I suppose the question is more, isn't my sister being unreasonable?
My husband and I are married to each other's younger sibling. I know this sounds incestuous but I promise you it is not! In fact, we are not even particularly close since we don't live near each other and have very different interests and values. Due to this close family situation, my mother blackmailed me some years ago into making them the Godparents for our three children. We stupidly went along with it at the time for the sake of family unity but we weren't comfortable with it at all since they are barely even believers and we are weekly Mass-going Catholics. I respect that's their right, but personally, I didn't and don't think they are role models of faith and therefore suitable 'godparents'.
Fast forward a few years and they had a daughter of their own who they had baptised and we were her godparents. We have tried wherever possible to send religious gifts to her and talk a little about the meaning of Easter and Christmas but not in any great detail. They do not let her come and stay with us so she has never been to church. We are not religious fundamentalists by any stretch of the imagination but we are sad that she knows nothing of the faith they themselves decided to initiate her into.
Fast forward another few years and now they have a second daughter. It was her baptism day last Sunday, 19 March. We were getting ready in the morning to drive the two and a half hours down to their local church, when my sister phoned the house and said she was just letting us know that the older girl (4) had just that morning come down with chicken pox. Our two older children have already had it but our youngest hasn't yet. We have a family holiday booked in London two weeks after the Christening, which we didn't want to jeopardise, so it was then assumed that we would need to leave our youngest son at home with a friend.
They went on to say that they intended to take their elder daughter to the church for the baptism, and then on to a restaurant for a celebratory lunch. They made no apology about this and were absolutely defiant when we stated that there was no way they should be taking a child out in public on day one of chicken pox. We attempted to compromise by saying that if one of the grandparents stayed with the poorly child during the ceremony, we could then go and have lunch elsewhere and they could have a little party at their house with all the grandparents but minus us since we didn't want our youngest son to catch chicken pox.
They made it clear that there was going to be no compromise whatsoever and that there was no way they would be excluding their elder daughter from the church or the restaurant. We said then they would have to postpone as none of us would be able to come down if they were insisting on taking out a child on day one of chicken pox, right when it is at it's most contagious.
They then proceeded to shout a load of abuse down the phone at us and then carried on with their day exactly as they had planned it, taking both daughters out in public. Both sets of our parents seem to have decided that this was acceptable behaviour, in fact my mother rang trying to bully me into coming down and my Dad offered to look after our youngest during the church ceremony. I refused this as I said the child to be excluded had to be the ill one, not my healthy one!
My mother has now said to me that she completely thinks they did the right thing. She believes that I would not have postponed my child's baptism, which is correct, but I would have excluded the one who was ill from the church and had a party at our house for any forewarned person who wanted to come. My mother has said she believes that I should apologise to them for letting them down in that we were not there as godparents on the day. I don't know who was!
Anyway, I'm deeply upset by this. I love my family but I do not like them at all and I believe they have a real superiority complex when it comes to how they behave and how they expect to be treated. When my children had chicken pox, I did not take them out of the house, even to the supermarket until the spots had all scabbed over, I think this was about day 5 and I remember being up the wall stuck at home! I stand by what I said and I felt that I had to stick up for what I believe to be right, but I cannot believe the reaction of our parents to this selfishness. I sincerely hope that any unsuspecting family or perhaps elderly person, maybe chemotherapy patient, was not in that restaurant on Sunday. I will not be apologising for the stance I have taken, AIBU???