Fate here to remind you that wishing death on another of your species will get you in trouble with your legal systems, and that as tempting as it is, causing the death(s) of those specifically involved in keeping you bound within those legal systems’ sticky webs will probably cause some sort of unpleasant repercussion…or so my lawyers keep reminding ME.
My boyfriend, eventually fiance, maintained good boundaries with his overbearing mother right up until we were married. Then we needed to rent a place that was big enough for her to move into too, because “she’s getting up there in years” and “who else is going to take care of her? I’m an only child, and my dad moved out of the country, remarried, and is happy raising my five half-siblings!”
Fate, as much as I still villainize my FIL-in-name-only (he couldn’t even be bothered to make the wedding), I now sympathize with him 100%. My MIL scans all my shopping, throws away the purchases she doesn’t approve of (including foods I need to eat to keep a health condition from going totally off the rails), sees no problem with barging into any room (e.g., our bedroom, my home office, the bathrooms) if it’s unlocked, and “punished” my husband if he attempted to install (stronger) locks by hiding his car keys so that he was “grounded” over the weekend. The car keys mysteriously reappeared when he relented on the lock installation or as soon as I needed to get to work, because I guess even she has just enough situational awareness of who’s underwriting her meal ticket.
The frustration got to my husband quickly enough. It’s hard (lol) to get in the mood for hot newlywed playtimes when your roommate, who happens to be your partner’s mother, keeps barging in to ask you how to work the TV remote or what the internet password is. While my husband eventually managed to get her to stop that by reminding her that she’s always wanted grandchildren and she’s preventing us from giving her any (WTF, before the wedding, we decided we were still at least five years from trying to have kids, if we even decide we want to at all), let’s just say that the lingering pressure to sneak around like horny high schoolers is kind of a mood-killer.
We’ve had fights. My husband refuses to kick her out, citing the same tired old “she’s getting older” crap (she’s the same age as my parents, and they’re still working full-time, going on epic vacations, and running marathons), but he’s trying to compromise by paying for just us two to have date nights and romantic weekend getaways (even though I do worry about what she’s capable of doing to the house while we’re away, considering the kinds of meltdowns she has about us leaving).
He also arranges for mother-son bonding time to get her out of my hair for a while. These times are the best. I get to sit around and watch trashy TV without her sneering at my lowbrow taste, read fantasy novels without her commenting that I should be reading works appropriate to my own age, mindlessly scrolling the internet without her commenting about how, in her day, the acceptable thing to do was to go out and interact with other human beings…you get the picture.
The last time my husband took her out, it was only supposed to be for the afternoon, just to go see an art exhibit that he reassured her I “wouldn’t appreciate anyway” (sorry, MIL, I still maintain that Impressionism only exists because Monet was losing his eyesight and there’s no deeper meaning to all the fuzziness). Usually, husband and MIL are very punctual people, so when afternoon turned into evening, I admit to getting a bit worried. The art museum is in a part of town that had seen a wave of carjackings and muggings recently. I worried that someone might have stolen the car.
A few minutes later, it also occurred to me that the same someone might have hurt or even killed my husband and MIL in the process of stealing the car. What if they were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding out at this very minute? What if they were already dead? I should probably call husband…nah, his phone never has service. Probably no point.
I continued enjoying my trash TV. Dinnertime rolled around. I did briefly reconsider calling my husband, but I also hadn’t had Thai food since, well, before we all moved in to be one big happy family together. “Too spicy” for MIL. I ordered myself some Thai. It was delicious.
It got to be bedtime. This was really concerning, or should have been. But I figured that whatever had happened to them, there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I stretched out on the couch, dozing off blissfully to the sound of some Real Housewives screeching at each other.
“Disappointment” isn’t the word I should be using to describe how I felt when the front door banged open and my MIL entered at full tilt, bitching up a storm about how “those bastards at the museum didn’t even check to see if anyone was still absorbing the beauty of Giverny” before shutting all the lights off and locking up, and how long it took the two of them to fumble around in the dark to find a phone that worked so that they could call 911, then hang up and redial the non-emergency police line, then have the police show up and say there was nothing they could do except to wait for building security to arrive, then of course MIL was about to faint from hunger so they just had to find something tasteful to eat, then there was nothing tasteful left open, so they had to go to the grocery store, and isn’t that actually a good thing, because the smell of what she’s cooking should hopefully cancel out the dreadful odors of whatever [I] had eaten…!
Of course I don’t wish any unnecessary and illegal harm to any other living creature, Fate, but as I sit here furtively browsing apartment listings on my phone in my home office, I can’t help but wonder why you couldn’t have arranged for a chance interaction between my MIL (and maybe, just maybe, my husband as well) and the one of the armed criminals plaguing the downtown area?
What’s not to admire about Monet? For a mere mortal, he certainly understood the beauty inherent in working within one’s limits in order to see beyond them. I’m sorry he couldn’t leave as much of an Impression on you as your family by choice clearly has.
