Had a rather uncomfortable interaction this past weekend. Apologize in advance for the length, but this is pretty much the battle going on in the entire state of Florida in a nutshell. Fourth of July weekend was my mom's birthday. She turned 75. My pops passed in 2016, so she's been coopping through that since. My brother and I decided that it would be a good idea to have his family and my mom come to our house for 4-5 days. The cousins haven't seen each other for almost a year and my kids haven't seen grandma in just over a year. So, we tell mom of our idea but it's only going to happen if she stays put in her house for two weeks and if she HAS to go out, she better wear a mask....yes, she's a "government can't tell me what to do" person. Anyway, we made the terms and she committed to them. They come down, have a great time everyone goes home, no big deal. They stayed here at our house. We had thought of going to the beach one day but upon learning that the beaches here were FULL at 8am that whole weekend, we decided not to go. We feasted on BBQ etc and the kids had a blast in the pool and the inflatable water slide we rented.
Fast forward to last week. My MIL, who lives in South Florida, has been begging my wife to allow the kids to come down to the beach in her area and she can look after them for a week. This is something they do every year. Problem is, she's a real estate agent (who also is anti-mask) and is out all over the counties that are getting run over by this virus every day. The town she lives in was at 100% capacity in early June and hasn't dropped below 95% this whole time. It's also one of the areas where they've had a few of these 7-800 person "block parties". So, we've been really hesitant to send them for a myriad of reasons, but these are the main ones. She called my wife again and asked saying she was all alone at the beach now and that it would be just her in the kids. She hadn't been anywhere for 10 days etc. So we decided, fine....let them go. Wife took them down on a Friday morning. Saturday we talk with the kids everything's good...having a blast, everyone's doing what they were supposed to (our kids know the deal and what we expect). Sunday rolls around and our daughter mentions that she's excited that "Papa" and their aunt are coming so that she can see them. Um, excuse me...what? Papa has been in Alabama around an entire family of "anti-mask" people and aunt is 29 years old living at home too lazy to do the work to collect unemployment. Oh, and by the way, she's also just gotten off of a week in Key West and 4-5 days here in Orlando area with all her friends. My wife was livid. We got in the car and drove down and picked them up that morning. The kids were upset, "Nana" was upset, my wife was angry and my SIL is bombarding my wife's phone with nonsense. Aunt, I don't care what you say...you don't have a voice here. Do the right thing or don't. That's your choice, but when you know what happens if you don't, don't get pissy with me because I follow through on what I tell you is going to happen. You aren't a child anymore...grow up. The same goes for the MIL too really. These decisions put us in an incredibly awkward situation and then framed as if we were the problem.
The awkwardness, whatever....I can deal with it. You made a bad decision, didn't think we'd do the right thing and you were wrong. That's on you not me. I was supportive of my wife through the whole thing, but kept quiet. Well, until my family and their visit came up (now you see why I explain that above). My MIL was laying on a pretty thick guilt trip to my wife (on speaker phone in the car on the way down) and then decided to go too far and bring my family into it. At that point, I decided to outline just how different things were between the two situations and how they weren't really comparable events and had nothing to do with the fact she made decisions we told her not to make and that she lied to us while doing it. We basically read her the riot act and it's been a week since she's talked to us. My wife doesn't know what to do and I keep telling her there's nothing for her to do. This was not her decision. It was her mom's. It's not her fault and she shouldn't feel guilty at all. She's protecting her family. School is starting in a couple weeks for the kids and she started classes this week. We can't afford sickness in this house and we've taken all this time to do the right thing for months, we aren't screwing that up because someone else can't be an adult. I don't know what's going to happen next, but it's not good right now. We are officially the black sheep to that side of her family. The whole thing sucks
