in-law issues

The Mother-In-Law


She lives.

I know this for a fact because a) I check the obituaries near daily and she hasn’t turned up and b) Dee received a birthday card from her in the mail today.

My late husband’s mother surfaces less than a half-dozen times a year due to the fact that Hallmark insists on making cards available for public consumption. Despite my gentle suggestion that she actually write something in the cards, the woman just signs her name and as the cards are devoid of currency, Dee opens, looks and puts them aside without comment.

My daughter refers to her late father’s mother as “Daddy Will’s mom” not Grandma or Oma or Nana. They don’t have that kind of relationship.

In fact, they have no relationship. Something I am not responsible for because I did try to include her early on, but she made it clear that her preference was that Will and I drop Dee off, go off and have dinner or something and then pick the baby up after. She wasn’t the least interested in either of us and found our annoying insistence about being present during visits a turn-off where the “grandmother” experience was concerned.

Since we didn’t allow her unsupervised visits, she decided not to have a relationship with Dee and discovered that being a marginalized grandparent had its own perks. People were outraged on her behalf. Offered her sympathy. Willingly bought into her fantasy about how I was the root of all evil.

Will’s illness, long decline and eventual death did nothing to improve relations between us, and likely fueled my impression that she was unbalanced and that Dee needed to be sheltered from her influence.

Fast forward, I remarried and emigrated to Canada with my daughter.

I did not tell my in-laws. Anything.

They didn’t know about Rob, the whole getting married thing and I definitely didn’t leave a forwarding address.

In my more perverse moments, it amused me to wonder just how long it would take for any of them to realize I’d sold my house and decamped the area.

It was Rob who prevailed upon me to send them word. We’d been married a couple of months and I sent a letter to Will’s uncle, telling him about our move and marriage. I enclosed a letter for him to give to MIL because I didn’t have her address. Or her phone number.

No, really, I didn’t.

She’d moved a few months before Will died. Sold the house her late husband had built for them and downsized to a trailer. I found out about it by accident. She was in the hospital recovering from a hip break and told her family not to tell me.

After I found out, she’d instructed them not to give me her new address or phone number. I was to contact her via her best friend and her best friend’s mother should I need to get information to her.

This was where our relationship stood.

The hospice months did nothing to improve relations though it did occur to her and her family and friends as the end inched closer that I was likely to cut off all contact after Will was gone. Sugar was applied liberally in the last few days.

But now it’s late August of 2007 and the in-laws are a bit taken aback by the fact that I remarried (so quickly) and left the country without them noticing or telling them.

Digression over. Birthday cards.

They arrive sometime in mid to late August. Dee’s birthday is in July. Early on MIL declared bankruptcy to get herself out of sending Dee a couple of dollars and Dee, being a mercenary, has little use for birthday greetings that bear no cash.

Yesterday the card arrived. Inside it was a small white envelope. No name. This is how she sends me messages. So I knew it was for me, but it’s Dee’s birthday card and she -rightly – assumes it is for her.

A ten-dollar bill tumbles out.

Dee is pleased though not pleased enough to refer to MIL as her “grandmother” when she goes to tell Rob about the money. My mother is her grandmother as far as she is concerned. She has no room for anyone else.

Along with the money was a single sheet of paper that read “for pictures”.

She has tried to send me cash to cover the expense of printing photos and mailing them to her. I send photos about twice a year but I am haphazard about it because I mainly share photos with family and friends on Facebook anymore.

“You could send her a note inviting her to be your Facebook friend,” Rob suggested.*

Which in all honestly would be an easier way to do this because printing pictures and sending them through the post is time and money consuming, but keeping ahead of Facebook’s complete disregard for my right to limit access to my information would be close to impossible. So as there is no way to “friend” the MIL without granting her access to my life at will, Facebook is out.

I also don’t think she has a computer anymore. She did once. Got it during her aborted attempt to go back to college. For the most part, she reveled in her poor widow me identity but every once in a while, she made a grab for normal life. But the computer would be older than Dee, if it still existed.

So sometime this month pictures need to be culled from various cameras and computers and sent off to Costco. Rob usually does that. I sort and mail. I was going to do this soon anyway because the new school year presents a formal photo op and now that Dee is eight, we simply don’t take pictures of her like we did when she was small.

I resent the note though. I lied to Dee. Told her the money was for her even though it wasn’t. The money was a rebuke. I’ve told her not to send money. We don’t need it. And she stopped so this was a reminder that I hadn’t sent photos since February and that she is an abandoned old woman living on a fixed income.

She’s lucky to get pictures at all and she knows it, but she can’t help herself. When opportunities arise to make herself look victimized by my stance on Dee – it being that Dee will not be allowed contact with her until she is old enough to understand what a manipulative, less than truthful person she is**.

*Rob is a tiny bit puzzled by my continued bad feelings toward MIL, but he has always had wonderful MILs who’ve adored him – that one incident where Shelley’s mother and older sister tried to talk her out of marrying him due to his outsider position in the community and his sketchy family aside.

** Like some of Will’s friends, MIL maintains that I was ultimately responsible for Will’s death because I refused to let him have a bone marrow transfer. The truth – which I got tired of repeating – was that Will was too old and his illness too advanced for BMT. It was an experimental thing at best and he didn’t qualify at any rate. All it would have done was kill him sooner. There really are no treatment options for what he had. BMT is actually one of those “cures” that works really well in children and teens but by the time a person is grown, the odds fall off a cliff.

An Honest Scrap


Lora receives The Honest Scrap blogger award often, and I’ve enviously wished to be awarded this myself as I’ve read her scraps of self-truth.

Being a more interesting and less censored person than myself, it isn’t surprising that she is a frequent honoree. She does Gary Paulson’s creedo of “going there” proud via her blogging efforts. I don’t boldly go much anymore. Age isn’t a factor. Wisdom hasn’t come with wrinkles and fading hair follicles. I just live in the world more and am less inclined to be infamously known in my realtity.

Not that Lora is infamously known – that I know of – but more and more, people I interact with in real time read this blog. Honesty has become a hassle. Coy isn’t difficult to write, but it’s not all that engaging on a creative or personal level for me. So I don’t.

And I’ll bet you were thinking “she’s grown a conscience, chosen modesty or, at the very least, reconnected with her empathy bone”.

Silverstar blessed me with my very own Honest Scrap Award. It comes with the onus of relating 10 little known facts about myself, as if I have that many anymore, and the request to pass it along to other bloggers. Most of the blogs I read are written by anti-meme types, so I can’t bring myself to name names. I consider my readership to be go-getting self-prodders who will simply appropriate this award and write, or not, as the mood moves them. My blogging buddies are scrappy like that.

Little known? What does that mean exactly? Known to my readers – who are varied, sitting in front of screens that are thousands of miles away from me and whose faces I may not know if I were to encounter them somewhere?

  1. I believe in destiny and fate, but I don’t think we are at their mercy. Though most of the time you are locked into a path until it plays out, you still have options. Your actions have effects. Where you are right now is still mostly your own doing because our difficulties in life are usually the result of fighting destiny rather than working within the confines of our predestined trajectory.
  2. Enlightenment is more often rejected than it is actually elusive, in my opinion. It’s probably completely possible to learn everything you need to know without ever stepping foot on this planet. Life is a choice we make at some point, and I think it is the physicality of it all that lures us here in spite of the fact that confining our true selves to such flimsy and frustratingly needy vessels can cause us pain in equal measure to joy and pleasure. Life is addicting.
  3. I check the obituaries of the Des Moines Register daily to see if my late husband’s mother has died yet. Occasionally I will google the names of his aunts and uncles to check on their pulse status as well. If I never saw or heard from them again, it wouldn’t pain me one bit and I will be relieved when I am finally shed of the semi-annual sending of the photos ritual and their couple of Hallmark cards a year addressed to Dee – who has absolutely no idea who they are. She checks the cards for money. My mother and Auntie send cash. There is never money. I remind her of the sender’s connection to her. Her grandmother. She’ll frown. My mom is her grandmother and her grandmother sends money. Her Daddy Will’s Auntie Gem, who she hasn’t seen since her father’s wake four years ago. Auntie Gem solicits photos to distribute among the uncles. I haven’t heard from either of them since just after I wrote them in the summer of 2007 to announce I’d remarried and emigrated to Canada. Hmmmm. Okay, I should have said something prior but when I met Rob, I hadn’t seen or heard from any of them in 7 or 8 months. What I really wanted to do was not write. Just wait until they’d figured out I’d moved away and were forced to call my folks to find me. Or maybe they’d have called the police? One of the uncles had been a warden at the big state prison. He had connections. And it was evil but I didn’t do it simply because Rob thought I should write them at the very least. And so, the very least I did. And I look for(ward to) their obits.
  4. I sometimes miss television. Bet that seems like a mild revelation after the last one, eh? Some evenings I don’t feel like reading or writing and it was nice to be mindlessly entertained following a show with recurring characters and stories that spun out over a couple of months. I’m waiting on season two of The Tudors from the public library. Sure, the history is faulty and it’s mostly bad soft porn, but not thinking in a semi-active way can be okay here and there.
  5. For the first two years of Dee’s life, I let her daycare providers cut her finger and toenails because I was afraid of snipping her. Those women were saintly. I never changed a crappy diaper either unless it was a weekend or a holiday because Dee pooped once a day in the mid-ish afternoon. Kid is still fairly punctual though now it’s after she gets home from school because she refuses to do #2 in a public washroom if she can avoid it. Will was like that. Rob is like that. Not me though. If I have to go, I go.
  6. I like living in J’berg. If it ended up that we were here for the duration, I would be completely okay with that though Rob? Not so much. I have mainly lived unseen and unnoted in larger cities or crowded towns and here, I am recognized. Maybe not as “one of them” because small towns are a bit weird about the whole “nativism” thing, but I belong after a fashion and it’s all good.
  7. My favorite time of year is nearly upon us, sun days. Those longly lit days when the sun is up at 3:30 and barely dips below the horizon sometime well after 11PM. I would love to experience true white nights. I don’t think I could live there because it’s opposite are the night-days of winter, but maybe experience it one time?
  8. I don’t believe every child can be educated. This doesn’t excuse them from the duty of trying, but I don’t think everyone is born with the same innate ability to learn. We should come with a label: skill level may vary. I don’t think its genetic. My oldest nephew is clever as hell and he didn’t get that from his parents. It made it hard to be a teacher. Correction, it made it hard to work myself up about kids who just didn’t get it. They worked hard, tried their best and just weren’t very smart. And I can’t even say that it’s sad because generally, they were sweet kids who grew up to be sweet, hard-working, lovable and loving adults. Nothing wrong with that.
  9. I like Nickelback. I thought that pickle thing was mean. Keep your Nickelback hate to yourselves in my presence. It’s catchy. It pounds. The lyrics are suitably pop cheesy and I like growly voiced singers.
  10. If you have animals in your home, I will try to avoid sitting down – or being without shoes – because I am conscious of the dander, the hair and the fact that kitty litter does not stay in the box; it is everywhere your cat has ever pawed. Don’t kid yourself. Last night we stopped by the home of one of Rob’s friends to pick up a few things he needs to haul away an old Volvo of Edie’s. They have three or four dogs running loose and about 2 dozen cats that run in and out of their house. Right now, they even have a mama cat and kittens in their upstairs linen closet because the mama sneaked in and gave birth there a week ago. They haven’t moved them but instead, threw everything out of the bottom shelves of the closet into the hallway. Rob’s friend invited me to sit in the family room to wait while he and Rob rummaged around in the barn. I smiled. Nodded and after they’d disappeared took Dee outside. If I’d sat, I would have been covered with hair, and more cats than I cared to be and my nose was already running. If you have cats especially, I probably won’t sit if the visit is a short one and I will avoid long ones, but if I can’t – the only way I’ll sit is if it matters to me if your feelings will be wounded because I know it will appear as though I am judging you and I’m not. I lived with cats here and there, but fur and itchy throat and running eyes and nose are not something I will do for many people. If I have done it for you, you are special indeed.

Well, I am sure that disappointed, but now I am done. Remember, you are welcome to take the scrap and run back to your own blog with it or just tmi all over the comments.

A Memoir Update


I hit 40,301 words into NaNoWriMo and my memoir Sunday evening. The plan is to hit 50,000 by Friday or Saturday and the full 79,000 – my own goal – by December 11th, my birthday. I write between 1400 and 2000 words a day, so I am confident.

I also made the decision to supplement the story-telling aspect with actual emails between Rob and I and IM sessions too. I mined old posts from the babycenter group and the soap opera message board I was a part of through the bulk of Will’s illness up through widowhood as a means of dating and clarifying events. I have been re-reading a lot of my own history in my own words and it has been, uh, interesting, looking back at who I was and how I got here.

There is going to be some rewriting. Early in the memoir I tried to be vague about people and events, especially with in-laws and the widow board, but as I wrote I realized that I can’t make sense of the storyline if I leave things out to spare myself and others embarrassment. I am reminded again of the advice I received on writing this memoir in the first place,

“Tell the story, big and messy.”

So, the incident with Rob’s widow board stalker is in. Fortunately she is no longer a reader of my blog. I think once I left the widow board most of the people there stopped reading and forgot all about me. And I wrote, though not in graphic detail, about my horrific attempts with dating prior to Rob. No real names naturally; it is good thing that I was already in the habit of nicknaming men. I haven’t known a single man who was nameable and the great thing about the Internet is that people conveniently re-christen themselves or are so predictable that their new names jump right off the screen at you.

For example, Rob’s stalker had the cutesy-poo habit of “decorating” her posts with flash graphics of the hearts, flowers and fluffy animals genre. We called her The Hallmark Lady for a long time, although she’s recently been downgraded to Mullet Woman.  My fault totally and I should be ashamed.

Most nicknames are pedestrian, however, and denote occupation or a physical characteristic of equally mundane origin. I don’t spend too much time bestowing monikers, but for purposes of telling a tiny portion of my life’s journey, I guess it’s a good thing I have bothered even a little.

I am also pretty honest about the mother-in-law but without being mean – at least I hope I am not coming off as vindictive. I feel more sorry for Will’s mother than anything else. But it’s hard for me to illustrate just what why I reacted to some things the way that I did without using examples and, even in a memoir, ya gotta show at least as much as you tell. MIL is not someone I would ever have chosen to share a stage with but she is a cast member who has to be acknowledged.

Rob raised an eyebrow – both actually – when I told him I was using our correspondence.

“All of it?”

“Well, no. Some stuff is private.”

The look I got was indicting, and rightfully so, because I have a long track record of indiscretion where writing about my life is concerned. Needless to say, Rob gets to read the manuscript before anyone else, and I doubt I will be looking for other beta reads before February anyway.  But I really want a good, shoppable draft done by April 1st, so I will need to find additional readers other than my husband.

November to April is a good six months from start to finish. I would give myself longer with a fiction novel but my life is really already written up to the current day, so I can’t say that more time would make it more interesting. It is what it is.