I'm not really sure I have an in-law rant. Until the end, my in-laws were great.

My father in law went crazy on all of us about his third year of chemo. At that point, no one could blame him for being an asshole to any and everyone.

I damn well could blame him for being an asshole in front of others though. It's one thing to tell a woman (a housewife, by choice, and one who took pride in how she kept her home) that you don't like something she made. It's another thing entirely to point to the entire family that you don't think the housewife can cook at all and you'd rather eat dirt than her cooking.

The last straw was the day he screamed at me for letting my dog up on the bed in the spare bedroom. It was his house, and therefore his bed, and that damn dog wasn't allowed on anything. It had to sleep on the floor, and if I let them back up on the bed, well, I knew where the door was and he didn't care if it hit me on my way out.

I truly believe that, right at that moment, I hated a dying man.

My ex-mother-in-law was a good woman. She loved me from day one, but, like me, she kept her head down and her mouth shut about a lot of things that went on. She and I both knew that it was easier to stay quiet and pretend we had no opinion, on anything, than it was to draw attention to ourselves.

It wasn't until she knew I was leaving her son, that I was divorcing her only child, that she disappeared. I'd like to say that she said good bye, that we had a talk about why I was leaving, and that I wasn't leaving her.

But we didn't.

One day she was there, the next, POOF. Gone.

And I was still calling her, emailing her, trying to get her to talk to me.

I'm not angry at her. Enough time hasn't passed for me to be angry; I'm still hurt about it all. I'm still hurt that she wrote off the better part of a decade of weekly calls and emails and holidays together.

Then I look through my text messages, my emails, my call logs, and realize that I walked away better. I know that when holidays come around, I have invites to multiple houses, I have friends (and their kids) telling me to come over. That me and my dog are always welcome in their home, for whatever I need.

And I know that, this holiday season, she will be sitting home alone and wondering where the happy family gathering went.