The Momoir Project

Here’s a riddle: When is loading the dishwasher not really about doing dishes?
Answer: When your Romanian mother-in-law is in town.

Between my husband and me, doing dishes is about shared responsibility and about keeping a home and family in a reasonable state of chaos. For this reason, I don’t say anything when he loads the dishwasher – even when he puts crystal stemware where the pots should be. Even when he forgets to rinse and the next morning I find baked on porridge coating the inside of all my coffee cups.

For me, washing dishes is about keeping my head straight. The first time I owned being an adult was when I transformed a childhood punishment into a grown up pleasure. Doing the dishes has become valued meditative time. Now, each time I plunge my hands into hot water and breathe in lavender-scented dish soap, I become a little more grounded. I get my best ideas in front of the sink. This is the time when I hatch schemes, form arguments, practice apologies.

For me and my mother-in-law, Jana, doing the dishes became our way of communicating. Since she didn’t speak English, it took some time to learn that slamming cups into rows meant she was upset or angry. Eventually I guessed that when deep sighs or woeful looks accompanied rinsing plates, I’d done something to hurt her feelings and when she briskly rearranged cutlery I had just finished placing in respective holders, she was teaching me the proper way to run a kitchen. She was letting me know I had something to learn from her. The appropriate response should have been gratitude – my actual one was silent outrage and jaw clenching annoyance.

What I felt but didn’t consider at the time – doing dishes was loaded, an indicator of an unspoken, on-going battle for domestic supremacy. The battle between adult women, who due to marriage find themselves in a relationship, is one which is both ancient and primal. It spans every period of history and crosses every culture. What I now know is that for many females in this modern age, when we no longer dominate by sniffing bums or dry humping legs (as was common in cave-woman days) loading the dishwasher can be interpreted as a demonstration of alpha-ness.

Since I don’t speak Romanian, I can’t be sure if my husband invited his mother as a loving gesture or if she insisted on coming to “help” because she’d inadvertently been given the impression I wasn’t able to manage. At any rate, she was planning to stay for three months when my daughter was just four weeks old. Once the grand tour had been given and Jana had time to settle in – my mother-in-law and I began an awkward period of sizing one another up. From the rocking chair in the living room where I breast fed my daughter, I watched her busily scurrying in and out of the room, picking up dirty dishes, rearranging cushions on the sofa, straightening carelessly tossed magazines. The woman rarely stopped moving and my own relative stillness began to feel uncomfortable. This was our first meeting, but I already knew she was different from me in other ways as well: an understated, yet intimidating woman, she finished first in her high school class. During a communist regime when every able adult worked, she left her young boys to be an engineer in a factory and only turned her attention to domestic pursuits after retirement, which she now did enthusiastically. I know her husband and sons are devoted to her and always do what she asks. I’ve lived with her son for three years – he does what I ask when it suits him. Clearly this woman had some skills.

One day after lunch, I got a call from my husband.
“Maybe you should eat more,” he started by saying. When his suggestion was met with a stony silence, he changed the subject.
“All I’m saying is maybe it’s time you got on a schedule,” he remarked with a relaxed but practiced tone. Later he asked if I shouldn’t supplement feedings with formula. “It’s just maybe the baby would sleep longer that way. You don’t eat much; maybe you’re not making enough.”

Up until that moment I was willing to overlook some of Jana’s earlier infractions – like her gift of cellulite cream – because my husband assured me it was a well-intentioned gesture. But that ended once her son began to question my breastfeeding abilities. Was she trying to find my weak points? Could she tell I was already questioning myself and so moved in for the kill? Had she decided I was an unfit mother and partner and was now starting a subtle campaign to erode my husband’s confidence in me? My fears felt a little irrational, but none-the–less, Jana’s gestures started to feel less helpful and more menacing..

Like the morning Jana came into the bedroom while I was changing Naomi. She stood by the door as I peeled off her onesie and tossed her diaper in the pail. I self consciously selected a pair of cotton pants and a cute little sweater and laid them on the change table. As I bent over the laundry basket, trying to find a matching sock in a pile of socks, Jana reached over me, carefully lifted Naomi’s head off the change table and began to slide a little red dress over her head. I froze, disbelieving. Was I really being challenged so openly? I waited for my chance to let Jana know this was a line that could not be crossed, which came when Jana fished through a drawer looking for baby sized tights and shoes. I quickly scooped Naomi in my arms, pushed my way out the door, scurried to the bathroom and locked the door.

In this moment I knew my fighting style tends to lean towards the passive aggressive. In the wild, I would probably be one of those animals who, out of spite, breaks into another female’s den, pees in it and then runs like mad.

I sat in the bathroom for several long minutes, trying to calm myself by listening to Naomi’s cooing and gurgling. I wondered if I might be a little preconditioned to dislike my Mother-In-Law. After all, my own mother’s dislike of her mother-in-law was obvious and their battles every Christmas and Easter over seemingly insignificant things were legendary. At the playground, my announcement that Jana was coming to help was met with groans and sympathetic pats. No one is expected to like their mother-in-law. Jokes illustrating these tensions are widespread and timeless. The Internet is flooded with articles, surveys and support-group blogs with titles like – What to Do with Your Islamic Mother-In-Law, Get Help with Your Asian Mother-In-Law, How to Cope with Your Jewish Mother-In-Law, Share Your In-Law Horror Stories Here.

It seems MIL’s from every corner of the globe are saddled with the same stereotype: overbearing, overly opinionated, power hungry, nasty, and manipulative. Always the daughter-in-law is the victim until she gets a chance to become a mother-in-law herself so she can then terrorize the next generation.

Even with this possibility to look forward to, I still needed some help. Thank goodness people are so willing to offer up their opinions:
“You need to put her in her place right away,” Dana, whose MIL is also from Romania, said. “Pick something, anything and yell at her about it. She needs to know you can’t be pushed.”
Another friend offered helpfully: “She won’t listen to you, so tell her your doctor ordered you not to eat foods with so much oil or butter.” She added, “Women her age always listen to doctors, never to daughters.”
Interestingly, no one suggested I try to be nice or concede any territory. “She’ll just see you as weak,” they said. “Once she breaks you, you’re done for.”

There is endless advice about how to bear or even sooth in-law tensions, but none of it actually explains why generation after generation continues the same conflict. To get to the root and possibly a lasting solution, I chose not to turn to pages of Psychology Today, but rather to the Discovery Channel.

In the wild, the fiercest battles among female primates are those meant to establish or defend position in the family. Once the pecking order is clear, harmony is restored. That sounds about right in my family as well. When Jana arrived I was a new mom, and a new homeowner — kind of new to the whole domestic scene – and this newness brought with it a certain amount of insecurity. For starters, this was the first time since graduating from high school that I was financially dependent on another person. I wasn’t working – electing instead to stay home with my newborn - and uncertain of my contribution to the household. I didn’t know if I was doing it right, and so my need for approval coupled with extreme exhaustion compounded my vulnerable position. Add to this the fact that I’m not actually married to my husband. We’ve lived together long enough to be common-law, but I know from my own Eastern European family, culturally this is problematic. It’s a question of legitimacy, really. My husband doesn’t get this, but I know in the way women know things, that this is an issue for my mother-in-law. She’ll never say anything to us, of course. She’s a smart woman who would never intentionally ruffle her son’s feathers, but I can feel in her sideways looks and in some of her gestures that she doesn’t know how to be with me. So we sniff at one another, trying to figure out where we belong, how we fit, what space we’ll be willing to give to the other. And since this isn’t something to discuss, we figure it out by picking out clothes and watching for a reaction. Loading the dishwasher then watching to see how it’s received. Giving advice then waiting to see if it’s taken.

So maybe she is testing me to see how adversarial I’ll be. Maybe she’s trying to assess whether or not I’m a threat to her uncontested position of matriarch – whether I’ve got what it takes to be an Alpha female. As the toilet seat grew more uncomfortable and Naomi squirmed, getting bored, I imagine Discovery Channel-like commentary laid over that day’s interactions with Jana.

“The female of the species bristles as the new female approaches the pack…” I can begin to imagine primal stirrings, an instinctive wariness as one who doesn’t share language or customs shacks up with the favoured male then attempts to take on a dominant role as mother of a most valued commodity: a grandchild. When concerns about whether that grandchild may or may not be learning the same language, customs or manners in an acceptable or familiar way are added, it’s actually remarkable that relations between the two females is so restrained.

I actually give Jana some credit for trying through cleaning, cooking and picking out outfits to assert her value and establish her place in our new little family. Although I’d been feeling pretty powerless since Jana started rearranging my kitchen cupboards, I imagined how my silence and withdrawing could actually feel like I was shutting her out. I hate admitting this, but I’ve got a ways to go before I could successfully compete for top spot in this family. For starters, I need to learn to iron. I’ve watched enough Wild Kingdom to know it’s the younger primates who pose greater threats. So maybe I should just give Jana the kitchen to control as she likes. She can have the laundry too, if she wants it. I look down at the squirming, half dressed infant struggling to free herself from my grasp. I slide her other arm into the little red dress and zip up the back. Maybe Naomi is the one I should be watching….