Putting the 'Thanks, Mother-in-Law!' Back in Thanksgiving

All across the country, homes are cleaner than usual this week, if not before the guests arrive then often after — if the guests include a mother-in-law.

The week my mother-in-law comes to visit is always a magical one for me. She rolls up her sleeves, and suddenly my couch reveals its cushions, my carpet ceases to crunch, and my slippers no longer make that peeling-off-a-Band-Aid sound when I walk across the kitchen floor.

Though my standards of housekeeping may be a little more lax than some others' — including most crystal meth peddlers — I do love a clean house, so I am extremely happy when my mother-in-law gets down to business. Hope I'm that agile at 86!

I beam as she does that floor thing. Moping? Mopping? And when she scrubs the toilet, I want to kiss her. (But I wait.) Her cheery way with dirty dishes makes me just as grateful as those people in the Norman Rockwell painting. The one with the turkey. And no candy bar wrappers on the dining room table. But my gratitude, it turns out, is unusual.

"Passive-aggressive!" snarled a woman I'll call Jenny when I asked how she'd describe her mother-in-law's help. While Jenny grudgingly appreciates her mother-in-law coming over — daily — to watch the kids, do the laundry, iron the clothes and clean the house, "It does seem like she's communicating that I'm not a good wife — at least, in the housecleaning department."

That seems a rather harsh judgment of a woman who has taken on the role of servant. But Jenny is not the only woman who thinks like this. Legion are the ladies who groan about the women who raised their husbands: "She can't stop herself from emptying the dishwasher!" "She automatically starts cleaning!" "She plumps the pillows!"

As if that's so evil.

What's going on, I think, is that many of us lasses, liberated though we may be, still hear little voices in the backs of our minds saying, "A woman can be judged by the dust on her dinner." Or whatever it is we're supposed to dust.

But that voice is from another era — an era when most women stayed at home, dusting.

An era that many mothers-in-law hail from. When those older women see dust and whip out damp rags, it can be hard to tell whether this is out of habit, kindness or condemnation. Some daughters-in-law assume the worst.

Now, if Jenny's mother-in-law spent the whole time muttering, "What a no-good slobnik my son married!" well, that would be rotten … unless she was muttering it to herself in an empty house while yanking slimy hairballs out of bathtub drains like the one in our … Uh. Never mind.

Anyway, this mother-in-law issue is not new. My friend Barbie (no relation to Skipper) remembers how upset her mother used to be when her mother-in-law would come over and immediately start scrubbing on her hands and knees.

"This happened every time my grandmother came to visit," Barbie recalled. "And to my mother, it felt like a slap in the face. One day, she finally had it out with her: 'What do you think? I'm such a terrible housekeeper? Why are you doing this to me? Why?'"

Her mother-in-law, a poor immigrant from Russia, was stunned.

"I — I — I do this," she stammered apologetically, "because I have nothing else that I can give you."

Oh.

My guess is that's why most mothers-in-law do it — out of love — and I'm sure that's what motivates mine.

Well, that and the thing in the tub.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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