I’ve Gotten My Money’s Worth

Eve Marx

The author’s mother-in-law

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. On the show, Eve and Kaye, who played characters named Eve and Kaye, are next door neighbors who don’t like each other. Their barely legal children fall in love and elope. The newlyweds, who are admittedly very wet behind the ears, live in Eve’s garage which has been converted into a studio apartment. What the kids did during the day was unclear, but their mothers were there to meddle. At fourteen I decided that’s what mothers in law did to keep themselves busy. They meddled. 

I married late myself and didn’t acquire a mother-in-law of my own until I was in my 30’s. And then I got two of them because my husband’s parents divorced and his father remarried. I entered the family from a distinct disadvantage as my husband was briefly married before and his mother, Marge, more often called Margie, and Ruth, his step-mother, adored the first wife and were upset that my husband left her. For me. In their eyes, I was a home-wrecker. 

It turned out I saw quite a bit of my husband’s mother because she lived close by. Ruth, my husband’s stepmother, lived far away. By then I’d become chummy with my husband’s first wife, F., who also lived close by and was in the habit of coming to our place to drink the very good champagne she brought while I cooked dinner. My husband would go to bed while she and I stayed up late engaging in dishy marathons discussing the good- looking liars she was dating and the awfulness of her best friend’s husband who kept coming on to her. She warned me about letting Marge come over too often; she said when she and my husband were married Marge invited herself over every weekend to hang out. Like from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. That couldn’t have been great for your marriage, I said. It wasn’t, F. said. Don’t repeat my mistake. 

When I produced a baby, I imagined Margie would be excited to be a grandmother. She did like the sound of it. The actual baby was a mystery to her and she claimed to not know how to change a diaper or do anything one does with newborns. She said when her sons were infants, she had a lot of hired help. Things improved when the child grew old enough to play card games and she tried to teach him how to whistle, one of her superpowers being whistling, and later, much later, how to make her famous chocolate roll, a special kind of cake my husband and his cousins on his mother’s side to this day all rave about. 

I could tell you a lot of things about Margie, most of them exasperating. I remember the time she insisted on making her signature fried matzo balls on my stove and splattered hot cooking oil all over my newly hung wallpaper. She had a knack for stepping in dog shit and tracking it into my house. She insisted on calling me “Kid” or “Kiddo” which felt rude. One time when I asked her to babysit overnight her grandson all she cared about was did I have enough ice for her Canadian Club on the rocks. When she had enough of something, including my company, her default remark was to say, “I’ve gotten my money’s worth.” 

The most annoying thing she did was browbeat me into making a big deal out of the Jewish holidays, especially Passover, where even as a non-observing Reform Jew I was expected to make roast beef; she didn’t care for brisket as it was “too Conservative.”  Her battered and charoset stained haggadahs had to be set out on the table just so even if the only part of the ceremony we participated in was the singing of Dayenu. Thirteen years into my marriage, my mother-in-law suddenly relocated to California to live with her boyfriend who was Jewish but called himself a practicing atheist.  I called her on the phone to ask what she was doing to mark the day and she nonchalantly said, “Oh, nothing. Sam (her boyfriend, who coincidentally shared the same name as her grandson) doesn’t care for it.” I held the phone against my ear and took some deep breaths. 

“And yet for years you made me do all that work to remind us that we’re Jewish,” I said, seething. The Passover meal, in case you’re not aware, is just as labor intensive as Thanksgiving. Or Easter. 

She didn’t care. 

One of the things that bound Margie and me together was our shared love of sneaking a cig. I also bummed smokes off my other mother-in-law, Ruth, when I saw her in Michigan. Margie and I had both officially quit smoking but there was always a pack in her bag. The other thing was a family ring she gave her son to give F. ,his first wife, when they became engaged. F. declined to return the ring when the marriage broke up and Marge continually hounded me to get the ring back. She was still talking about it from her hospice bed. Get that ring back, she croaked into the phone, dying of pancreatic cancer. 

As I am writing this, it’s the anniversary of Margie’s death. I only know this because Facebook reminded me. She did not have a great death. But like Eve Arden on the show The Mothers In Law, she never lost her ability to wisecrack. In her final days when she spent all her time with her eyes closed and was largely uncommunicative, she said to my husband who was sitting by her side, “Am I dead yet?” 

Forever in our hearts, Margie. Thank you for not haunting us. 

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.