The Living Experiment
By Kerri Havnen Gordon,
Is it any wonder that Mother’s Day is widely celebrated but that few know about Mothers-in-Law Day? Perhaps it is because mothers-in-law have a reputation for being meddlesome and difficult. Mine is not, but unfortunately I couldn’t say the same for my own grandmother. Grandma Rosella was, God rest her soul, a snob. She was a city girl, prone to picking the “right” friends and flagrantly turning up her nose at anything or anyone who didn’t measure up to her ideals of status and wealth.
Rosella’s rare soft spot was her only child, my dad. In her eyes, he could do no wrong except for pick the wrong girl, an inevitability given that few girls in America would have been good enough for her Tommy. As a country girl, my poor mom didn’t stand a chance. Although she was lovely in every way, she was a far cry from the cosmopolitan woman Grandma clearly envisioned for her son.
When my parents named their daughter Kerri Lynn a year after they married, Grandma Rosella protested loudly at saddling a child with such an undignified name. She was so relentless in her hounding that on my sister’s 89th day of life, the second-to-last day to legally change a baby’s name on the birth certificate, my parents renamed their daughter Diane Kay.
By the time I was born four years later, my mom was inclined to ignore her snooty mother-in-law, so Kerri Lynn I became. Sure, the first three months of both Havnen sisters’ baby pictures are all labeled Kerri Lynn, but I imagine that finally defying Rosella was both deliciously satisfying and worth the confusion.
Good old Grandma Rosella displayed her continued disdain every Christmas and birthday by routinely misspelling my name. These “mistakes” were clearly deliberate because each misspelling was different from the last. It became a family joke, not in Grandma’s presence of course, wondering what spelling concoction she would come up with next. K-a-r-y, C-a-r-r-i-e - trust me, there are countless ways to spell Kerri, and even Lynn offers a few variations. To my mom’s immense credit, she rarely complained, and I have a feeling there was much to complain about.
So you can imagine my low expectations at the prospect of gaining my very own mother-in-law. I expected to be unfairly judged and deemed unworthy or deficient. I anticipated a lifetime of stiff, stilted in-law visits in which I never quite fit in or was accepted.
Well, if that’s the script, then someone forgot to tell Dorothy, my loving, delightful mother-in-law.
Dorothy is every daughter-in-law’s dream. Since she lives 15 minutes away, we get to see her and my father-in-law often. This close proximity would make many a daughter-in-law cringe, but not me. In my 20 years of marriage to her son, Dorothy has always respected our family’s privacy and choices and has never once interfered. Here’s a mother-in-law who is consistently helpful, supportive and even complimentary. She just might be the nicest lady I’ve ever known.
I realize that I am one of the lucky ones. A friend of mine told me today that his mother-in-law is “a female Archie Bunker.” Yikes. Life sure gets sticky when you have the mother-in-law from hell.
I expect to be a mother-in-law someday, and for better or worse I am by nature a feistier woman than Dorothy. Oh, goddess of mothers-in-law, when my time comes please help me keep my mouth shut when I’m inclined to unwisely open it. Steer me away from interfering or being judgmental. Guide me to be kind, helpful and supportive. Oh, dear goddess, please help me be a Dorothy, not a Rosella.
livingexperiment@pacbell.net
