MIL from hell.

 My coworker had two married sons and just seems like she must be the mother in law from hell.  She calls both her daughter in laws whores, treats her biological grandchildren A LOT better than her son’s stepkids, and is actually trying to set one of her sons up with someone else. She must be going through something, because she’s also become sort of evil at work. I was venting to my mom about it, because it can often be triggering to hear a lot of these conversations. We carpool long distances very often, and I just- need to always remember my earbuds. 

My mom started talking about what a mother in law from hell my paternal grandmother was. I asked right away, “But did she ever try to set my father up with someone else?”  My mom paused. She said, “Well no, I’ll give her that.”  

My paternal grandmother died when I was 15. I have two first cousins on that side that are younger than me, and I distinctly remember her telling the three of us not to name any of our children after her. She was superstitious and thought that if anyone was named after her, then she’d also inherit her bad luck. She literally told me and my two younger cousins, “I will haunt you.  I will haunt the hell out of you if you name your kids after me.”  So what did one of those cousins end up doing? Name his daughter after her. I asked him recently, “… Don’t you remember that conversation?”  He said he didn’t. He wouldn’t believe in haunting anyway, even if he did remember it. 

I also thought of the fact that my paternal grandmother had a lot of similarities with my daughter. My grandmother grew up speaking both English and Greek fluently, which made her truly bilingual. It’s not like she had a “first language” and a “second language.”  She was born into a household that spoke both equally, but she also obviously had some undiagnosed learning disabilities.  She would get unnecessarily irate if something wasn’t spelled how it was pronounced, and INSISTED on spelling things exactly how they sounded. 

When my daughter was learning to read and write, she was exactly the same way. I remember her learning about the letter K being silent. She argued, “That’s dumb, why even have a K if you aren’t going to say the K sound?”  I told her I didn’t know, that’s just the way it was. I told her, “it’s just for writing. When you speak the word, there’s no K. When you write it, there is.”  I started panicking a little because it was exactly how my grandmother would argue about the same issue, and I thought, is my daughter going to go around the rest of her life now spelling knife “nife”?  

My mom agreed that my daughter was the same way as my grandmother in this department. But then she added that at least when we would explain English language oddities to her, she would just accept it and let it go. My grandmother spent her whole life insisting on things that were just wrong, and it often made her look stupid. I mean, my daughter wouldn’t always instantly let it go. But she doesn’t remember any of these conversations.  

I hope that someday if I ever get a son in law, I’m not like that at all. I hope he’ll be like the son I never had. And if he comes with kids, I’ll be an instant grandmother, even if my own daughter ends up giving birth. They’ll all be treated the same way. I’m not going to brag about it either. Some people do- you ask them how many grandkids they have and they’ll say a number but then they say how many are their kids’ stepkids “but I count them anyway” and when people say it like that, it gives “I want pats on the back vibes”. If my daughter ever has any combo of step, adopted, foster, bio etc kids and someone asks how many grandkids I have, I’m just giving the number and that is it. Because that’s all it will be in my mind. And I’m never definitely ever going to try and fix her up with other guys if she’s married. Good lord.