoke anymore, and so I’d say my secrets now are more in the lines of character flaws. Not that I’m completely and utterly flawed, but still. These flaws or weaknesses insist upon themselves, seem tricky enough to keep coming back, and my husband knows them as well as I do. He also knows my strengths, as I do his. But I like to know that I can safely store my pack of bad habits in his house, and he won’t throw me out for it.

6. An undying, forever-feeling, all-or-nothing, Us vs. Them conviction

It may not be at the forefront of my consciousness every single time I pour a jar of Trader Joe’s marinara into a pot for a hasty dinner while he’s lying face down on the couch before a televised golf tournament. But put us at risk and it’s right there. When the doctor told my husband about his predilection for heart disease, for instance. Or when we had to find our way through the crowds in New Delhi during the Republic Day parade. Or even at certain unending dinner parties at which new theories on why there’s no such thing as global warming are being explained.

We band together then, as Jenny and I did when we were teenagers. Back then, every day felt like running the gauntlet, filled with new threats and drama and confusion. We were trying to step up to the plate; trying to explain, to articulate, who we were. We were able to succeed, sometimes, because we knew we had each other.

7. An apparently untiring audience for the first draft of my poems

And this was a heck of a lot easier for Jenny, because I only wrote one or two poems a week. And they were poems. But now I write novels. And I want him to read not just this draft but that draft and then that draft, also? The man is incredible as a reader and editor. The poems Jenny and I shared were in our handwriting, in our journals, and I’ll always love her careful square letters, whimsical and reluctant both.

8. A person who will tell me if these black shoes look better than those black shoes (she was a little better at this)

Well, never mind about this one. Forget it.

9. Mad Magazine, or something similar

We were very, very funny. We had a repertoire. We had an arsenal. We especially liked to use it during class, or when describing the personal style of various sinisterly athletic classmates or the Spanish teacher who just gave us a C+. My parents thought Jenny was too critical, too sarcastic, and her parents thought I was an oddball, out of touch. It didn’t matter what they thought, as long as we could laugh.

I remember dating a guy who was nice in every way, but our senses of humor didn’t quite match up, and that was it: we were history. Thankfully, my husband is in the other room with a big red ball on his nose right now, about to launch into morning limerick, so I think we’ll be okay.

10. Changes, yes, but some things that stay true

She changed a lot, during those years, and so did I. It was not always easy. And there have been stretches in our adult lives when we’ve fallen out of touch, when it’s not been possible to explain life changes, new mates, rapid decisions. We weather these dry spells -- in part, I believe, because we remember how our friendship was a ballast we could find nowhere else in our young lives.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. My husband and I used Shakespeare famous words at our wedding, as have many other plucky English majors.

The quote is also a decent definition of friendship.

Copyright © 2007 Aurelie Sheehan

Author Aurelie Sheehan is the author of the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant and the novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. The director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, she has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award. She lives in Tucson with her husband and daughter.

For more information, please visit www.aureliesheehan.com

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Photo credit: Martha Lochert