Hi Swistle,
I know you sometimes post reader questions, and this came to mind while reading your post about Rob coming home from college and the dynamics between an older child and parents. I also know you had a hard time with your mother-in-law.
I commented that, as the mother of all boys, I have a huge fear—my biggest parenting fear, in fact—that my boys will all marry women who dislike me or don’t care about having a relationship with me, and I will end up not having a close or satisfying relationship with my adult sons (or grandkids, for that matter.). Right now, my boys are all still little enough that they worship me and I am the center of their world, and I know that all goes away and that’s natural, but I hate to think that someday these little boys will end up like my husband is with his mother: frequently annoyed and rather distant.
Let me explain: I have a very annoying mother-in-law. I won’t go into the many, many examples I could share (which are endlessly entertaining to my friends), but she is a strong mix of passive-aggressive and undermining. She also possesses some of my most disliked personality flaws, including being braggy and two-faced. She certainly doesn’t think I worship my husband enough, and that he is above and beyond what I could ever deserve. We are very different in pretty much every way.
As a result, I’m sure I have complained and griped about her to my husband more than my fair share, but he agrees with me on all points and now feels much closer to my family. (I am biased, but I do think my parents and siblings are pretty darn great.) He has actually told me that he feels closer to my siblings than his, that he respects my parents opinions more and prefers to get their advice on things instead, and so on. Which is great for me now, but I fear that karma is going to bite me and I’m going to end up living the rhyme, “A son is a son till he marries his wife, but a daughter’s a daughter for the rest of my life.” It certainly feels true to me now.
So, for debate—this is long, please feel free to cut out all the backstory—what makes for a bad or good mother-in-law? What can we moms do to avoid those strained relationships with our future in-laws? I am heartened to know that my mom had a wonderful relationship with my paternal grandma, and I know there are other cases like that. But—what makes for those good and bad relationships? To be fair, my MIL was not a bad mom—very affectionate and fawning and permissive and special snow-flakey, but not a bad mom. She loves her kids a lot. I feel certain that my MIL believes she is actually an *excellent* mother and mother-in-law, and would be absolutely baffled to hear anything to the contrary. Is being self-aware enough?? How do I know whether I am self-aware? Maybe I, too, am actually a super annoying person?!
Thanks!
I am RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. The discussion has come up often with various of my friends, as our children approach the era of bringing new people legally into our families. How can we avoid being Bad Mothers-in-Law, when surely the bad mothers-in-law we know did not SET OUT to be terrible, and yet they STILL ARE?
(A digression already, when we have hardly even gotten started: I am going to be talking primarily about mothers-in-law, because in our society the mother-in-law relationship is considered the fraught one, and the father-in-law relationship is not. An individual father-in-law can have serious faults, but we don’t talk about fathers-in-law as a group the way we talk about mothers-in-law. This could be yet another area where women are held to a different/higher standard—like when female politicians must be likeable and have pleasant voices and answer questions about how they’re taking care of their children, while male politicians needn’t do any of those things. Or it could be that women in general really do act differently in this role than men do, and/or that fathers-in-law are just as problematic but in ways our society doesn’t criticize/punish them for. It is worth noting that in my first marriage, my father-in-law was difficult and manipulative, and my mother-in-law was pleasant and friendly—and yet at the time, I blamed her for the issues. In my second marriage, my mother-in-law drove me up a wall but on the other hand my father-in-law had almost nothing to do with us or his grandchildren, except to call every couple of years and try to get us to make him feel better about how bad he felt about being so terrible, so I’d say he was actually much worse. Anyway. Back to the post. I had just finished asking how on earth we were going to avoid being bad mothers-in-law, when presumably no one SET OUT to be a bad mother-in-law and yet many of them WERE.)
I was particularly perplexed by the way my mother-in-law considered herself to be an EXCELLENT mother-in-law. She would tell me about her sister-in-law and what a dreadful time her daughters-in-law had with her, and how lucky I was. How LUCKY I was. Meanwhile I was spending huge portions of her visits DAYDREAMING ABOUT UNTRACEABLE POISONS. When she died unexpectedly (NOT FROM UNTRACEABLE POISON), I was SUFFUSED WITH HAPPINESS!! and I still think of it now from time to time, with happy feelings of relief and luckiness at having been spared. We do not want our sons- and daughters-in-law SUFFUSED WITH HAPPINESS and FEELING RELIEVED AND LUCKY when we die! How how how can we avoid this??
(Well, and it’s not as scary as what I’m working myself up to, here. In-laws are for the most part non-chosen family members, and so it’s normal for them to be, er, not what we’d choose. And yet many of us accept that and adjust to it and cope with it and stay polite and everything is basically fine, and everyone is doing their best to get along, and no one is swooning with delight but also no one is daydreaming about untraceable poisons. I had a particularly bad experience with my mother-in-law, but that’s not the usual. Some in-laws feel friendly toward each other! Some of them even love each other devotedly! Some prefer their in-laws to their own actual family members! But it’s understandable that we would worry about the less-favorable outcomes and hope to do what we can to prevent them.)
One problem is that the whole situation is EXTREMELY DEPENDENT on the personality combinations involved. That is, I am willing to conceive of a person who might have married Paul and found his mother delightful. His mother did not like me very much, and our personalities were not a good match; some of her most aggravating qualities might not have been brought out at all if she’d had a different sort of daughter-in-law, or might have been brought out but not perceived as aggravating, or might have been perceived as aggravating but then swiftly and decisively dealt with. There could be areas where neither of us were at fault: our personalities just didn’t work out well together.
But also, my mother-in-law really was an oblivious and difficult person. That is, I can write some of this off as personality conflicts, no one’s fault, etc., but she was the kind of person who, with a topic as minor as “how to cook taco meat,” thought of there as being one Right Way (her way) and a whole bunch of Stupid Ways—not DIFFERENT ways but STUPID ways. She would tell stories about other people (often they were pointed stories about how those people did something I happened to also do), and she’d roll her eyes and make scoffing sounds about any decisions that were different than hers, and she’d say “It was just so STUPID!,” and make closing remarks like “Well, but they didn’t ask me!” as if that made her a reasonable, accepting person resigned to her fate as Cassandra, always right but never consulted/believed.
My hope is that we are starting from a place where we already know not to do this. And that as we get older, we will remain aware that there are many different right ways to live a life, and that those ways suit different people, and that two people can live very differently indeed (even including the way they cook taco meat) and still both be living the Right Way for them. And that we will able to apply that point of view to our daughters- and sons-in-laws as broadly and lovingly and supportively as we would want our mothers- and fathers-in-law to apply it to us. And that we can try not to be actively difficult people. And that our children will not bring actively difficult people into our lives. This is a lot of hopes.
I share your worry about getting a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who actively badmouths me to my child and turns my child against me. Basically I am worried I will get the same thing in a daughter/son-in-law that I had in a mother-in-law: someone who thinks there is one Right way to do things and all the other ways (definitely including mine) are Stupid, and that this should be regularly and scoffingly pointed out to my child until he/she agrees and scorns me for it. I guess this means I am hoping I have children who grow up understanding that just because they prefer to do things a certain way doesn’t mean preferring to do things a different way is stupid/wrong/gross/bad. And that if my children DO understand that, they will not be as likely to link their lives to people who think otherwise. Though attraction is a marvel, and makes all kinds of combinations happen.
Another concern I have is that the very ways we consider ourselves delightfully Not Difficult could be THE VERY THINGS that drive our children and their partners up a wall. My mother-in-law considered herself SUCH an easy houseguest, because unlike her parents she didn’t expect us to give up our bed for her—but “giving the guest the best bed in the house” was not a concept I was familiar with in my extended family, so I failed to appreciate her graciousness in not demanding to sleep in my bed. (Also, she mentioned it every time she visited, which made it seem like maybe she DID want us to give up our bed.) And there was a whole interesting category of things where she would say proudly that she didn’t need to be entertained, she didn’t need special meals cooked—but then she did need to be entertained and she did need special meals cooked, it’s just that her idea of entertainment and special cooking were not the same as mine, so what she saw as low-maintenance (she thought everyone should be eating salt-free and low-fat, so it was not special that she needed those kinds of meals) I saw as high-maintenance, and I don’t know if there was any way around that. Or wait, actually I do know the way around that: I think the key may be to avoid bragging about how easy we are, and to avoid assuming we’re easy and delightful.
I worry too because sometimes I see “Can’t Win” talk going on with relationships like these: it’s easy to do it when we don’t like someone or find the relationship difficult (see also: Bitch Eating Crackers). Like, if a mother-in-law visits, she’s a burden and an intrusion; but if she doesn’t, she doesn’t care about her grandchildren and she’s wrong for expecting people to travel to her. If she sends gifts, she’s sending things no one wants, and/or spending either too much or too little, and/or buying things WE wanted to buy the children, and/or buying things we didn’t want the children to have, and so on; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t even care enough to send gifts to her own grandchildren / doesn’t even care enough to mark their special occasions. If she asks for updates/photos, she’s demanding and needy; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t care and isn’t involved. Can’t win. I tried to correct that with my attitude toward my own mother-in-law: if she did something I didn’t like, I’d think “Would I be any happier if she did something else instead, or would I find a way to criticize her no matter what?” This led me to give credit where credit was due: she visited often and was involved with her grandchildren, which was GOOD; she sent gifts and cards and letters, which was GOOD; she was interested in updates and photos, which was GOOD. I’m going to try to remember to apply this also to my future sons- and daughters-in-law, and avoid thinking of them in Can’t Win ways if we don’t happen to like each other very much.
Okay, do we have a rough plan here?
1. We can emphasize to our children (and model it in the way we speak of others) that there are different Right Ways to live for different people: that two people can live differently and yet both be living exactly the right way for their own lives.
2. We can try to remember this ourselves as we get older, and not fall into the trap of thinking that younger people need us to tell them how to live exactly like we did/do.
3. We can be aware of the odd dynamics inherent to the whole “building family out of people who didn’t used to be family” concept, and expect to need to do our share to make these relationships go smoothly, and not panic if the relationships aren’t all great ones. We can hope that our children will bring dear good nice people into our lives, but we can focus on hoping our children will find the people who are right for THEM, not right for US.
4. We can try to be Not Difficult, and to avoid the common pitfalls (being critical, being intrusive, giving too much unasked-for input, scoffing at new developments and saying “We didn’t do things like that in MY day and we all survived!”), but not assume that we are succeeding, and not brag that we are succeeding.
5. In situations where personalities are not a delightful fit, we can do our part to make sure we are not putting our sons- and daughters-in-law into Can’t Win situations where we manage to think of them poorly no matter what they do. We can hope they will do the same for us.
6. We can hope that our fretfulness and anxiety on this topic already puts us ahead of the people who plow into this assuming they’re the best mothers-in-law ever and that their daughters- and son-in-law can’t WAIT to hear wise instructions on how they should run their lives in every detail.
More things to add to the list? Some of you are mothers-in-law already, and I hope you will tell us everything you know, everything you’ve learned, everything you’re doing. Some of you may have active mother-in-law situations going on right now, situations that are giving you lots of ideas of things to do differently when it’s your turn, and I hope you will tell us all of those ideas.
