although i will not believe it until i see my mother sitting on our couch, my parents tell me they are coming this weekend. this is HUGE, dude! my parents have not been all that accepting of my relationship with the hippie for a number of reasons, but they actually seem to be coming around a little bit. the rents have very firm ideas on marriage, the institution, and marriage, the religious state, and marriage, the justification for sex and/or children and/or living together. and well--the hippie and i are not only not married, but we also have no intention of ever being married. it's just not for us. so to my rents, we are living in sin and always will be. add onto this that the hippie was married before, and that my mother views me as "the other woman" in his marriage (although neither the hippie or i feel that this was exactly the case), and you have a woman who is not really ready to accept our living arrangements or let us sleep in the same bed at her house.
the road to acceptance actually began with the hippie fixing my father's email within the first hour of the first weekend that i took him home to meet them. they actually like the hippie a lot, so that goes a long way. but fighting against that is my mother's general distrust of men and my ability to take care of myself, coupled with her beliefs about marriage.
the last time we went home to visit my parents, we opted to stay in a B&B in my hometown. and although i would not recommend this particular B&B to anyone, i still think it was the right thing to do. we wanted to see the rents, and we wanted to be able to sleep, so we compromised. but i think my mother saw it as us drawing some kind of accept-us-or-else line in the sand or something. that was not at all our intention, but it seems to be having a positive effect none the less.
i mean, for our birthdays, they bought us rocking chairs for the porch of the house where we live together in sin.
imagine my surprise last weekend when i called home to find my mother, who does NOT travel AT ALL, thinking about coming to visit. imagine my surprise when i suggested that they meet us at the zoo this coming weekend and then come home with us and was not met with total disdain. imagine my surprise to find that they are actually planning to do it.
so this is the plan: we are meeting them at 10 am tomorrow at the asheboro zoo where we hope to take a gander at the new, 2 month old lion cubs, and then they will come back to raleigh with us for one night. they are not staying with us in our house of sin, but will rather be staying in a rather crappy hotel somewhat nearby. had they the ability to make plans ahead of time, they could have stayed at a beautiful B&B right here in our hood, but alas it is all booked up. my father called at 7:15 this morning to tell me to find them a hotel, and that has actually been something of a challenge--almost everything in raleigh is full, as this is homecoming weekend for NCSU. so yeah. they are coming. we'll see how this goes. i love my parents, and i do want their acceptance, so i am really glad they are making an effort. i just hope it goes well, and i will be a bit nervous until they are actually here.
if nothing else, i really can't wait to see the baby lions. :)
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