Chapter 1: The Woman Who Never Lifted a Finger
My mother-in-law treats my mom's lake house like a free luxury resort — we put up with it all summer, but when she told my mother to move her own geraniums because they were blocking her view from the lounger, I decided she needed a lesson she'd remember.
We got married in the spring, and this was the first summer our families spent time together.
My mother has a little place by the lake.
The first time my husband's parents came up, she was nervous for a week.
She bought new sheets.
She wanted everything to be perfect, because in her head we married into each other now and this is family.
The weather's held, so we've been going up most weekends since June.
I'm sitting on that porch as I type this.
And here's what every single one of those weekends looks like.
My mom is up at six.
Coffee.
Breakfast for six people.
Cleans it up.
Beds, towels, and a forty-minute round trip to the store because Susan doesn't eat regular mayonnaise.
Then she cooks dinner.
Susan — my mother-in-law — arrives, walks through the house, and settles into the lounger on the deck with her iced tea and her phone.
That's it.
That's her weekend.
All summer, she has not once asked if she could help.
Not once.
She's never carried a plate to the sink.
Never chopped an onion.
She doesn't even take her own coffee cup in.
And at some point she stopped saying thank you.
That's the part that actually got me.
Last weekend my mom put out new flower boxes along the deck rail.
Geraniums.
She'd been looking forward to it — she showed me pictures of them on her phone in the car.
Susan came out with her tea, sat down, looked at them and said:
"Oh.
No, these are all wrong here.
I'm lying right here and they're blocking my whole view of the water.
Don't do that again."
Don't do that again.
In my mother's house.
About my mother's flowers.
From the lounger my mother put a cushion on that morning.
My mom said, "Oh — I didn't think of that," and started moving them.
She moved her own flowers.
While that woman watched.
I know my mother.
She's soft and she'll swallow anything to keep the peace, especially for me.
That's exactly why I'm not swallowing it.
And I didn't want a fight either.
That's my husband's mother.
I have to sit across from her at Christmas for the next thirty years.
But you don't get to speak to somebody's parent like that.
Not in her own house.
Not while she's cooking your dinner.
Shouting wouldn't have done anything.
She'd have gone home and told everyone how I att@cked her.
So I didn't say a word to her that night.
I went into the bedroom, took out my phone and set an alarm for five in the morning.
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What did she do at 5am — and did Susan ever see it coming?
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