XXVII
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW
Undoubtedly there is no other thing over which so many tears are shed and which is such a potent source of discord and misery as in-laws. Innumerable young women have the happiness of their youth wrecked by their quarrels with their mothers-in-law. Innumerable old women have their last days made bitter to them by the knowledge that they are unwelcome guests in their sons’ houses and that their daughters-in-law hate them. Innumerable men are made miserable by being torn between the two women they love, who fight over them like dogs over a bone. Discussing this subject the other day, a woman who is a mother-in-law said:
“Like everything else, the mother-in-law question is a fifty-fifty proposition, and when they don’t get along together both are to blame. Certainly it isn’t an easy thing for a woman who has run her own house and been at the head of everything to take a back seat in her daughter-in-law’s home. And it isn’t easy to forget that your children are your children and to keep hands off in their affairs and treat them with the formality you would strangers.
“On the other hand, most daughters-in-law meet their mothers-in-law with a chip on their shoulders and are always hunting for trouble. They seem to feel that when a man marries he should forget the mother who bore him and wipe out the memory of all the years of close association that there has been between them. They are even jealous of the slightest attention and consideration that their husbands show their mothers.
“They seem to forget that if it wasn’t for these much-resented mothers-in-law they wouldn’t have any husbands at all, and that the better husbands they have the more they owe to their mothers-in-law.
“For if a man is tender, and kind, and generous, and considerate to his wife, it is because his mother has taught him to be chivalrous to women. She has trained him to be a good husband just as she has trained him to be a good citizen, and he honors and respects his wife because he so greatly honors and respects his mother.
“You never saw a bad son who was a good husband. You never hear of a man who abused and cursed his mother, and regarded her as only a slave to wait upon him, who didn’t treat his wife the same way. And so we mothers who raise up clean, straight sons, who enter into marriage with high ideals and a determination to cherish their wives and make them happy, have done the girls who get them such a service as they could not repay if they were down on their knees before us the balance of their days.
“But if any daughter-in-law has ever lifted her voice in thanks to her mother-in-law for teaching her son to be unselfish, or to be generous with money, or to pay her the little attentions that women love, I have never heard of it.
“And there is another queer thing about daughters-in-law. They seem to think that marriage should obliterate a man’s past and break all the ties of his life.
“He and his mother may have been the closest of companions; he may have asked her advice on every subject and talked over all of his plans with her, but woe be unto all concerned if he tries that after he takes a wife.
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the wife grows green-eyed and considers it rank treachery to her, and for the sake of peace mother and son have to forego the little talks that were such a joy to them both or else do this stealthily and hold a stolen rendezvous.
“Yet it does look as if any woman who wasn’t a moron would have sense enough to see that any man who could forget his mother and all he owed to her would be such a disloyal creature that he would forget his wife when some younger and fairer woman came along.
“Of course, the chief charge that our daughters-in-law have against us is that we are always meddling in their affairs. Perhaps we do, but aren’t our children’s affairs our affairs too? Hasn’t the mother who has raised her son to manhood and who has made him strong and capable of earning a fine salary a right to say something when she sees his hard-earned money being wasted, his home neglected and his health ruined by bad cooking?
“If a mother saw her own daughter treating her husband that way, she would rebuke her and show her where she was making a fatal mistake, and the daughter would not resent it. Why can’t a daughter-in-law take the same advice and profit by it, instead of flying at the throat of the mother-in-law and considering herself a martyr to mother-in-lawism?
“Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. I know daughters-in-law who are real daughters to their husbands’ mothers. I even know daughters-in-law who have borne with angelic patience cranky women who could not even get along with their own daughters. And I know mothers-in-law whose presence is like a benediction in a house and others who are firebrands wherever they go. So perhaps there is no way to settle the question so long as we are all human and not female saints. But God pity the mother who is obliged to live with her children, no matter how kind they may be! She is always the fifth wheel, and feels it. Perhaps those savages who kill off all the old people haven’t such a bad plan of disposing of the question, after all.”