Mother-in-law
There’s no record of what Dorothy Parker’s two mothers-in-law thought of her but, well, we can just imagine… Historically, it’s one of humanity’s trickiest relationships, prone to misinterpretation, hurt, and more than a little jealousy. In this issue, we cover the whole spectrum, from loveable matriarch to incorrigible bitch.
A True Pearl
Word Count 1163
My husband and I had been dating for more than a year before I was finally introduced to his mother, Pearl. He’d been delaying our meeting the way he’d delay a tooth extraction, and for good reason. When Phil finally asked Pearl if I could come for Thanksgiving dinner, she said yes — as long as I brought along a date.
I shouldn't have been surprised by Pearl’s hostile sarcasm. I had already been warned, not only by my future husband Phil, but also by friends he had grown up with. I was told that Pearl had a scowl permanently pressed into her face from disapproving of everything in her orbit. Even when she smiled, she scowled. They called her the Don Rickles of Westchester, owing to her particular brand of insult humor -- except that her humor didn’t always land, particularly when her son was its target. His friends suggested we break up to avoid the encounter.
What Should I Have Called You?
Word Count 1503
“You’re divorced,” my boyfriend’s mother pronounced, her face a mask of tragic disappointment.
We’d just sat down at her kitchen table, and this was her opening gambit. We’d met an hour earlier, me bright-eyed and eager to impress. This woman would become my mother-in-law the following year.
“What? No, no, I’m not divorced,” I said, startled. The kitchen was cramped, with one small window over the sink, barely letting in a desultory winter light. My boyfriend, Michael, had decamped to another room to watch football with his father. His dad was fully settled into his Barcalounger, beer in a koozie by the footrest.
The Gifts that Keep on Coming
Word Count 1347
It arrived a week before Christmas. An ordinary brown box addressed to my husband.
“Another one from my mom,” he held it like it might contain a bomb or a live animal, gently setting it on the counter. I watched him cut through the thick clear tape and pull out a packing slip.
This should be good, I thought. She once gave me chocolate body paint for Mother’s Day, several years before I had children. A breast cancer survivor, she passed around her prosthetic boob at my wedding shower. Root beer floats and popcorn were common breakfast options at grandma’s house.
Greek to Me
Word Count 1590
Bad timing made me the default chauffeur for the airport run. My husband and his brother had to work the day after New Year’s so I was the designated driver for my glaucoma-ridden Greek father-in-law, picking up his mail-order bride.
They had met only once in person, introduced through his brother in Athens. A business arrangement was brokered: she would take her first-ever plane ride, her first-ever escalator ride, live in Boston with my father-in-law as his wife, and in return she would get a more comfortable though not luxurious lifestyle and eventually an apartment back in Athens.
The Buttercup Room
Word Count 1303
My husband Blair’s parents were getting ready to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, so I decided to make them a photo album. I secretly contacted family members and asked them if they would send favorite pictures and stories. As I put together the book, reading about how they had been loving to so many—a model of how to love a long time, a model of coolness, even, to nephews and nieces who wanted to grow up to be like them, I felt a hole in me growing larger. I had so wanted to have a good relationship with them, but I always felt outside of their golden circle.
Something happened to the way my own brain worked after the deaths of my own parents when I was twenty-four.
I’ve Gotten My Money’s Worth
Word Count 1073
There’s no instruction manual to guide a person into becoming a mother-in-law. I found myself in this predicament when our son became engaged. I can’t say my own experience of being a daughter in law has been much of service.
My notions about mothers-in-law were largely shaped by a television show that ran for two seasons in the late 1960’s called “The Mothers-in Law” starring the comediennes, Kaye Ballard and Eve Arden. In 1968, when the show launched, I was fourteen and some of my already sexually curious friends were dreaming of being married. At least one of them got knocked up only a year later and had a shotgun wedding where they did live in her family home in the basement.
Brother’s Keeper
Word Count 1790
The call comes from a hoarse and panicky Eunice. Gary sort of died, then didn’t, then maybe did. After fifteen minutes of CPR, paramedics got Gary’s heart pumping because sometimes DNR rules do not apply when you are trained to keep people alive. Even in Assisted Care. Doctors, after clinical tests on the Brain-Dead scale, got no gag reflex, no blip of thinking, no reflexes. Suddenly, my husband and his one-hundred-year-old mother needed to make a decision. About a brother, about a son.
Why did the mother-in-law bring a notepad to the family dinner?
To take notes on all the ways she can criticize.
With this Ring
Word Count 2034
Art and I had been waiting more than half an hour in Leo Ping’s, the popular, and maybe only, Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor in the early 1970s, when his mother finally showed up. After sitting down, she handed Art piles of newspaper clippings and letters, and then reached into her near-empty pocketbook, pulled out a small, white box, and handed it to me.
Inside, a ring rested on cotton, like a baby bird in a nest. The band was gold-toned. Two tiny diamonds were placed in between two pearls that sat up like mouse ears. One pearl was white, the other a misshapen, cloudy gray.
“Put it on,” she plucked it from the box.
I slipped the ring on my right ring finger. It was too large, and the pearls rolled into my palm. I turned it upright and anchored my fingers together to keep it in place.
Rabbi for a Day
Word Count 1190
The call wakes us at 6:30 AM. Caryl, my mother-in-law, has died in her sleep at age 102.5, which sounds more like a thermometer reading than a physical age. I’ve known her for five decades, but all she ever shared about her post-mortem preferences were cremation and burial in her in her family’s Queens plot.
During her final three years in a Florida nursing home, my husband Steve and I FaceTimed from a computer in Manhattan twice a week. Sometimes she slumped down and all we could see was her nose and forehead. As soon as her first-born son’s face illuminated her screen, she always began with a surprised greeting, as if seeing him for the first time: “Steve! You look just like me! Same face! But…I’m older.”
Comfort and Joy
Word Count 1350
“It must have been the color scheme that sold you,” my mother in law said, peering over her glasses at the vast expanse of lime-green carpet that clashed wildly with the lurid, dark red wallpaper. Glancing at the Christmas tree, she frowned. My stomach muscles clenched. My husband Howard had suggested we not have a tree, but I wanted the house to look festive for my in-laws’ first visit, so we decorated a balsam fir piecemeal during our newborn son Elliott’s naps.
“Your room is back here,” Howard said.He picked up their luggage and led them down the short hallway.
“Well, this is certainly not our room,” Helen turned, muttering as she looked around the modest space.
The Better Mother
Word Count 1120
One of the most memorable moments from my wedding happened when my mother-in-law wrapped me in a hug and whispered into my ear, “Now you have two mothers.” It took me years to recognize the significance of her words.
My relationship with my own mother was complicated. Before she passed away last year, she often told me that I was a “mistake,” and that the only reason she went through with the pregnancy was because my father begged her. She already had two kids. “Nobody wants three,” she told me, virtually every time she visited.