This is the story of my role model where mother in laws are concerned. She is gone now but she lived to be 102 and we remained friends my entire life.
I don't know when I met her because she spent her summers at the same place my mother did. They took their little 3 and 4 year-olds, (my future husband and me), down to the beach and visited with each other while we played there.
Fast forward...long story, we married in 1947 and she became my mother in law. She was a kindergarten teacher and she had the patience of a saint. I am absolutely sure that many of her students were more skilled and more mature than I was at the time we became related through my marriage to her son.
I had firmly withstood every attempt my own mother made to teach me to cook and clean... and be responsible. I had no concept of money management and I didn't know anything about kids. As I look back all those years, I know I had to be every mother in law's nightmare.
She was a friend. We shopped together, decorated our homes together, and even joined the same social club together in the little mid-west town where we lived.
She was never bossy or disapproving. She taught by example, and as I have mentioned, with infinite patience. Where she got her patience, I have no idea... but it was never ending. And I learned. My only skill to start out with was that I was a nurse. I didn't work outside the home but I knew how to take care of my kids when they were sick. Chalk 1 up for me and a 1000 up for her.
I learned the way most of us do, intermittently and sporadically. You know... one step forward followed by three steps backwards. A lot of what I was expected to do didn't interest me... which didn't help the process much. Yet she didn't push me or hold me back. She honored my eventual progress calmly, as through it had been a given. Ha! What were the odds?
After eighteen years of marriage, I divorced her son. End of my relationship with her, right? Wrong! She and I stayed in touch and remained friends for another 40 years.
The moral of this story is that I knew what to do and what not to do when my sons married and I became the mother in law. I had daughter in laws that related to me like I did to her and I had daughter in laws that didn't. You have to have the raw material to work with and when you are labeled as "the enemy" even before you are introduced, it can all be downhill from there. However, I also have a daughter in law who divorced one of my sons and you know what we did? We decided to not get divorced! As a result, we have been inseparable for over 25 years and only death will part us.
I was willing to learn and my mother in law was willing to teach me. The bottom line, I think, was willingness... openness... forgiveness and our constant acknowledgment of our mutual humanness. Bless her heart!
