In Defense of Your Problematic Mother-in-Law
No wonder our foremothers are doing the spiritual equivalent of driving through the living room at Christmas Eve dinner.
In blackjack, a hand of any 10 plus a 7 is referred to colloquially as the mother-in-law hand. The reason for this is twofold. First, players with a “hard 17” can’t draw a card to improve their hand, as very few cards take a 17 to 21 without overshooting. They also will lose to common hands of 18 or better. The mother-in-law name is a little joke about this misfortune: “you don’t want it, and you can’t get rid of it.” I am thinking a lot, these days, about matriarchs—women who have raised their babies—and what happens after the baby-raising. There are endless pop culture tropes about “the mean mother of grown children”: the mother-in-law who won’t accept her son’s fiancee, the mother who critiques her daughter’s parenting and style until they are both in tears, and more. If you watched The Bear, you will recall matriarch Donna Barzotto (played expertly by Jamie Lee Curtis), seething quietly, then loudly, as she prepares dinner for her ungrateful clan. The episode ends as she, in mounting desperation no one notices until it’s far too late, drunkenly drives a car through the side of the house during Christmas Eve dinner.
Reading any internet forum, or even talking with my own friends, it’s clear that art imitates life (if generally less extreme). These figures are intelligible to us because we know them, or know of them. In my friend group chats, it’s common to discuss the elder women who both reassure and bedevil us. We are all so reasonable, we tell each other, we will never turn into this stereotype. We will be different, and better. It isn’t lost on me that these mothers who haunt our cultural consciousness, if not our every holiday dinner, did not spring this way from the ether. If group chats were a thing in their day, my sense is they would have made a similar promise, quite sincerely. Why is it, then, that it’s so common for women of a certain age and stage to go from revered and praised domestic perfection to a hated footnote?
