Our culture unfortunately stresses the stress of relations between the married children and their in-laws.
While I spent most of my youth searching for enduring love, and wanted a life partner more than I wanted much of anything else, I sincerely feared ever having a mother-in-law. I recalled this fear only a few weeks ago when my wife’s mother came to visit us from Europe.
As a child, the models I had for mothers-in-law were my grandmothers. They were displaced Lithuanian women, survivors of World War II: they made dumplings and blintzes, hauled wagonloads of groceries across town, and scolded their husbands for drinking too much and urinating on trees. They maintained gardens, grew vegetables and devised ways to murder neighborhood cats (cats ruined gardens fertilized with fish guts). While my grandmothers did not have careers, not real ones, they were smart as whips, used cunning when necessary, always saved their best faces for parish pastors, lightning breath for car salesmen, and envelopes of cash for town officials. With these women on your side, you were well-fed and defended from harm. You crossed them at great risk.
We returned to a clean house, the kids asleep, my wife’s mom sitting up on the sofa and listening to Bill Evans, dinner leftovers still warm in the oven.
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In the town where I grew up, bruising Cicero, Illinois, few women of this generation were any different. We grandsons mostly had them on our side—truth be told, they spoiled and fattened most of us. But our fathers and uncles generally crossed them. They just didn’t seem to have any way of satisfying the mothers-in-law, and often gave up trying rather early in the game.
This model is, of course, unhealthy and incomplete. Combined with images of mothers-in-law from popular culture—for some reason, I recall The Flintstones—mothers-in-law get a bad rap. On Mother’s Day, some of them deserve special mention.
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I must admit that my relationship to my mother-in-law is unorthodox. To start, we can barely have a conversation together. Her native language is Russian, and my Russian is embarrassingly bad, her English rudimentary at best. I live in Chicago while she lives in Poland; she talks to the kids on Skype every week, but I barely ever see her. I know some men have mothers-in-law who come over just any old time, live down the street or even in the attic. I don’t face such proximity, and my opinion would probably be different if I did.
However, my wife and I also have very little available social capital. My wife’s work situation has recently improved, but for years we simply could not afford childcare. I’m a community college professor and can adjust my schedule to take the kids in the evenings while my wife, a musician, plays gigs at night and rehearses. We manage but rarely have time to ourselves, and I had seen my wife play only one concert since our daughter was born in 2009.
This past April, a single night out to see my wife play a gig—and a fucking amazing gig at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art—gave our marriage a much-needed jolt. My mother-in-law took the kids willingly, happily, and spent the whole night with them while I enjoyed the concert, then mingled with brilliant musicians at a reception. Afterwards, my wife and I could have a conversation without kids pulling at our legs, without the end-of-day exhaustion that overtakes us so often, and we got to walk home together from the el stop on a cool early-spring night. We returned to a clean house, the kids asleep, my wife’s mom sitting up on the sofa and listening to Bill Evans, dinner leftovers still warm in the oven. She dropped no guilt trip, did not demand some special recognition and seemed sincerely happy that we had been out together.
My wife and her mother have their moments of grief. If I’m to write this note of praise, I should acknowledge those moments because they are difficult and painful. But this night out was a welcome gift. I’m sure all parents know exactly what I mean. It was a gift of intimacy, essential for marriage to remain healthy. This one was wonderful enough to be shocking: I had missed my wife’s playing more than I could allow myself to admit.
There are mother-in-laws all over the world who provide this kind of support. It’s nothing to ignore, and if some readers have it consistently I encourage them to be mindful, not to take it for granted. I want to thank my mother-in-law for that night out as I wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. By extension, the Marriage Section wishes all mother’s-in-law a very Happy Mother’s Day in 2013.
Photo by pupismyname
I thoroughly enjoyed this post, and agree that mothers-in-law – or in-laws in general – often get an undeserved bad rap. My in-laws were foreign, and I adored them. I could communicate well with my father-in-law, and somewhat less so with my mother-in-law. But I loved and respected both of them, and regretted that they weren’t closer.