It was many years ago, but I recall the day before my mother-in-laws birthday as if it were yesterday.
My daughter was just a babybarely four and a half months old, and the world seemed all a muddle. At first, shed invited us to her house for a modest celebration, and wed arranged for my own mother to mind the little one. Then, rather abruptly, my mother-in-law changed her mind. She wanted instead to come with my father-in-law and my daughter, to celebrate right under our very roof. Paying for a grand dinner at The Kings Arms simply wasnt possiblenot with our circumstancesand neither my husband nor I were keen, nor was she. They were frugal folks, never ones for show or excess.
Why she chose to mark her birthday in our modest flat, I truly couldnt tell. Perhaps to unsettle me, to cast me in the part of an inept hostess, perhaps to unite the family beneath a single roofor perhaps to resolve the silent contest that had simmered between us since the day we met, and had only grown colder after my daughters birth. Part of me fancied that she hoped to mend things, but the way she went about it was simply wrong. She never spoke an insult, but she had struck me in her own way, and whatever old warmth once lingered for her in my heart had quietly vanished. Now I saw plainly, beneath every polite smile, what she thought of me.
I never barred her from visiting her grandchild, though Id no sense she truly wished to come. Each week, Id ask my husband if his mother wanted to see her granddaughter, so it was clear I wasnt standing in the way. Yet, a meeting always seemed awkward, stilted. She remembered, I guessed, her unkind words; I remembered them too.
Yes, my family was what some would call on the rough edgemy father and sister were fond of drink, but what of it? I was still a person. She need not scoff at my wish to sleep in a little later on Sundays, if my baby let me. Those brief mornings were a treasureno need to rise at half six to fix my husbands tea. If she and her husband were coming, plans always shifteda flurry of messages, never settledand every time I heard a key rattling in the lock, my heart would leap and Id wish to bolt.
Time and again, she would foist upon me the reminder that the flat was hers, and her rules held sway. I understood, of course, but as long as I lived there, I felt I might as well wander about in my dressing gown and unbrushed hair, and she ought respect that. Back then, at least to my mind, good manners mattered. No decent landlord would enter without a knock, even if it was their property. Her behaviour was always an unsubtle reminder that I was but a guest, regardless of circumstance.
Things between us were strained, largely because she hadnt wished to know me even after her son proposed; when we registered our intent at the registry office, she called me again and again, unableor unwillingto believe it. She would not meet me, not at her home, nor at a café. Of course, she never guessed she was my first serious companion.
Our first encounter was accidental, after my husband and I had known each other five months. He introduced me, but she barely tried to hide her disdain. I barely saw my father-in-lawon our wedding day and never again. Perhaps that explains why, deep down, I held no fondness for her.
Pretending was never my strong suit, although Ive managed when pressed. But in her case, Id no intention of feigning warmth. While it was technically still her flat, she had gifted it to my husband, and the rest seemed moot. She came to me, a day after I left hospital, and sharp as a blade, belittled me for my family, for depending on her sonthough I had done nothing but love him. How can a woman in her fifties speak so to a daughter-in-law, bringing cruelty to a young mother who only wished for peace and comfort?
It wasnt guests themselves I minded, but hosting her unsettled me. Helping a woman who held me in low regard lay the table, dashing between my infant and the kitchen, all the while longing for it to end. Still, for courtesys sake, I had bought her a little gift.
And that, I look back now, was how things were: an uneasy peace, fragile as a china cup. The years have tempered the memory, for better or worse.
