Be civil for sake of your hubby

Dear Annie: My husband's family recently moved to our city. We are the exact opposites of them. My husband and I are college grads, each with a good career, strong work/moral ethics, great friends and blessed to do much of what we want.
Enter his dysfunctional family -- his mother and sister and his sister's husband. All are extremely co-dependent on one another and spend much of their time trying to find better ways to live off the government. I loathe that mentality and am finding it increasingly difficult to be in their presence. What, if anything, can be done with this situation? Daughter-in-Law
Dear DIL: It might help to remember that your in-laws do not have to be a reflection on you and the way you choose to live your life. Every family has members who are less than admirable, but you tolerate them because they are family.
You don't have to like them, you don't have to condone the way they behave, and you don't have to spend a lot of time in their company. But you married someone who was raised by this bunch, and he might want to maintain a certain level of closeness. Please respect that, even if you don't agree, and be as civil as you can for his sake.
Dear Annie: My husband and I are expecting our third child, and we already know it is a girl. It is our third girl. I'm delighted and so is my husband, although I'm sure he would have liked a boy.
However, it's the rude comments from others that are starting to get to me. When people ask if I know the sex of the baby, I answer very happily, "It's a girl." I can't keep track of how many people respond, "Sorry it's not a boy this time." If that's not bad enough, they say it right in front of my other girls.
My youngest child hears a lot of these comments and is now asking, "Mommy, why do you need another girl?" Even at the doctor's office, some guy was in the waiting room bragging that he's finally getting his boy because the first three girls were really awful to deal with.
Why can't people just say, "Congratulations"? No one should express dismay about a baby's impending arrival, or worse, ask if we're going to try for another after I've been carrying this one for nine months. Louisville, Ky.
Dear Louisville: People sometimes don't think before they speak, but it is important that you correct them if your daughter is listening. She needs to hear you say, "We are so thrilled it's another girl because we simply adore the ones we have."
Dear Annie: I had to write in response to the woman who had been married for 40 years to "a man who suffered from depression, poor self-esteem and a persecution complex," and was elated when he finally died. She said he had smothered all the joy out of her home and made her and her children miserable.
If the marriage was so awful and her children were suffering, I'm wondering why she stayed in it for 40 years. Why didn't she pack her bags and leave when the children were grown?
She talks about his mental illness as if it were something he enjoyed doing just to punish her. Did she do anything to alleviate his pain, or did she just make it worse? The venomous tone of her letter makes me suspect that she was the cause of some of his problems. But apparently their life together wasn't bad enough for her to stop using him as her means of support for 40 years. Sarasue
Dear Sarasue: Some people do not believe in divorce, no matter how bad the marriage, and apparently this was one of those cases. But thanks for your opinion.
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