If you’re like me, you worked out many of the details of your married life long before you said “I do”. Decisions were made about having children, you discussed where you would like to live, and you may have even planned how often you would vacation.  But did you discuss whose family you would spend more time with?

I distinctly remember conversations between my parents when I was growing up that centered around “your family” and time with “those people.”  I believe that for the most part my parents each got along decently well with their in-laws, but my dad never felt as comfortable with my mom’s family as she did and vice versa.

Because I grew up in the same town as my mom, her entire family lived within five or ten minutes of our home. My dad’s family, however, was a different story. His parents were a half hour away and with a father who was ill by the time I was in junior high and a mother nearly blind and unable to drive, we simply did not see those grandparents as often. The aunt/uncle/cousin situation was also distinctly different.

On my mother’s side, my older brother and I were the only grandchildren until we were fifteen and seventeen years old, so we enjoyed the attention of our maternal grandparents as well as my mom’s brother and his wife.  My dad’s older sister, however, was ten years older, and some of her children had married and begun families of their own before I was even born. To complicate the relationship further, my aunt passed away when I was very young, and her husband quickly remarried.  My other paternal aunt never had children and lived in a different state.

Now that I have a family of my own, I am happy to say that my children are incredibly close to my entire family, even my sixteen-year-old first cousin who is about as far apart in age from my children as she is from me.  Their relationship with my husband’s family is an entirely different story.  His nuclear family lives half way across the country, and they make little to no effort to be a part of our lives, despite our best attempts to build a strong relationship.  This has caused a great deal of tension between us, and the effects have also begun to show themselves on my daughter who is about to turn five and wonders aloud why she doesn’t see one set of grandparents nearly as often as the other.

Should we have discussed such things when dating?  Would it have affected anything if I had known while dating my husband that my children would essentially have half a family?

No family is perfect, and the only rule of families is that you’re stuck with the one you have, for better or for worse.  Perhaps the best solution is to work out a plan with your spouse to resolve family relationship issues. If your in-laws will not travel to see your children, perhaps you should plan to save for a trip to see them a set number of times a year. If you would prefer for your spouse’s family to show more interest in your children, be sure to not only go out of your way to keep them abreast of your children’s activities and accomplishments, but also sit down and discuss with them directly how much family means to you.

It appears that, like my dad, my husband is doomed (or blessed) to be closer to my side of the family than to his, and time with his own family will be time spent with “those Texans.”  But as long as we deal with those tensions openly, everything should be just fine.  After all, we’re family and we love each other.

When Amy Lupold Bair is not arguing with her husband about her in-laws, she is blogging at Resourceful Mommy and tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/ResourcefulMom .