Sometimes, when I ask him for the 400th time to please get rid of the suits that no longer fit, I have the urge to outsource the matter to his father. Surely another man could explain that an ill-fitting jacket that’s been sitting in his closet for three years should no longer be considered an active member of the wardrobe. Then I remember: my husband’s parents are no longer with us.
His father passed away before we started dating, so I never met him. His mother died 40 days before our wedding, after years of being wheelchair-bound following a stroke. I technically met her, although she could no longer speak.
Her eyes suggested that she understood I was the girlfriend of her youngest—and evidently most prized—of eight children. But I never really knew her: her likes, dislikes, annoying habits or, well, her love. This is all to say: I understand that I do not entirely understand.
I have never had a mother-in-law question how I feed my children, arrive too early, stay too late or offer an opinion so intrusive that it requires an emergency debrief with my husband. I have been spared the aggravation of having in-laws, but only because I have also been denied, at the fault of no one, the experience of having them at all. And yet, that absence has made me increasingly impatient with the endless stream of social media posts devoted to exposing supposedly unbearable in-laws.
The grievances arrive as videos, confessionals and screenshots of text exchanges so exquisitely unhinged that I suspect at least some were written specifically to incite comments and engagement. Let’s be clear: I’m not jealous, one way or the other. I’m annoyed by the suggestion that every unsolicited opinion constitutes a boundary violation, that every grandmother who calls a child “my baby” is staking a territorial claim and that every mother-in-law who buys the wrong pajamas or asks too many questions about preschool must be confronted and perhaps blocked.
Some in-laws are genuinely destructive. They manipulate, humiliate and interfere in marriages in ways that are neither benign nor amusing. Nobody is obligated to tolerate cruelty in the name of family harmony.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
