We threaten to leave

Ten years into it, we were raising our children in the house we built. I quit my job when my second daughter was born, and times were pretty lean, although we had plenty to eat. We grew a big garden and I canned hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and jam. On a dairy, at least, you can subsist. We survived a time of high inflation and paid off the bills that had earlier threatened to overwhelm us.

FIL had one leg shorter than the other, blamed on something that happened with horses while he was growing up. He walked with a decided limp and had one shoe sole built up. They wanted to do a hip replacement but because he was so obviously willful that it would be a mistake to let him pull it out by trying to push himself harder, they decided to let him suffer a few years more to get him to believe he needed time to recover.

He could hardly walk the year before his surgery, and he would have been in a wheelchair the rest of his life without it. By this time, my children were a great help to their father, so they did most of the work without any help from their grandfather at all.

Once when his parents were out of town, my husband dug into the financial records hidden under the landing. In an inspection of these, it became apparent that not only were they paying off the debts in their name with money my husband and children were generating, they were paying themselves half again more than we were getting.

It was all too much for me, and even for my husband, who had thus far been extraordinarily patient and unwilling to discuss things. But his legendary patience sometimes runs out. We had a meeting with them, and we threatened to leave.

In looking back over the meetings we had trying to set things right and fair and honest and open, it occurred to me only many years later that this was not how a partnership was supposed to run. Financial decisions were made arbitrarily and in secret. My MIL was so untrusting that she would not give us information we needed to do what needed to be done.

She obviously did not want her husband to know much of anything, even though in financial discussions his eyes glazed over and all he wanted to know was how much cash there was on hand. He was not interested in the financial consequences of decision making, or tax matters, or estate matters. All he was told was that there was no money, and not to ask.

It would take another fifteen years to gain MIL's trust. My husband talked to her daily, and eventually she and he became a decision making team that allowed things to progress in a way that never could have happened otherwise. This was only after the baleful effects of Sister Twin's taking up residence nearby, and the attendant and merciless criticism of my husband and his supposed manipulation and deceit in trying to take over the farm, were shown to be projections of her own desires to do so.

Still, I was worried about FIL's temper when it came to these meetings. I need not have feared. We geared the meetings unconsciously, it seemed, toward flattering his importance, something he could not resist. He responded by agreeing to everything we said. He couldn't help himself.

So they gave in to our ultimatum. Unless they wrote up partnership papers and provided some sort of estate plan that gave us eventual ownership of the farm, we would sell our house and find employment elsewhere. Of course it was my MIL who followed through on the legalities, since FIL's time was spent more importantly with other things, like trying to get someone else to unclog his Rube Goldberg manure system.

We were the gravy train, and when faced with their secure future pulling out when FIL couldn't even walk, they finally agreed to go to the lawyers and did what should have been done years before.