I’ve never lived as stressed out as I do with my mother-in-law. My wife and I rent an apartment in the same building that her parents live in, so my mother-in-law is always hanging around. Thankfully, I have a job and a chance to get away from her for at least nine or ten hours, but there are still fights and screams waiting for me at home. She’s a woman who is very unhappy and restless, she always has to do something with us, right up to checking our closets, and she never scolds her daughter for anything, and I’m her scapegoat. She finds something to pick on, and then she yells at me so much that the neighbors knock on our radiators. They don’t always know that my mother-in-law is the problem, and then they look at me and my wife crossly, thinking that everything is not all right in our marriage.
I grew up in a good family, my parents never hit or yelled at us, they had completely different methods of punishment and because of that I think my brothers and I grew up to be good people. Maybe because of the lack of swearing in my family I am less stress-resistant, because I get very hurt every time my mother-in-law swears. I have to restrain myself so I don’t fight back and be negative for the rest of the day. And my mood affects my ability to work, and because of my mother-in-law’s scandals I can lose my job.
My wife can’t do anything about it, but has already agreed to move out when the contract for the apartment expires. If it were up to me, we would move to another city, but it’s just closer to my work. We both partly hope that my mother-in-law will find it hard to visit us often and leave our marriage alone, and me first and foremost.
