When I was young, I learned an important lesson: life under one roof with my in-laws. Husband and kids are everything. No moms, dads, brothers and sisters. I paid dearly for the lesson: We lived with my mother-in-law and my 13-year-old son, who was a bad boy. I was terrified to leave my room; I had to put up with going to the bathroom until the last moment.
The house was 200 square meters – on me. If there was a dirty spoon in the sink, it could fly in my direction, screaming that I was a pig. A year of nagging, scandals, and demands for paychecks. Moving away from my mother-in-law was the best thing that ever happened to me.
We were students then, working part-time, feeding ourselves. We lived on my husband’s property – he owned part of the house. On moving out, my husband wrote off his share to my mother, and “thanked” her for her good attitude. We left for the city from the township where the house was located. We tried to forget living together like a bad dream. My husband never forgave my mother for her behavior.
For the first few years she kept calling and demanding money. My husband changed his number. After that, she didn’t come into our life for 13 years. Then she remembered us and got the number from a childhood friend of her husband’s. She called and complained that the younger daughter-in-law had grown impudent: she was bossing us around like in her own house, she could throw her fists, take away our pension, yells in foul language. Maria forgot that for every spiteful mother-in-law there is an even more spiteful bitch-snob, and for every cheeky woman there is a more cheeky person. The brother-in-law grew up, got married, and brought his wife into the house. Maria began to have a hard life.
I was surprised: everything Maria described, she had once allowed herself to do to me. Her abuse of me, which resulted in an aborted pregnancy, was the last straw, after which we moved out.
– I was scared to go out in the hall. When I have to go to the store, I climb out the window to avoid being seen by my youngest daughter-in-law! – Maria whined pitifully into the tube.
She needed help – to pluck the unhappy mother from the clinging clutches of the offender, to take her to the city, a separate room and to introduce her to her grandchildren. With the very grandchildren, whom I had allegedly fostered in some unknown place.
– I packed my things, they are under my bed in bags. Sonny, I’m waiting for you! – After a proper description of her suffering, she finished.
– She will not live with us! – I immediately marked it, remembering the loss of my firstborn son, and went to look for information: At what age are you accepted into a nursing home.
My mom’s hair stood on end – as in a nursing home? What about forgiving, understanding, accepting with open arms?
– Will you turn me in later, too? – my mother asked grudgingly.
– No. It’s not like you were making fun of me.
My husband wasn’t eager to take his mother to us, either. We have a mortgage and children – a teenager and a schoolboy. There’s no room for her in our two-bedroom apartment. To be honest, there wouldn’t be room for her in our five-bedroom apartment either.
– I’ll go and see how things really are. I’ll talk to my brother, my husband decided. – Are you coming with me?
Such a suggestion made me twitch, I did not even need to answer.
I did. His brother and his wife wouldn’t even let him in. Said that he is nobody and his name is nothing. Maria went out to see her son. She crawled out of the window of the first floor. She did not cheat. Her husband came home, his sweater damp with mother’s tears. He apologized, his mother repented for the past, wanted to be friends. They found some money, rented her a room in a communal apartment. Moved her in. She keeps asking to visit us. The older kid doesn’t even want to meet his grandmother, he says he has one and he’s had enough. The youngest has not said anything yet.
Public opinion “this is not the case – my mother-in-law lives in a communal apartment, it is high time to forgive her and take her to her place!
It didn’t work anyway – I was still twitching at the sound of the name. Only now I know that I don’t have to endure anything. What was there to put up with, I even had every right not to see her at all!
For a year of that poking around, Maria is paying for her life with strangers and our handouts. I do not care how it looks from a moral point of view.
She should have thought with her head before she cried at 58 years old that no one wanted her, that she wanted to know her grandchildren, that she longed to redeem herself in front of me. I don’t care about that. She can thank me for the room.
