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YOU’VE GOT A MOM. HE’S GOT A MOM. YOU’VE HAD YOUR
WHOLE LIFE TO GET TO KNOW YOURS. BUT HIS? TOTALLY
NEW TERRITORY. WELCOME TO LIFE WITH A MOTHER-IN-LAW.
BY DANA HUDEPOHL
lenty of women absolutely adore their mother-in-law. They talk about feeling like a part
of the family even before the wedding—being offered heirloom jewelr y as their some-
thing blue, receiving a loving toast at the rehearsal dinner. That said, most wives con-
fess some tension with the “other woman” in their husband’s life, and the feeling
is mutual, says Deanna Brann, a licensed clinical psychotherapist and the author of
Reluctantly Related: Secrets to Getting Along with Your Mother-in-Law or Daughter-in-Law.
In a sur vey of 1,000 relationships, she says, 75 percent of both MILs and DILs reported
less-than-fuzzy feelings, ranging from “I wish it were better” to “I can’t be around
her.” Pop culture hasn’t done moms-in-law any favors: From Jane Fonda’s aptly named
Monster-in-Law to the murderous Victoria Grayson on Revenge to that pinnacle of over-
bearingness, Marie from Everybody Loves Raymond, on-screen MILs are almost univer-
sally insufferable, interfering, passive-aggressive guilt-trip machines.
The fact is, your MIL is only human, and so are you, both reacting to a seismic shift in
your relationships with her son and each other. Any time you’re assuming a position
long held by another (in this case, the most important woman in your fiancé’s life), the
transfer of power will be fraught, and even the most outwardly sunny relationship can
harbor an undercurrent of tension, whether it’s mild irritation or full-blown discord.
For Lauren Moore, a dietitian in Denver, it was the first. She’d fallen in love with her
husband’s short, feisty, bleached-blond mother the minute they met. “Remember in
high school, there was one house ever yone gravitated toward because of the mom?”
says Moore, 28. “That’s her. I can picture her ser ving pizza rolls all night to make sure
the kids and their friends were fed and happy.” Then came the Cookie Jar Incident: “She
visited us and saw an empty cookie jar in our kitchen,” she says. “She told Mike that if I
didn’t want to bake, she could send homemade cookies from Arizona to keep our jar
full. I thought, ‘Oh, shit, this woman is going to be overbearing.’ ”THE NEW
WOM A N
IN YOUR LIFE
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 421TRUNK ARCHIVE