Picture it...

Me. San Francisco International Airport. A glass of wine. A 3-hours-early arrival for a red-eye flight to visit my parents in Vermont and see friends in Boston.

It's the perfect recipe for me to finally post something on my blog!

Lots, and very little, has happened in the past two weeks.

I passed my CPHQ exam (Certified Professional in Health Care Quality), so now I have a credential that I can attach to my name. It's apparently more popular on the west coast than in the east, so I came to the right place.

TCH's parents are visiting, and right now, so are his aunt, uncle, and grandmother. I'm proud to discover that I've gotten pretty darn good at navigating around San Francisco, and I can take visitors from out of town on really fun sightseeing tours. Today (feeling like a mama duck leading her ducklings), I took the whole crowd to see the Golden Gate Bridge while TCH was at work. It's lots of fun.

So I've gone back and forth between feeling annoyed that there are so many people crammed into MY apartment (why can't they just stay at a hotel like normal people?), and feeling guilty for being such a selfish American who wouldn't want to welcome her auntie, uncle, and grandmother into her home (we're all the same family, it's only temporary, it's expensive to stay at a hotel, and they're sacrificing space, too).

It's complicated, obviously, and although I consistently expect these situations to be absolutely unbearable, each visit with TCH's parents is more fun than the one before. I get myself all worked up before a visit--an absolute mess, stress-wise--because somehow I am fixated on the awkwardness of their first couple of visits, back before we really knew each other. These days, things are different: we get along easily, his parents are more laid-back, etc. So why don't I remember that when they're about to visit?? Is it because I think I'm "supposed" to have a weird relationship with my in-laws? I guess not. But while they, coming from an Eastern culture, are more collectivist, I think that I, on a personal level, have a lot of my own isolationist tendencies that don't really help the situation. And also, the mental grudge list that I can't stop adding to.

Maybe this is one of the things that get easier as we age?