There’s a moment in the horror movie The Strangers when Liv Tyler’s character asks one of the masked home invaders why they were torturing her and her family. The masked invader (known as Dollface) says “Because you were home”.

In my case the answer is “Because you are husband”.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, our girls’ piano teacher and her colleagues schedule a large performance in the middle of December. It falls after the girls’ final exams but before the end of school. This is great for them, but not so great for me as I’m in the middle of marking exams and I lose most of a Sunday by going to see our girls perform for a few minutes.

The last couple years this has been complicated by the arrival of the strangers, er, the in-laws who arrive to see the performance. Last year they stayed at our small apartment and I told She Who Must Be Obeyed to never, ever do that again during exams. This is partly because I’m torn between doing my job and playing gracious host.

Gracious host, however, doesn’t pay that well so I tend to opt for doing my job whilst everyone else has a good time. I then get called out for being rude. My reaction usually is, “I know, I know. Now let me finish marking so I can stop being rude.”

Now, I know you’re thinking “Why don’t you just plan for this and get your marking done early?” First, we don’t control the schedule of the exams so we may not have much time to do our marking before pass back classes. Second, I only found out the in-laws were in-bound last Monday in an “Oh, by the way, did I tell you XYZ?” (I’ve been getting that a lot lately from other sources, too–more on that in another post.)

Granted, they aren’t staying the night, but they did spend the afternoon here and we had a big dinner out. Once again, I got to play the rude host. I did get a lot of marking done, though.