When you get together with your larger family, is there more love or trouble?

Michele Obama is a man, my mother-in-law believes. She’s pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, and is an avid follower of many conspiracy theories.

That aside, she’s just a difficult character. She often means well, but her capacity for bugging and commenting on numerous matters where no one needs her opinion is highly annoying. She can also easily fall into a state of rage if something doesn’t go her way.

I didn’t mean this to be a story that bashes and mocks my mother-in-law. For one thing, writing often has an ethical dilemma — how do you balance honesty and the need for expression with being insensitive to your relatives or friends? Also, I’ve been with my wife for almost twenty-five years. Of course, I know my mother-in-law well, and now — when she’s eighty and visited us in the US for the first time in four years— is not the right time to pull my hair over her antics.

But she wasn’t the only character who I had to deal with while vacationing for several days at Lake Tahoe. My wife’s older brother, his wife, and their teenage son were there. A couple of times a year, we’d get together — we did this when we were back in Russia more than a decade ago and more recently. We emigrated in 2013, and my wife’s brother’s family came to the US two years later. Initially, we lived close to each other, but then we moved so I can’t complain about spending too much time with my wife’s relatives, whether I like them or not.