A Difficult Woman

"The only way to stay sane is to go a bit crazy."*

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestseller Wild, speak about an essay she wrote about her complicated relationship with her mother-in-law (MIL). The first anecdote she shared was when her MIL, Joan, gave her a gift certificate for Weight Watchers when she was eight months pregnant. The audience wasn’t sure whether to gasp or laugh.

I stopped what I was doing to listen because it sounded like something my MIL, Rita, might have done. My relationship with her was indeed complicated, balancing the weight of her hurtful behaviors and my desire to be approved and accepted.

Cheryl’s essay is titled Two Women Walk into a Bar because she first met her soon-to-be MIL while waiting tables in a French restaurant. Though she had been dating her future husband for eight months, and they lived in the same city as his mother, he avoided introducing Cheryl to his mother because he “didn’t want to scare her off.”

My late husband was more direct: he explained that his mother was crazy. She was unpredictable, riding an emotional rollercoaster, and it seemed like the family dealt with her behaviors by staying out of her way. Throughout our marriage, we lived at least 1500 miles apart, so my time with her was limited to her occasional visits and phone calls. I have painful memories of most of those experiences.

In the early years of our acquaintance—the best word to describe our occasional contact—she treated me as an annoyance. She was uninterested in me, and what little she did know of me, she disapproved of. On her visits, snide remarks and incredulous looks were cast my way. My attempts to win her over were ignored. Keeping my maiden name insulted her and her son, declaring, not asking if their last name wasn’t good enough for me. She addressed Christmas cards to only her son and grandson and abruptly requested to speak to her son whenever she called our landline, and I answered.

Her treatment of me conveyed that I was persona non grata.

Over the thirty years of my marriage, she sent me a birthday card once, a month late. I think my husband asked her to. I desperately wanted to be accepted but had given up by year ten. I no longer sent photos and handwritten letters about our young son’s development. I worked hard not to take her actions personally. I subscribed to the family’s belief that she was, in fact, crazy and unpredictable. I was polite when she visited every other year but avoided her as much as possible; conversations diminished to hellos and goodbyes. 

In year twelve, she came for a week-long visit during the school year despite our preference that she wait until summer. Our son was in school all day, my husband was working, and I was a full-time student in the last year of my BA program. But she explained that she had to go somewhere or she was going to go crazy.

As I took notes for a research project at the kitchen table, she stood outside on the patio, smoking her extra-long Virginia Slims. I could feel her staring at me. When she opened the patio door, she casually asked why I was spending her son’s money to go to college. She proclaimed that college was a waste of time; her sons all made good money working in the trades. As far as I knew, my husband's large extended family had no college attendees or graduates. My first thought was, once again, I did not fit in - she would never accept me. I shrugged, choosing not to answer her because it would have been a loud, angry, and rude retort. Later that evening, I wondered if she was jealous of my independence, my ability to create a better life, and the agency I had over my life. She never acknowledged the completion of my undergraduate and graduate programs, which I intellectually understood was about her and not me, but a slight that hit me hard at the time.

In Two Women Walk into a Bar, Cheryl describes how she tried to probe her MIL about her life to understand her rough edges better. She learned that her MIL’s mother started her adult life as a “fallen woman” - an unwed mother- and created a family history based on lies and sad decisions.

I learned similar things about Rita. Born and raised in poverty in the Bronx, her mother had married (or not) multiple times, and as a child, she may or may not have witnessed the murder of her grandfather or one of her mother’s husbands. Her childhood memories seem to change over the years, and later, her older sister said that most of them were untrue. Her father was not in her life; I don’t know if she knew who he was. Different men fathered her three siblings. Rita quit school in her teens, married a handsome “bad boy” at 18, and had seven children over twelve years. Her husband struggled with alcohol addiction and preferred the thrill of criminal activities, eventually going to prison for seven years. They lost a house they had purchased and borrowed money from relatives to pay monthly bills. She never learned to drive and lived in rural areas, making her dependent on others to go anywhere. Poverty ruled her entire adult life.

She relied 100% on a man who was 100% unreliable.

With the wisdom of age and the recognition of how deeply our life experiences shape us emotionally, I have been able to reflect on my MIL’s unhappy life. She desperately sought opportunities for happiness, moving to four states and borrowing money each time from us, which she knew she could never repay. She called the moves “fresh starts.” After a visit to Ireland, she spent months speaking with an Irish brogue and was fixated on moving to Ireland. Her older sister, Dot, helped her financially despite disliking some of the decisions she made. When Dot was dying, she requested that her daughter continue to assist Rita until she died.

Most of Rita’s children did not fare well; six of her seven children died before she did. She had three daughters-in-law and one son-in-law, and she judged that none of us were acceptable. There were eleven grandchildren, but her erratic behaviors did not allow for solid relationships. In her sixties, she learned that her younger brother, a frequent visitor to her home in her young years as a mother, had molested several of her children. I think this revelation was too much for her, and she became a sorrowful older woman, silenced by shame, beaten down by the struggles of poverty, and restrained by factors that never allowed her to build the life she dreamed of. 

In the last third of Cheryl Strayed’s essay, she describes her time spent with her dying mother-in-law. Her final weeks were filled with stressful hallucinations as her end-of-life doula explained that she was “resisting but moving on to acceptance…she was working out her unfinished business.”

Rita’s last visit to our home was in 2010, and the difficult woman I had known for thirty years was now a subdued, despondent 76-year-old widow who lived alone in an old, deteriorating single-wide trailer in rural North Carolina. She sat on our porch, staring into nothingness, still smoking her extra-long Virginia Slims. There were no conversations, no energy for difficulty, no judgmental remarks, and no unsolicited negative opinions. It was difficult to witness such a sad woman.

When my husband died unexpectedly the following year, I wasn’t emotionally able to call my mother-in-law to tell her that another one of her children had died. Her youngest son drove to her trailer to break the news to her. She called several days later, but consumed in my grief, I remember none of that conversation. We talked one more time several months after that, but after years of fearing her responses and rejections, I lied when I told her I was okay and ended the call. I don’t know why she called, but I had nothing to offer her. The decades of difficult interactions forced me to create a space of detachment to protect my heart and nervous system. She died in 2016, cared for by her remaining son and daughter-in-law.

Early in Cheryl’s marriage, she told her MIL that she planned to write a novel for publication. Her MIL responded: “How likely is that? You know, at some point you have to give up your dreams.”

How many women give up their dreams? I thought about my maternal grandmother, another difficult woman who gave up her preferred independence for the cultural and familial expectations of marriage and motherhood and then slowly exchanged that life for one of closeted alcoholism. 

The history of women's lives is often one of thwarted dreams, powerlessness, cultural expectations, and diminishing hopes as we age. I think more kindly about my difficult mother-in-law now, understanding that perhaps the meaning of crazy is best defined by layers of disappointments, disillusionments, and heartbreak.

* Quote by Susanna Kaysen from Girl Interrupted

Edvard Munch’s The Scream 1893 (Wikiart.org)

Cheryl Strayed’s essay Two Women Walk into a Bar is available at Amazon and Apple Books. Her Dear Sugar Letters offer some of the most heartfelt thoughts on being human. Her book Tiny Beautiful Things features her early Dear Sugar advice columns. I listen to it each year and wonder how she became so wise while so young.

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