Conversations Which in Journal

leave me unsatisfied.
DH and I talked about our experience of his family at the 30-or-so people gathering yesterday. It went something like this.
Me: “I noticed that I have a lot of anxiety around W playing with the other kids. Not because the other kids are bad, but because I’m afraid that their parents have committed to such authoritarian control that they can’t help but act out on younger, helpless children. I noticed that while W (2 years old) was sitting on the floor, A (7 years old) kept kicking him in a not-hurtful, but very annoying way. I looked right at her and asked her to please stop doing that. She did stop, but she then picked up a baby doll and held it over W’s head. “She’s pooping!” she said, gesturing in a manner that indicated the doll pooping on W’s head.” I paused to see DH’s reaction or response.
Initially he seemed defensive,
DH: “That seems uncalled for. She’s being punitive towards a baby who can’t fight back or have any choice about how to play. I think she gets that from the older boys- they’re pretty aggressive.”
Me: “I’m not so sure that’s it. She did this right next to me and staring right at me. She was looking for some kind of offense from me, I think. She also tends to check for adults whenever a baby comes into her vicinity. I think that A is just acting out the hateful and punitive treatment that she receives from her parents.”
DH: “Oh, yeah, it’s definitely the parenting.”

A few minutes later,
DH: “Grandma was wondering if W ever gets to play with other kids his age probably because all of his other cousins play together regularly and she hears about it a lot from the cousins.”
Me: “yeah, well, I guess we would play with them except they all in (far away town) and it’d be an all-day thing just to get over there.”
DH: “Right. If they were closer it wouldn’t be a big deal.”

If it’s not obvious from the context and the convo, the same parents that I expressed deep reservations about are the same ones I expressed I would not have a problem visiting and interacting with regularly, but didn’t due to time and distance constraints.
Now, I sort of felt in the back of my mind that this wasn’t true as I said it, but upon reflection it of course isn’t true, and is a remnant of the self-erasure that I engage in while around such people. I have to erase my commitment to principle, to the calling out of child abuse, to the recognition of the insane way regular parents treat their kids every single day without a single thought about it. I had to erase that huge, enormous, fundamental part of myself in order to merely exist around these people. In order to even show up at grandma’s, I have to admit that I’m doing it in order to preserve the comfortable status-quo of child abusers.
But mostly for DH.
And DH didn’t catch the fairly quick 180 in my narrative. Of course not. He wants to preserve the illusion that completely opposite values can exist side by side and in complete harmony.