An Untold Modern Love Story: My monstrous mother-in-law?

This week I ran a three-hour workshop on Picturing Mothers, where together we looked at visual representations of the feminine/maternal/caregiver throughout history.

We talked about wet nurses and childcare practitioners, mothers divine and mundane. We talked about ambivalence & rebelliousness, unruly bodies & absent fathers.

Here’s some feedback from a couple of the attendees:

I absolutely loved it! It was a brilliant overview of representations of the mother/feminine in art history, drawing out key themes and the way you set up the activities and hosted the discussion was very accessible to people without any art history background. The 3 hour format worked really well, though I could happily have attended three days on this!

So enjoyed it! Joined while doing lots of busy mothering and thoroughly loved listening to everyone. xx

I thoroughly enjoyed the images and the inspired conversation.

I always get nervous before this kind of thing, especially when it’s my own thing, outside of my institutional teaching. But I also love it and learn more every time I run such a session.

And today, I came away thinking about another mother-figure.

The butt of so many jokes, the person who has launched a thousand despairing Mumsnet threads, the meddling, belittling, overbearing and always disapproving presence in the extended family: the mother-in-law.

Portrait of Madame Charles-Pierre Pécoul, mother-in-law of the artist, by Jacques-Louis David, 1784, oil on canvas

Night had quite lifted over the Ponte di Rialto as I crouched next to my mother-in-law, pressing tissues to her forearm.

‘Just sit,’ I told her firmly, as I knelt beside her, one foot pressing up against my daughter’s buggy to stop it rolling away. D had insisted on accompanying us to the airport to see us off. But in the dim dawn light she had tripped over a flood barrier while shuttling back and forth between piers, increasingly panicked that we might miss my flight.

This was the first time in ten years I had spoken to her sharply.

She pushed my hand away, insisting she was fine, but the strip of skin hanging from wrist to elbow told otherwise.

Minutes later, at the back of the boat, we apologised. My daughter watched us closely, gumming on a piece of croissant.

***

It didn’t start like this. I recall the ice-cold moment of dread ahead of meeting my potential future mother-in-law for the first. My boyfriend was checking his emails in our third floor Phnom Penh apartment that often smelt of grilled meat and engine oil wafting up from the street below.

‘She says she’s arriving on Thursday,’ he told me. ‘Siem Reap for a week, then onto Vietnam. She says she doesn’t mind if we can’t see her.’

I turned from where I sat in front of the fan, still damp from the shower, aghast. ‘If your mum is flying to Cambodia next week, we have to see her,’ I shrieked, as my mind began working out how to reschedule our work and holiday plans so we could travel the 300km from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to meet her on her arrival.

For the whole six-hour bus ride up to Siem Reap (gateway town for Angkor Wat and where I lived for years), I wondered: what kind of woman would announce an impulsive trip to Cambodia as a fait accompli?

An apothecary gives a dangerous medicine to a man harbouring murderous thoughts about his mother-in-law. Colour photomechanical reproduction of a lithograph, c. 1900. Wellcome Collection

I pictured the kind of monstrous narcissistic mother-in-law so culturally ingrained from decades of stand-up jokes and sitcoms. I thought of those horror stories shared on internet forums of the aging matriarch who can’t let go. I pictured a life of intrusion, unannounced visits, controlling vibes.

I had other fears too. During our time in Cambodia together, conversations with my boyfriend about our future had turned from the tentative to the granular. ‘You can say when we have children, not if’, he told me.

I had wanted to be a mother for so long. But the idea was also everything I feared deep in my gut. Motherhood, I was sure, meant a shrinking of life and a permanent pause on all adventure. All my dreams would telescope down and stay that way, a fading of myself to eventual invisibility.

This was not a very feminist vision. But it was also something culture had taught me. Youth is the prize; nothing good ever happens over fifty. By the time any future children had left home, I would be a woman in her sixties. Whose life expands in her sixties?

But, my mother-in-law was to show me otherwise.

The day she landed, I sat opposite her in a tuk-tuk, our knees almost touching, my eyes darting between her face and my boyfriend’s, noticing the way their noses curved identically. She was so petite, folded neatly into the seat in a drapey linen dress, her lipstick just so and ready for an adventure.

Two days later, the three of us went for a glass of wine in a newly opened bar in Battambang, a small Cambodian city famous for its colonial shopfronts and artistic heritage. We sat in generous rattan armchairs on the street, an upright fan hastily arranged at our sides. We chatted politely about travel and our teaching jobs.

After that first glass, my boyfriend excused himself and crossed the narrow street back to the hotel. D and I ordered a bottle of wine. I learned about her life as a mother of four children. She told me that her first trip outside of Europe took place when she was in her fifties: she told me about riding through Thailand on motorbikes. She travelled to India frequently, on her own, sometimes in tour groups. She owned an enviable wardrobe of vintage kimonos and Indian cotton dresses.

Two empty bottles of wine, the barman slipped away, reappearing with what might have been the last bottle of white wine in town. Any pre-meeting fears had evaporated.

I don’t recall if we finished that last bottle of wine, but I do remember her small frame against me as we made our way across the deserted road, guiding her up several flights of stairs, her arm hooked through mine. I remember trying and failing not to wake my boyfriend, and the tablet of milk thistle she passed me the next morning as we set off on a 350km taxi ride back to Siem Reap.

I was in love for a second time, this time with my mother-in-law and also the picture she allowed me to conjure of my womanhood.

Because, three years later, my now-husband and I had our first baby. My heart swelled and, as I had predicted, my life shrank in certain ways. During the pandemic we made the sensible move from London to the mid-sized English town where I grew up. A place with a gorgeous embankment and good transport links, but still, it represented an end to decades of travel and living overseas. My days involved crawling on the floor to pick up discarded sandwich crusts, chasing toddlers around with a potty, and somewhere between all the supermarket trips, carving out time to work and to write.

And I kept bracing myself for the inevitable intrusion or criticism from the woman who had raised four children before me and probably knew better. That’s what mothers-in-law did, right?

The Visit of the Mother in Law, Erskine Nicol RSA ARA, 1860

Instead, she took me out for cake, sent me massage vouchers for my birthday, and still arrives for pre-arranged visits with a bag of wine and edible treats. She never judges the state of my house and would be horrified if she thought I’d ever felt the need to deep-clean on her account.

When I was pregnant with my second child and worrying how much more of myself would be left in the aftermath, she invited me to spend a week with her at the Venice Biennale the following year. ‘You can look at art, I’ll watch the baby,’ she’d said, as if it were the most obvious arrangement in the world.

It made a certain sense; she had been tutoring students for years to fund annual stints in Venice and India, moving through the world entirely on her own terms.

Through her, I am rewriting what I imagined for my own life. She has offered me an alternative, a widening of the world and an example of someone truly coming into her own self. Through her, I am better able to love myself too.

That morning at the dock in Venice, it was clear my love for her son had opened the door to a second, unexpected love story. I already have a wonderful mother who I love in all ways and who is a role model to me in ways I can’t begin to articulate. My mother-in-law has a beautiful relationship with her own daughter. Whatever daughter-in-law/mother-in-law relationship we have is a bonus; an extra rather than a replacement for anything.

I am beyond fortunate to have both my own mum and a mother-in-law who cherish me and I adore them both right back. (To outline what my own mum means to me is currently beyond my capabilities as a writer. ) My husband and my own mother have a wonderful relationship of their own.

I am often giddy with my good fortune.

And, when we made it to the airport in Venice and she finally allowed me to take her to the first-aid counter, and it wasn’t only my rusty Italian that led me to refer to her as mia madre. Because, she is. A different sort of mothering perhaps, but one that has nurtured something else within me.