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Family, both my own and my husband's, is perhaps the greatest blessing in my life; however, when one bad apple starts to spread worms around about the rest, it can be like a curse. Being a people pleaser by nature, I never want to hurt anyone's feelings so I used to end up hurting everyone's instead. This is because instead of standing up to the initiator of the tales being told, I would just smile and nod at whatever anyone said. Especially difficult was when it was an in-law or someone older than I am since I didn't want to seem disrespectful or as though I was scolding them.

Last fall, my mother-in-law came to visit with my brother-in-law and his wife. I am fairly new to their family and had met them all seperately but never together. I also liked them all seperately. Thus, I had no idea what I was in for and that there was such animosity between my mother and sister-in-law. I would soon find out how tricky family relationships can get when you just want to keep everyone happy and they seem to want to sabotage your goal at every turn.

Part of the problem I was having was that I am from a large family that is exceptionally loving and protective of one another. In fact, I have never met anyone with a family that was as much so as my own. That is a true blessing and a gift. We were also grieving the loss of one of them at the time, so we were even closer than usual. What I was about to see in my husband's family was something so foreign to me that I am still perplexed by it and trying to figure out the dynamics that are going on behind the scenes to cause such troubles and dissension.

Here is an example of just one of the things that happened that weekend to let me know that if I was not going to get sucked into one side or the other, I was goiing to have to do something besides smile and nod. I make cross necklaces that we give out to people and they come in all sorts of colors. My mother-in-law wanted to take some home to her friends which was no problem. I got them out and she took one of almost every color. When my sister-in-law saw them, she wanted a purple one to take home to her daughter as this was her favorite color.

The problems started when I realized that I had run out of purple when my mother-in-law had taken the last one. I thought this would be no problem at all (wouldn't have been in my family) as she could just get a different color and give that one to my sister-in-law. When she asked for it, my mother-in-law said no because she was going to wear

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