For example, at dinner time, in my husbands family everyone dishes up before the prayer, but in my family you dish up after the prayer. In Andrew's family, it's not really anyone's specific responsibility to ask someone to pray, and you can say no. In my family the pattern of who is responsible for asking someone to pray goes Dad, Enoch, then my husband (depending on who is there). And it's an unspoken rule in my family that you have to say yes. I think I've said no twice in my life and got the death glare from everyone in the family and ended up praying and that's how I learned what the unspoken rule was! I honestly was somewhat surprised the first time I had dinner at my in-laws and someone said no when they were asked to pray. But I've come to realize that in his family it's a rule that you can turn down praying if you want and in mine it's the opposite. It's not that one way is right and the other is wrong, that's just how it is in both of our families.
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| We spent our first Christmas cruising in Mexico! |
I think that you really don't notice your family's rules until you get married and all of those rules clash! For example, our first Christmas I didn't buy any presents for anyone in Andrew's family. No one ever told me who we were assigned to so I just figured that we didn't need to get anyone presents. In my family presents aren't really a big deal. We siblings never buy each other presents for birthdays and we only get the person that we are assigned to a present for Christmas. My mom organizes it and we all draw someone's name from a hat. We also don't really get our parents anything. But in my husbands family it is an unspoken rule that you buy everyone a present for every holiday. It was kind of overwhelming at first because I wasn't used to it! And I think I made some people mad at first because I didn't see why it was such a big deal at the beginning. It is kind of hard to balance out the differences in each of our family's rules.
But now I have learned that there are many different rules in each family. It just takes a while to figure them all out!
I would love to hear about your "unspoken" family rules! Please comment!
4 comments:
The presents were a big deal in my family too, where Shannon's family doesn't do much. But the most interesting one for me is that when you leave a gathering for my family, you hug and tell each other "i love you", where in her family you just say "see ya later" and walk away. that has been an interesting one for us.
Interesting reading about our family rules from the child's perspective. I remember Dad and I deciding which rules, traditions and behaviors from our families growing up we would incorporate into our new family.
In my husbands family they have a neat little tradition where the sound off before every prayer and then their dad just picks someone. When they were born they were given a number. So since Hunter is the second child he is number four and so on. I've decided I'm 4a. In my family each person has an assigned seat and we just go around the table. If someone isn't there we just skip them and go on. Interesting.
I had a good different family rule idea that hadn't been mentioned yet, but forgot it. But I just thought of another. Christmas presents - in my family my mom would always hand out all the presents so we could (kind of) take it slower and see what everyone else was getting. In Jamie's family they could just grab their own from under the tree.
Thinking more. Another could be who drives. (Maybe this is an older rule vs. a newer rule.) With both our parents the dad always drove if both husband and wife were there, and we do the same thing (except in rare cases like when he's really tired or if I've just picked him up from something). But in my sister's family and my brother's family, if it's "her" car, the wife drives. I like the chivalrous-ness of the husband driving, but my sister says she doesn't like him messing with her seat position. I would much rather change the seat and let him be the man.
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