Laura Lou had the good idea to follow up on some of my guest-related concerns: specifically, how to figure out what they expected, and how to deal with the religion/church issue. I’d also been concerned that there might be hard feelings over Paul and his sister not having a funeral for their dad (his aunt’s brother), and I’d been concerned that his aunt would boss me (those two issues are both mentioned in the church-issue post as well).

1. Figuring out their expectations. For this one, his aunt gave me an opening: she emailed chatting about a fun day they’d had doing various things—things that had equivalents around here. So I emailed back, saying oh, if you like those things, I wonder if you would like to do those things on your visit here? And she emailed back saying that although those things did sound like fun, what they’d prefer to do is just spend time with our family. I would have found this a little puzzling (I consider “doing things together” to be “spending time with family”), except for the context and also Paul’s translation: he says for his family, “spending time with family” means “at the house, chatting.” And that really is what we did: we sat and chatted. I was pretty wrung out afterward from the intensity of that kind of social contact (seriously: 10.5 hours where the only time I wasn’t in a conversation was when I was in the bathroom), but it was also fun: because his aunt and uncle are relatively new to me, I could ask TONS of the fun/easy-to-talk-about questions, like about how they met, whether their kids got along, all about their grandchildren, etc. And I could tell all MY fun/easy stories, too.

2. The church issue. I used Judith’s suggestion of giving them a strong hint framed as an offer to find out information: “Would you like us to get service times / recommendations for churches in the area? We’re not part of a congregation, but we’ve heard good things about Church X and Church Y.” I put it in the same email as the questions about activities. They responded that they would indeed attend church on Sunday but that they would find one themselves. They didn’t question us specifically, but we didn’t pray before meals, and one of our children asked what a hymn was, so it seems like things must have been fairly clear. Paul’s aunt asked a number of questions (“So your dad was a minister?” “So how did you come to attend [Christian college]?”) that told me she would really like to know more, but at least on this trip she didn’t ask directly. (Though I would have been okay if she had: my main concern was that there would be an awkward question that was only awkward because it assumed we were religious, and was hard to answer without first addressing that point.) I think that on this topic, my history leads to very misleading conversations: I’ve had the same trouble with my wine-and-appetizers friends, where I keep telling stories about my minister dad or my Christian schools, and then realizing that might be why people are saying “sorry” to me when they swear.

3. The no-funeral issue. Did not come up.

4. His aunt might try to boss me. It seemed to me that she is Quite Bossy by nature, but that she is self-aware enough to attempt to reign herself in—unlike my late mother-in-law, who would just LET FLY with anything she felt like bossing me about, with the strongly-felt implication that there was The Right Way and The Dumb Way. I think Paul’s aunt ITCHES to tell people The Right Way, but that she is aware that it’s not necessarily The Dumb Way if they want to do it differently; or that even if it IS The Dumb Way, that’s not her concern. Also, she is aware that people don’t necessarily LIKE to be bossed. So for two days, she did well. But by the end of the second day she was starting to Make Suggestions in a way that told me that if I were her daughter-in-law, or if she were staying longer than two days, we would start to have Issues. As neither of those were the case, we got along beautifully and I liked her very much. If Paul and I ever do the road trip we’d like to do someday, I’d want to deliberately route it so that we could stop and see his aunt and uncle.