Coda

Read the post under this one first, or this won't make any sense.

After all this family feuding was done, the Remix was reeling. This was mostly my fault, I exacerbated the situation by a wanton misreading of her tone in some early e-mails, leading to the always disastrous "I-thought-we-were-joking-around-and-you-were-near-tears" effect. (E-mails should come with coded fonts for tone...you know, the text turns yellow automatically if you're scared, or blue if you're sad, or stays a harmless shade of teal when you're just chatting. This would be both helpful and aesthetically pleasing...the sarcastic purple being my personal favorite.)

Anyway, my mom essentially managed to nail down both the Remix and my own worst fears about the situation--that someone would feel slighted, no one would be happy with what they had, and the whole day would be an overly tense high wire act trying not to further hurt anyone's feelings. I think I defused that possibility, but the potential was slightly terrifying.

One good thing, though. Even at it's worst, while I was yelling at my mom (bold red letters, possibly in all caps or underlined, under my new color/tone system), I never made it about the Remix. Eons ago, the first time around, she was always in the middle. It was unfair, and an impossible position for her to navigate.

Oh yeah. Also may have mentioned that I love her in the e-mail to the parents. Not that it's a secret, obviously, or even a surprise, but certainly different. We've gone public, baby! Woo hoo!