My Father-In-Law Looks Nothing Like Jeff Daniels

Actually, you can, indeed, live with someone for almost 20 years and still learn new things about them.

Husband and I rented The Squid and the Whale to watch when the kids were asleep. It's the story of a disintigrated marriage and how the family grapples with the divorce.

We were about 20 minutes into the movie. I'm sitting there thinking, "The parents are doorknobs. How could they hurt their boys like that?" I stretch my legs out on to Husband's lap and he absentmindedly starts tapping them. After a minute, he sighed, "This reminds me of my own parents' divorce."

We've always been pretty up-front about everything with each other, but his parents and all the crap that's associated with them are things he very seldom discusses. On one of our first dates, I had asked about his parents and he curtly said, "They're divorced. My mom remarried a guy nine years older than me and my dad is divorcing his second wife. And that's all I want to say about that, if you don't mind."

Since then, I don't touch that subject. Little by little, he tells me odd snippets of his childhood, mostly hidden within another story ("I think the last time I saw that movie was when I was visiting my mother in the hospital one Christmas...").

Needless to say, we continued to watch the rest of the movie in silence.