Celebrate your mother-in-law this Mother’s Day - AL.com

Happy Mother’s Day to mothers-in-law. They deserve a break, but they don’t often get one. They are mocked. They are scorned. There is even a funny but mean collective noun for them: a consternation of mothers-in-law.

Stand-up comics start their set with “Let me tell you about my mother-in-law.” What follows is rarely complimentary.

Still, a few of the rude jokes have a grain of truth buried in them.

One-mother-in-law I knew rearranged her son’s bureau drawers on each visit because her daughter-in-law didn’t do it right, as in the way she’d done it when her son was growing up. She also moved the pots and pans in their kitchen cabinets to fit a logical pattern, not a harum-scarum jumble, which was what she called the kitchen arrangement.

When she left after a week or so, they called her the “That’s not the way I did it” visitor and told jokes about her overbearing personality. It felt kind of mean because it was.

And then they had a child and the mother-in-law became a grandmother and her desire to control everything melted into a desire to spend time with the first child and then the next one that came after that. She wrote letters to both of them the day they were born, though she couldn’t see them for another month as they lived far away.

She didn’t understand modern child-rearing methods, like carrying a baby around in a sack on your chest or nursing instead of bottle-feeding, but she got used to it and gave up control on her brief visits. She was too busy buying frilly dresses for the child who had made her a grandmother and too busy rocking the baby named after her late husband. She forgot to be a bossy mother-in-law and became a loving grandmother.

That mother-in-law was my mother-in-law, and we loved each other though we were different in background and temperament. She’d grown up in Depression-era Mississippi on a farm. She vowed never again to gather eggs out of a hen house or dig vegetables out of the farm’s hard soil.

She didn’t want to swap shoes with her sisters or share their small bedroom in the farmhouse. As soon as she was old enough, she ran off to the big city of Jackson, worked in a bakery, and met the man who’d become her husband and the father of her only child. After he came back from the war, she arranged his sock drawer and kept her kitchen clean. They raised a child and eventually they grew old together.

I grew up in towns and small cities and thought eggs just came in a carton. I went to college before marrying that boy they raised together. A professional cook, he scoffed at her 1950s ways of cooking out of cans and boxes. She made fun of his recipes that were “scratch everything,” and asked me to take her out for dinner when Martha Stewart, as she called him, was out of town or working late. A wonderful cook in her own right, she was willing to take short cuts that he wasn’t.

Like all older people, she missed the way things used to be. On shopping trips to the mall, she wondered where all the sales clerks were, the ones who knew her size and which colors looked good on her. She wondered when people started wearing pajamas in public and didn’t even know what a girdle was.

The best way to appreciate a mother-in-law is to become one. When I did, I had no desire to rearrange anybody’s sock drawer but I may have expressed my opinion now and again about shoes left harum-scarum around the house.

When my mother-in-law died, her walk-in closet held more than fifty pairs of shoes. There were some flats, but they were mostly heels and high-heeled boots. They weren’t my size and I never wear heels. so I donated them to a charity she liked. Her path was a hard one to follow. I could never walk a mile in her shoes.

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source: https://www.al.com/life/2022/05/celebrate-your-mother-in-law-this-mothers-day.html

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