A toothbrush and some floss...stepping away from her FOO drama

[formflier]

 The quick update:  Christmas went really well.    Yesterday my wife had a long involved conversation on the phone with her sister.  Very animated.  Really didn't hear any of it, by choice, but I could see her and could tell it was a very involved thing.  I approach her later and she asks if I have talked to my SIL's ex (father of my nieces and nephews).   Turns out that he supposedly gave his oldest kid a toothbrush and some floss for Christmas and gave the other two kids Ipad minis.  Told the oldest one (16 years old) that he didn't know what he would like so he got him the toothbrush and floss.  Then wife tries to get me to join her in speculating about what he was thinking/saying by doing this.  My nieces and nephews are very troubled kids (IMO), SIL is much more BPDish than my wife.    I've been doing lots of thinking about  what role I can play/should play in dysfunctional FOO dynamics.  I keep coming up with "stay out of it".    So, I tried to validate that it was a troubling and upsetting story and also stated that since we weren't there (SIL didn't witness this either, so it's all 2nd/3rd hand) my "money bet" was that we are missing some critical elements of the story.  I then said I shouldn't speculate (made it about me) about such things and exited the conversation.    In the past I would have happily joined in talking about things like this.  Usually, at some point my opinion of speculative things would not match that of my wife's and I would end up somehow in trouble.   The other FOO issue (same nephew) that I have stepped away from is this nephews supposed interest in the military.  There was an earlier post from my about how my MIL was telling my wife that anyone would be foolish for joining.  This set off my wife.    Well, I stopped by SIL's house over holidays and she wanted to discuss nephew joining military (I'm a retired naval officer for those new to my story).    It became obvious she wanted me to go talk to nephew and "push" him to do it.  I gave her some information about the process and found out that what he has really done is "mentioned it" (my interpretation) and time or two and the SIL latched on to that and is now "pushing" it.   A bad dynamic in my wife's FOO is that "the women" get together and harumph about how bad the men are in the family and they devise strategies to "fix" the men.  Instead of letting nephew devise his own path in life, they are pushing him towards one.  Nephew is troubled kid.  Bad divorce between parents and horrible parenting, toss in some bad choices on his part with no consequences and you have a recipe for disaster.  Anyway, I let it be known that I would be happy to discuss it with nephew whenever he wanted to reach out to me to discuss.  I saw and talked to nephew several times, he didn't bring it up and neither did I.  I hope everyone's holidays went well.    

FF  

[Daniell85]

You know, I think you have this right. You guys literally moved into the "hot zone" in some ways. If you are able to handle things like you still lived very far away, I think it will keep going towards stability.

Glad to see you back, and I hope everyone is getting settled in and calmed back down!