After a truly wonderful week in the Midwest to celebrate Christmas with Steve's family, followed by a most lovely Hanukkah dinner with my parents, I am flush with love and happiness. Several times in the past few days, Steve and I have acknowledged to one another how extraordinarily lucky we are in the family department.
Each of us has two smart, loving, interesting, funny, engaged, mostly healthy parents. Each set of parents is well into its fourth decade of a happy, healthy, loving marriage. Each of us has siblings we like, who married or are dating someone we like. My parents and his get along famously, and our parents have wholeheartedly embraced our marriage and their son- or daughter-in-law. We've each spent a full week in the company of the other's family without going crazy (and while having a rollicking good time).
Which is not to say that everybody loves everybody else every moment of every day, or that there's never a bit of drama in the dynamic. But, mostly, the family thing rocks.
I would not have predicted this ease of familial blending. Steve and I come from very different backgrounds in terms of religion, geography, socio-economic status, education, world-view, cultural exposure, extended family, and more. His family is full of teachers and engineers, while mine is so heavy on lawyers as to be either comical or frightening, depending on your perspective. And yet, the basic values with which we were raised are quite similar, and both of us have developed close, healthy relationships with our parents as adults.
Really, though, the key to our positive family dynamics is simple: we all love to play cards.
With Steve's family, we play Sheepshead. It took me a while to adapt to the counter-intuitive card-strength system of this classic Wisconsin game, but I'm picking it up at last. Steve's octogenarian grandmother paid me an enormous compliment last week, announcing that I played a mean game for a novice. They play for real money in Steve's family, but at only a nickel a point, they haven't bankrupted me yet.
With my family, we play Shanghai, a seven-hand progressive rummy game of unknown origins (but that my dad's family has played for at least three generations). The game can move quickly or go on for hours. The competition often grows heated, leading us to institute a rule prohibiting spouses from sitting next to one another. Marriages have been saved as a result. Steve had played a similar game before he met me, and so picked up Shanghai in no time at all. He has become an even sneakier down-and-out threat than my father, and he's damn lucky my parents had already grown to love him when he started beating us on a regular basis.
Steve and I are hugely competitive with one another over games, deriving no joy from our spouse's success at our own expense. Some might think this a negative, or a relationship red flag. But in each of our families, cards and games provide a healthy outlet for competitiveness and aggression. Our parents have been playing cards against one another for almost 40 years each, taking great pleasure both in winning and in beating their beloved. It has worked for them, it has helped us stay close to them, and we have every intention of carrying on the tradition.