My wife's mother is a chocolate addict. She goes through chocolate the way chain smokers go through Marlboros. In the course of attempting to find coffee filters in her kitchen, I turned up eleven bags of chocolate - truffles, Frangos, After 8 mints, peanut butter cups, miniatures, you name it. It is safe to say that in her 64 square foot kitchen there is approximately three cubic feet of chocolate interspersed through it like marbling in a steak. Yet every year, she dramatically gives up sweets for Lent. No chocolate. No sugar. No dessert. Nothing. My wife's birthday is March 5. So every year, any cake that is made is resented by her mother, who has given up sugar for Lent, and why can't we all be more understanding? And then she buys eleven metric tons of chocolate the day after easter and proceeds to eat it like Spam in a survival shelter. Fuck everything about Lent.
She's doing it wrong. Lent is about abstaining to increase empathy. Not to fast, binge, self-pity, and guilt trip. I refuse to let bad people ruin a good thing. Lent is good. Some people are bad. Such is life. I wish I could eat chocolate like that. She must have the metabolism of a ferret, or the size of a small moon.Fuck everything about Lent.
She goes through chocolate the way chain smokers go through Marlboros.
I just need to let you know that this analogy is amazing.It is safe to say that in her 64 square foot kitchen there is approximately three cubic feet of chocolate interspersed through it like marbling in a steak.
Her kitchen is amazing. She's a 5 on the hoarder scale, yet positively fastidious. For reasons I've never truly understood, they refuse to pay for garbage service, which means they pretty much polish their refuse because it's gotta sit until they feel like making a dump run. So there are lots of boxes of cans and things everywhere, as well as a lifetime's accumulation of coffee mugs &c. There is also no dishwasher and a lack of cabinet space so every square inch has something on it - all of it clean, all of it tidy, all of it organized by a not-entirely-human-parsable method. And every fourth item is chocolate.
Fuck everything about your wife's mom, more than Lent, really. I don't think there's anything wrong, and potentially a great deal of good, that can come from giving up an enjoyable habit or an enjoyable-but-negative behavior for a predetermined, finite period of time. For those with really bad habits it allows them to see a "light at the end of the tunnel" where it's easier to quit in the short-term because they know they can go back to it in the long-term. Sometimes, people will choose to stay quit after they get 30 or 40 (in the case of Lent) days of abstinence under their belt. I don't think there's even anything that wrong about mildly complaining about how you miss what you've given up, for a while. It's not your wife's fault when her birthday is and it's not like her mother is oblivious to that date either. Is your wife not supposed to celebrate her birthday because her mother's giving something up? (Well excuuuuuuuse me, Ms. klein's-mother-in-law.) It's not even like there won't be plenty of cakes for MIL to eat after the end of Lent. If I choose to make a lifestyle change, small or large, temporary or permanent, I can't expect everyone else to accommodate me by hiding my poor delicate feelings from other behaviors. Not even my family. Your MIL is silly. At best.