When worlds [and families] collide - an impulsive rant

Admittedly the past few weeks have been a bit of a rough patch for lolladad and me for various reasons. Today, we managed to record a podcast in the morning, make important decisions for our business, and shortly after get into a fight that ended in one of us storming off upset. The root cause of that fight...family and not seeing eye-to-eye.

I don't know about all of you, but my husband and I are incredibly close to our families, but we may need a break of some sort - for the sake of us. Don't get me wrong, I love our families deeply and I feel incredibly grateful for them, but these days, I feel like our families and the different value systems are actually causing problems in my marriage that otherwise would not have even been an issue. I guess the optimistic side of me could spin all the BS as challenging us to have difficult conversations and getting at the core of who we are, but the pessimistic, selfish side of me thinks if we were simply more distant, we wouldn't be dealing with any of this.

We come from seemingly similar yet fundamentally different families. For ten years, we've been able to skate by and cordially manage all the intensely complicated relationships and ways in which our families influence our everyday, but I am starting to wonder how much our families are affecting our happiness. Help~ how do I carefully extract all the amazing characteristics from each of our families and family members and pass that onto our daughters without imploding first?