Impropriety sidebar

[badstar]

This whole thing was so absurd. I'm still really irritated about it, not as much as I was, but still. It was rather ridiculous on many levels, the largest being that it could have REALLY easily been avoided with a bit of forewarning.

Okay...so as I mentioned before...Saturday night, Gavin and I started discussing some writing and ended up in a very long, involved conversation, largely but not entirely about religion.

The parents came home earlier than expected...Mike went out again, mom went to sleep, threatening death to anyone who woke her up so we closed the door and made sure to not talk very loudly. Before she went to bed, Mumsie pulled me outside and asked what we were doing, and said she wanted to make sure we weren't "doing anything inappropriate". I informed her very plainly that we were discussing some writing as we said and no, we weren't having sex, nor did we intend to, neither of us were particularly into the idea of having sex only a thin wall away from my parents, you get the idea. So Mumsie says "Okay, good, just wanted to check, have fun" or somesuch and goes merrily to sleep.

At some point, Mike came back and was watching TV downstairs and in the midst of all this, he heard Grandma Jane getting up and walking around every fifteen minutes or so, apparently checking to make sure that she didn't catch wind of anything improper going on under her roof. Meanwhile, we were completely clueless about this as we continued to talk into the night, occasionally going downstairs for coffee and desserty things.

Sunday I get a call from Mom informing me of all this. I love my mom, really I do but my gawds, the woman can really sound extremely accusatory at the worst times. This didn't help any.

She then informed me that it had nothing to do with the fact that Gavin and I are both women (thought never crossed my mind until she mentioned it) and everything to do with the fact that we're not married. There were similar problems last year when my cousin Lily was living with them and her boyfriend would come to visit and they would cloister themselves in a room for long periods of time and Grandma Jane would have a cow.

So here's the problem: I never knew this. We had no intentions of having sex while visiting, in fact, there was a fairly active disinterest. Yes, clearly, I'm nearly thirty years old, they know I'm not a shining virginal maiden whatever...but I'd really rather the people I'm related to not be in earshot when I'm in the midst of a romp between the sheets any more than I want to hear when any of them are, ya know? And girlfriend or no, it just never occurred to me that sitting in a room together with the door closed would be taken as the "appearance of impropriety" as my mother kept putting it.

However, as I mentioned, she knew that this was a problem and didn't say "By the way, Grandma Jane has a cow if she thinks people even give the appearance that they might be indulging in some impropriety under her roof." When I pointed out that she could have mentioned this at any time before we came up there, when we got there, when she was asking what we were doing, she came back with "Well it was never a problem with you before..."

Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be when you consider that this would be the first time I've ever brought anyone home.

Then Mom suggested that we try to fix it by finding a way to work nonchalantly into conversation some mention of talking for a long time and possibly been what we were talking about, which we refused to do...for one, there's no way to do that without sounding really obvious even if we wanted to and more than that, we weren't doing anything that we needed to defend ourselves from.

We seriously thought about coming back to Baltimore on Sunday afternoon.

On top of that, Mike knew, and he was sitting in a chair right beside the stairs when we came down more than once for coffee, he could have let me in on this and I would have known.

For gawds sakes if someone had just told me that this was such a massive issue with Grandma Jane, we could have kept the door open and it never would have kept her up all night.

This whole issue led to lots and lots of jokes about impropriety on Sunday night.

As it was though, it seems that things were fine in the end. On Sunday night, we spent more time downstairs, and kept the door open while upstairs. I made sure that my mother knew very clearly that I didn't like how the situation was handled and that both she and Mike could have let us know, which got me several comments about being far too defensive, but whatever. We were just trying to be polite in keeping the door closed and no one bothered to tell us that there was a problem til after the fact.

Comments

[falnfenix]

ohh family...

when i originally planned on in with Chris, my mother demanded to know where i would be sleeping. i ended up telling her i'd sleep in the guest bed, just to soothe her nerves.

nevermind the fact that i'm 2 months shy of my 27th birthday...

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Heh...glad that my mom isn't that uptight.

If it were my mom's house, sleeping in the same bed probably wouldn't have been a big deal so long as it was sleeping

[falnfenix]

lol, my parents are Catholic. if we were staying in their home for any reason, he'd be in one bedroom and i would be in the other. :)

i managed to skate in one of my ex girlfriends...they assumed we weren't doing anything because she was a girl.friend (they don't know i like girls). any guys have been stuck upstairs with them.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

i managed to skate in one of my ex girlfriends...they assumed we weren't doing anything because she was a girl.friend (they don't know i like girls). any guys have been stuck upstairs with them.

I think it's hilarious when people think that nothing could ever possible go on between two women cause like, it's two women, not a man and a woman, right?

[falnfenix]

absolutely!!

[aphiorogue.livejournal.com]

I had a child. (Rich and I were not yet married) and I was told we were expected to sleep in seperate rooms when visiting my grandmother (by my mom) My Grandmother told her that she was being ridiculous and that Rich might need to help with the baby at night. She was much more relaxed about it then my mom was.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

yay for reasonable Grandma!

[aphiorogue.livejournal.com]

she basically told my mom it was pointless to expect that when I was now a mom myself.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

we probably would have done something like that were it not Grandma Jane who really is just a sweet little old lady who's trying to get into heaven*, even if she's somewhat neurotic. If it were, say, my mom who had the problem and not just been the messenger oh yeah, we would have been obnoxious about it.


*my stepfather's words, borrowed from Bill Cosby, not mine.

[chironcentaur.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm childish that way too and the thought did cross my mind. If this had been my family we were visiting I wouldn't have hesitated. Of course no one in my family would do this, except perhaps for some of my mother's family that I don't want to see myself let alone subject my girlfriend to them.

[vediskoerner.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my family (I don't know who started it) freaked out when I sat on my soon to be husband's lap. Granted he was the first man I had brought home as a 'lover' but it wasn't like I was grinding away. I was sitting on his knee!

*L*

I told them to deal with it because we WERE having sex and so long as I wasn't doing it in front of them, they had no room to complain. They dropped it at that point, and now my brother and his 18 year old girlfriend get away with a LOT worse! *L*

So ((HUGS)) for dealing with the crazy family issues!

[verginiamus.livejournal.com]

Sounds like your family doesn't talk to each other or something. That's families for you.