Leah Averick says she lost her equilibrium several years ago when she got the news she was to become a mother-in-law. “I didn’t know what to do or say. Why was I feeling this way? I should have been happy. Other people told me that my future daughter-in-law would be like a daughter to me, and I thought, ‘bullshit.’ I was ashamed to tell my husband how I felt.”
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Averick has now been a daughter-in-law, a mother-in-law three times, an ex-mother-in-law once, a sister-in-law to six, and an aunt-in-law to three. And she’s still researching the subject. In the last seven years she’s interviewed nearly 300 Poles, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Armenians, African Americans, Cubans, Canadians, Dutch, Russians, Greeks, Mexicans, Pakistanis, Israelis, Arabs, Bahamians, Swedes, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Catholics, Jews, and Lutherans–many of them from Chicago.
One man told her he chased his daughter-in-law around the room with a knife when she broached the subject of moving her family to another city. Another man insisted that the wedding pictures from his son’s first marriage stay on his own living-room walls because he liked the first wife. “She’ll always be my daughter-in-law,” he said. One woman said she told her son-in-law, “Just because you sleep with my daughter doesn’t mean I have to have anything to do with your parents.”
Soon after this, the women break for lunch, which consists of kosher box lunches. There is really only one subject of conversation.
Averick, who has overheard her, looks a little skeptical. She believes that in-law relationships are never completely smooth, never completely harmonious. They are complex and tangled. There are problems in every in-law relationship, she says, because in-laws’ lives are bound together–and most had nothing to say about it. Moreover, in-laws represent some of the genes grandchildren will inherit, some of the ideas and values that will be passed on to the next generation. In-laws also represent the future of your newly married child or brother or sister, and the past of your husband or wife. All of which can be very scary. Yet Averick also points out that in-laws can sometimes fill a hole in your life–become someone to cultivate, tolerate, satisfy your needs.
