Screw you guys, I'm going home

So, I’m taking a 4 day weekend for this 4th of July and going back up to my home state of Michigan to visit family. I haven’t been there in about a year, and this will probably be the only time I’ll get to go this year. Which is a shame because I really like hanging out in my old home town of Traverse City, even if it will be Cherry Fest and swollen with thousands of tourists.
I’m meeting up with my dad in Ann Arbor and going to my Uncle’s big “keeping up with the Jones-s” fourth of July party. Then we’ll head up north to TC to visit my grandfather and others. Here’s the problem – my Dad’s several times x-girlfriend whom he is apparently back seeing again. It’s not that I hate her or anything, it’s just that I would prefer not to have contact with her. In the fifteen some years we have known her no one in the family or family friends network has grown to like her any better, only less. At various points in their relationship I think all of my sisters and I have threatened to never visit him again if she’s in the picture. My older sister even told him once that he was never going to meet his grandchildren if he didn’t get rid of her. I think we all would have put up with her and thought better of her if it seemed like a healthy relationship, or even one in which she pulled her own weight, but it wasn’t. And we all got tired of the already tenuous father-daughter relationship being constantly intruded upon and strained by an insecure hanger-on. After my grandmother died the girlfriend moved into her house with my Dad, and her adhd son. She repainted garish colors, remodeled and basically stripped this house that held a lot of sentimental value to everyone in the family. She additionally got to absorb several of the nice belongings in the house and china sets. She didn’t work, she did practically nothing in the way of housework, she had hypochondriacal and dramatic tendencies, she was an inattentive mother who couldn’t be bothered with dealing with her child if he was being irritating, and she and my Dad argued all the time when my sisters and I were around. Although they claimed they got along great the rest of the time. Family vacations (although sometimes amusing when viewed from the outside) were really just stressful and often unbearable disasters. When they finally broke up for the last time and she moved out my Dad was a little shell shocked, they’d been together for something like 12 years, but he said how relieved he was for it to finally be settled and over, and how much happier and less stressed out he was. But he never really cut off seeing her altogether, and now, a few years later he calls me up and says he’s thinking about marrying her. If you could reach through the phone and slap someone upside the head I think my Dad would have been slapped by every member of the family. Someone really needs to invent a way to do that.
Of course, I told him I thought it was a terrible idea. He has tried eharmony.com, with not much in the way of dates or compatible finds. I told him I thought he wasn’t really trying to get out there and meet someone new. He replied “Oh, I’m not trying at all.”
Yeah, great, dad. That’s a great example and a great reason to marry someone. Way to give up on yourself and your future. He’s only 47, it’s not like he’s 80 with severely limited options and mobility.
I think he figures with all of us grown up he won’t be seeing us often enough to make up for the lack of having somebody around. He’s never been good at being alone and he can’t cook to save his life. Still, I think he could do at least a little better.
But now he says Kathy and her son will be spending all day with us at the 4th of July party (I’m sure my Uncle is thrilled as well), and then he wants to bring them up to my grandfather’s cabin for the rest of the weekend ( a 4+ hour drive each way). I had to put my foot down. It’s my one trip to Michigan this year, I’m 7 months pregnant and I just want to have some nice time visiting with family I never get to see. I do not want the stress of dealing with that bullshit and having to pretend like the last 15 years of bad feelings and memories don’t exist. I am especially not doing 8 hours in a car with them. I don’t care if it’s unchristian, I have to draw the line somewhere to save my sanity.
Amusing family trip memories to follow...