The In-Law Switch

[Longhorn]

Great article at the AARP site! I now have two new sons-in-law with two unmarried children left to go so I found the article especially interesting. My first MIL apparently hated me so much that she tried to get my future husband to transfer to another college on the other side of Texas. However, by the time I gave her four grandchildren and she was dying of cancer, she accepted me. My FIL remarried and I get along great with my step-MIL. Of course, I didn't steal her son away from her and we were adults when she came into our lives but it's nice that we enjoy each other's company so much.

I hope I'm a good MIL. I try not to interfere and I don't take sides if my daughters complain about their husbands. I'm lucky that both sets of the other parents live pretty far away so there's not a lot of holiday conflict.

Here's the article:

It really was a glorious day. The scent of new-mown grass blended with the perfume of white roses as the bride and groom spoke their vows in the shade of the old gazebo. As mother of the groom, I felt entitled to be a little weepy. My husband squeezed my hand, the music lifted, and the sun poured down like butterscotch…uh-oh, wait a minute. Like a hammer to the kneecaps, the thought hit me: I was now a mother-in-law. Mother. In. Law. Read: gorgon, dragon, harridan, witch, radioactive thermonuclear bitch from hell.

What a stunning concept. No more snarky mother-in-law jokes. No more rolling my eyes in the universal sign for “Yeah, that’s just what she’s like!” Struggling for Zen calm but breathing as if someone had just thrown a bag over my head, I looked at my beautiful new daughter-in-law. I wondered what she saw when she looked back at me. I wondered who we were to each other and who we might become. There was a time, years ago, when I was this girl. If there was a punch line anywhere in this scenario, I guessed I was it.

I probably wasn’t anybody’s idea of the ideal daughter-in-law, back in the day. My first mother-in-law—a cultured German refugee—was somewhat alarmed when I first arrived in her son’s life, just minutes out of high school. After the obligatory waitressing summer, I’d be off to college, with no idea of what I’d do once I got there. My mother, a secretary in a local insurance agency, kept five children and a husband clean and well fed; she introduced us to theater and vegetable gardens, and made sure we all knew how to boil water, scramble eggs, and keep our promises. But (since it was never her plan that I’d wed in my teens) she had not yet prepared me to be a wife, much less a daughter-in-law to a sophisticate who’d envisioned a glossy name-brand wedding and a commensurate dowry. Instead, they got me: a girl who flunked out after freshman year, got pregnant and eloped, and became pathetically eager to know which fork was which and what color wine went with what, long before I’d learned to make a bearable pot of coffee.

My groom was headstrong (not to put too fine a point on it), and I was naive, even stupid, about what was important to him. But as the mother of the first grandson, I was granted some stature, and more than a little slack. Slowly, my mother-in-law and I made our way to each other. By the second winter, we skied together once a week, calling down from the chairlift to the people we knew. One hot spring weekend we planted more than 300 bedding plants together, laughing and dirty and sunburned. She introduced me to soft Brie and hard Parmesan; I introduced her to waterproof mascara and held her hand when she had her ears pierced. She was dismayed that I didn’t iron the sheets; when I offered to let her do it, she declined. She insisted that it was a wife’s job to forgive all husbandly trespasses, even (or perhaps especially) infidelity. I disagreed.

(more)

http://www.aarpmagazine.org/family/the_in-law_switch.html