Mother-in-law

Last weekend my family and I loaded up the car and began a six hour drive to upstate New York. We ended up in a small town that lies along the Delaware River, directly across the bridge from Pennsylvania. While it was beautiful, we were not there for pleasure. There was a job to be done. You see, my mother-in-law lives in this small town. We were there to pick her up and bring her back to our home near Boston. The plan is that she was to stay with us for two weeks. Two long weeks.

It's been one week and two days now. I can hear some of you say, "nine days isn't so bad." Well, if you are saying that, I can determine something about you: YOU ARE NOT FUCKING MARRIED! You couldn't possibly be. If you were, you would feel my pain.

You see, my mother-in-law isn't half bad. She's is VERY generous. She is a loving person. She is WONDERFUL with my daughter, but I still have a hard time spending two weeks with her in my house.

I know we all wish we had someone around that is willing to help out. Sometime that doesn't work the way you want it to. She keeps doing my dishes. The problem is that she can't see well and is accustomed to using a dishwasher at home. So, she misses little stuff. The silverware might have a smudge on it, a plate may have a speck of food, and my coffee mugs all have brown rings on the bottoms. I've asked her not to do them anymore, but she does anyway. So, I end up re-doing dishes. The environmentalist in me hates wasted resources.

The other day, she said that my bathroom floor was "disgusting" and she swept and mopped it. This drives my wife mad. My wife wants her to stay out of our business completely, but she won't. We have a maid that we didn't ask for. She gets so frustrated that we don't want her help and she does things anyway, insistent that she is indeed helping, when in fact we have to do everything over again to insure that it is done right. It is as though we couldn't afford the maid from Mexico and had to settle on the affordable Eskimo. I just wish she would listen! She doesn't realize that paying full attention to our daughter is immeasurably helpful.

Here's the part that is driving me crazy. This is the part that is going to send me to hell. I can't stand to listen to her repeat another one of her stories. I'll die if I have to. It's not just the same stories that I've heard for the past ten years (which by the way, ARE interesting the first two times), it's her accounts from the day. She tells me the interesting parts of the day at least three times! I think that when she tells me something that happened earlier in the day, that she actually forgot that she told me this same thing twice, twenty minutes ago! How can even an old person do that?! I'm not going to kill her. I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to do it slowly, during one of her stories, just to make it interesting again.

Which brings me to social commentary. Are we doing old people a favor by caring for them? I don't think so. At least, not the annoying ones. Do you think they would like themselves if their young selves met their old selves? I doubt it. If I start to tell the same story everyday to the same people, regardless of how old I am, it means that my time has come. Kill me, if I don't have the sense to kill myself.