My Mother In Law Moved In After A Fire Until I Uncovered The Truth

You know that moment in a relationship, when everything has been going so well for so long that you actually start to get nervous, start waiting for the other shoe to drop, start wondering when and how something is finally going to go wrong?

Well. For my husband and me, the wrong turned out to be his mother.

Judy.

There were entire years where I was fairly certain that Judy was the devil’s right hand woman. On my darker days, I wasn’t sure she wasn’t the devil herself.

And don’t get me wrong. I tried. I genuinely, sincerely tried, for a long time, harder than anyone in my life would have given me credit for. I wanted to be the good daughter in law, the kind people talk about at family gatherings with a warm little smile, the kind other women envy. I came into my marriage fully prepared to love my husband’s mother, to build something with her, to be family in the real sense of the word.

I invited her shopping, early on, back when I still believed the problem was just that we didn’t know each other well enough. I thought that if we spent some real time together, just the two of us, she’d finally see me as an actual person, a real part of the family instead of the woman who’d taken her son. But every single time I made the effort, I came home regretting it, feeling smaller than when I’d left.

“Oh, dear,” she’d say, looking me over as we walked through the mall, “are you eating enough? You’re looking a little frail. A little washed out. You should really take better care of yourself now that you’ve got a husband to think about.”

And then, the very next outing, without any apparent memory of the first: “You’ve put on some weight, haven’t you? Around the middle, I mean. Nothing drastic. But maybe a little diet would do you some good. You want to keep him interested.”

It was as though she had a personal mission, a quiet dedicated project, to find and catalog every possible flaw in me. If I was too thin, she said so. If I gained three pounds, she noticed within the hour. If I cooked, the seasoning was off. If I ordered takeout, I was lazy and no wonder her son looked tired. There was no version of me that would have satisfied her, because the dissatisfaction was never really about me. It was about the fact that I existed at all, that I had married her son, that I stood between her and the one relationship in her life she had fully controlled…