Family matters: Learning to love your in-laws

Boy meets girl. Love blossoms. Boy marries girl — and inherits the in-laws.

The in-laws we acquire can affect our quality of life, from long-term happiness to family life. In “What Do You Want From Me?: Learning How to Get Along With In-Laws,” author and psychologist Terri Apter offers advice on how to ease tension and build healthy relationships with your spouse’s family. Here is an excerpt from chapter 4.

Chapter 4: Why Is It So Hard on the Women?

Ideals and Competition
During 20 years of research on families, I have observed in-laws who love one another, and in-laws who show immense appreciation for what each brings to the family. I have seen in-laws who demonstrate sympathy and stamina for each other’s quirks and demands. I have heard about in-laws who are a source of joy and support. In a myriad of ways, in-law relationships can be filled with love, warmth, and tolerance.

I have also found that any in-law relationship can be difficult in the ways that, for many reasons, only in-law relationships can be — jam-packed with tensions over matters that seem tiny, marked by long-term grudges over passing comments, and triggered by one careless comment or sin of omission. Whether it is a parent-in-law, child-in-law, or sibling-in-law, in-law relationships have their special potential for conflict. But I have also observed that the most heated and persistent problems arise between two women — the wife and the husband’s mother. While 15 percent of mother-in-law/son-in-law relationships have some tension, 60 percent of mother-in-law/daughter-in-law bonds are described by some strong negative term, such as “strained,” “uncomfortable,” “infuriating,” “depressing,” “draining,” “simply awful.”

The intractable problems between the two women in-laws — the wife and the husband’s mother — arise from their similar positions: Each is the primary woman in her primary family. As each tries to establish or protect her status, each feels threatened by the other. “What will I have to relinquish if I respect your position in the family?” and “Will I retain my importance if I acknowledge yours?” signal a vulnerability that can lead to competition over emotive issues about who has more power and more influence in the domestic sphere.

Vulnerability can make apparently minor in-law conflicts feel like storms in the center of our lives. Concern about power and influence, and about the enduring nature of love, is often acted out between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in the context of female roles, particularly that of “good wife,” “good mother,” and, more generally, “good woman.” These roles generate questions that emerge in the pressure cooker of family life, questions that we answer, only to find that our long-sought answers require further amendments and refinements. Contact and conflict with our in-laws press upon sore points of doubt and regret, and many women find themselves enacting global battles between cultural ideals and personal realities on their own domestic turf.

The Domestic Watch
Most of the time, most of the women who collaborated with me in these studies assured me that they had little patience with the ideals that may have dominated the lives of women during the middle part of the last century. The mystique of the perfect mother and the ideal wife, for both mothers-in-law and -daughters-in-law, signals ideals they are likely to relegate to time past. Nevertheless, these so-called defunct ideals became live issues between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Sammi, Tim, and Marge: The Emotional Issue of Housework
Sammi, at the age of thirty-four, is normally comfortable with her domestic lifestyle, but a visit from her mother-in-law, Marge, injects her with self-doubt:

I try to play it cool, and say to myself, “She can just take me as I am.” But as soon as Marge steps through the door I start seeing things that ordinarily don’t bother me one bit. The homey feel in the living room suddenly looks like a train wreck. Marge is never outright critical, but last time she came she took one sorrowful look around the place and said, “You must be awfully busy at work.” I damn near choked on that. What was she doing? Offering me some excuse for the messy house?

I know how important it all is to her. Neat as a pin, she keeps her home. She’s always rushing around, muttering to herself as she cleans up. “Let me save you a job,” she says, and she picks Tim’s clothes out of the dryer and starts folding and smoothing them. Day one, I keep my mouth shut. But day four of her visit, I tell her, “Marge, it’s Tim’s job to iron his own shirts, so you’re not saving me a job, you’re saving Tim a job, and I hope he thanks you.” I never know if she gets it, or if just one more thing has flown out of my mouth to put her in a sulk. Sure, I should follow Tim’s advice and not let it get to me; but that’s easier said than done. She presses on all those sore spots. When she’s around, I catch myself worrying: Is my home downright unwholesome? Am I ruining my kid’s life with this environment? Shouldn’t — you know — shouldn’t the sheets be smooth and straight? Marge doesn’t have to say much to work my mind to that drill.

Like many women I interviewed, Sammi describes a spike in self-doubt in her mother-in-law’s presence. Though Marge denies that she is in any way critical of Sammi, she also says, “Everybody wants a clean and orderly home. When I visit I like to make myself useful, so I help her with that. I know that’s what Tim wants, too, and it’s better for the baby.”

Marge is not alone in her assumptions. A survey of one thousand women showed that 80 percent believed that the standard of cleanliness in a home was an important issue in whether or not they could warm to a daughter-in-law. In some cases this may register simple generational differences. Younger and older women may have very different ideas about what a woman is supposed to do. Someone who believes that you should have a dust-free house, a spotless kitchen, and children who look nice and neat because you’ve washed their clothes will not understand someone who thinks that her career is crucial to who she is, while housework is, to her, just a chore.

But the value a mother-in-law may place on a clean home, or her assumption that the responsibility for household cleanliness is her daughter-in-law’s, does not fully explain responses like those of Sammi — responses that are common, that deeply affect the daughter-in-law’s contentment, not only with her mother-in-law but also with her husband, and with herself.

Unwelcome Mental Inhabitants: The Over-Eye
Mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflict often emerges from an expectation that each is criticizing or undermining the other. As a daughter-in-law, you may believe that your mother-in-law’s domestic routines set a standard that you think she expects you to follow. As a mother-in-law, you may think that your daughter-in-law’s lifestyle implies criticism of your own values and achievements. This mutual unease may have less to do with actual attitudes, and far more to do with persistent female norms that few of us manage to shake off completely.

In her work with women and depression, Dana Crowley Jack identified an internal, nagging observer, and named it the Over-Eye. Social norms are internalized, so that even when we resist them, they may get in our way. For example, the norm that housework is the job of a (good) wife, and that a good home must operate as a clean and neat home, can be activated and make you feel deficient, even when the more conscious and determined part of your mind rejects those assumptions. Cultural associations stick, even when you personally do not endorse them. That is why housework can be so emotionally laden: Who does it well may be a sign of who is caring and loving.

Why Can’t You Just Ignore This?
“Why do you let this bother you?” Tim demands. “You have so much going for you. There’s no reason to feel she’s putting you down. That’s just how she is. Just let it go.”

Tim reminds Sammi that there are things about her parents that bother him, and he just ignores them: Why can’t Sammi do the same with his mother?

Ignoring comments is not an option for women dealing with their in-laws. Women rarely have the knack of switching off their antennae. In-law visits take place within the home, and the home is a testing ground for still-powerful questions about women’s roles and the symbolic value of domestic acts. Whether it’s remembering a nephew’s birthday or pouring the milk into a jug before setting it on the table, small, apparently insignificant gestures can take on meaning, or become points over which meaning is teased out. When women of different families become, in law, one family, each can trigger the other’s dormant anxieties about norms within the home.

Carol, Gillian, and Paul: Praise as Control
Reminders of female domestic norms can ignite anger that may seem inexplicable and irrational to others. Carol, forty-three, feels threatened by her mother-in-law’s praise. “You’ve done a lovely job on this kitchen. My, those curtains are adorable” and “That pot roast was something else. You just have to tell me how you do it,” Carol mimics her mother-in-law, Gillian, and sighs. “And the next thing I know Gillian’s talking about her other daughter-in-law, how wonderful she is, how she’s done these marvelous things with her children or her house, or how she gave her a super-duper present or said something really nice to her. My husband says that she’s just talking, just giving us the family news, just trying to be nice. But you can’t convince me it’s ‘just’ that.”

Gillian cannot fathom the source of her daughter-in-law’s unease. “That woman is ornery,” she tells me. “You never know how she’s going to jump. No way of knowing what’s going to calm her down and what’s going to wind her up.”

Carol feels criticized when her mother-in-law praises her, because she thinks Gillian’s “praise” marks out a hierarchy of values and her own low score on that value system. Gillian is unaware of this possible interpretation, and is unable to crack the code of her daughter-in-law’s responses.

“You Raised Him Like This”: It’s Easier to Blame His Mother
Husbands are under pressure to change — to put more time into running the home and caring for their children, to revise their expectations of a wife’s role both within the home and at work, to learn new ways of sharing and connecting. Some men have to unlearn patterns they learned from their parents’ allocation of domestic work. Some women, as daughters-in-law, blame their husband’s mother for their partner’s resistance to change; and some women, as mothers-in-law, feel that a daughter-in-law’s complaints about a son’s behavior denigrate the domestic habits they themselves value.

At the same time, many mothers-in-law insist that they have done their best to raise sons to be new men, that they have encouraged their son to respect women’s careers and to take on a fair share of domestic tasks. They are confounded by a daughter-in-law’s view that they have failed.

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