Meeting the in-Laws

In my entire life I have met ‘the in-laws’ three times. I haven’t married any of their offspring unfortunately or fortunately considering the last encounter turned into a full-blown attack on my personality.

My first experience was surreal, almost like an out of body experience because these old folks discussed me like homework whiles I sat right there. Basically I was invisible. I was 19 years; obviously they didn’t take me serious.

In fact they thought I was a distraction to their ‘baby boy’ as his mum so fondly called him. She looked at me with suspicion, like anytime now I was going to jump on her son, get pregnant and be a burden on her Prince who I had been informed a hundred times that afternoon was heading for Harvard.

For the first time in a long time I really missed my mum. I missed her fussing about me, her worry that I’d turn out okay. She wouldn’t have said I was heading to Harvard but certainly she would have had no problem reminding every Dick Tom and Kofi how incomparable they were to her only jewel. She always said I was a rare beauty and any man was going to be lucky to marry me… If I kept my thighs together of course.

My first in-law encounter took away my self esteem. I was the nobody girl who wanted to destroy the future of somebody’s boy.

He never left for Harvard, got two different girls pregnant within two years and ended up running a small drinking joint in Asylum Down…

My second encounter was almost hilarious. My boyfriend’s father flirted with me from the moment I entered the house until I left and right after that my boy broke up with me because his mother had found texts from his father’s phone to mine professing his love for me.

Now I wasn’t about to tell my boy his father had the hots for me. I didn’t encourage it, in fact I threatened to tell his son but somehow I never got around to it. It was difficult and I didn’t want to loose my most pleasant future mother in-law yet.

After my first experience I was just too happy to be accepted by my second future mother in-law. His mum was sweet, I cooked with her in the kitchen, she liked my suggestions and continuously said I could be the daughter she never had. She had four boys, mine being the third. His father was a dog… And he wasn’t too subtle about it.

I remember he kept telling everybody how beautiful he thought I was and how his boy was too lucky to have me. I could swear I saw my boyfriend warn his father off at one point during these encounters but when those texts were found out they ousted just one person, me.

To my boyfriend, I was a home wrecker.

He left the country about a year after our break-up. He never returned, even for his father’s funeral. According to popular gossip, the man was caught in bed with my ex’s fiancée. Apparently some brides to be are sluttier that us single ones.

My third was an outright disaster… The immediate ex was invited too. It was a family lunch and I was the unlucky guest. Basically my future in-laws had a preference of who they thought their son should marry, his immediate ex-girlfriend. My twat of a boyfriend was confused and so took his one week old girlfriend to meet his parents so they could choose between me and the girl he had dated for five years.

When I realized what was happening it was too late. They said she was just a family friend until the quizzes begun. I was expected to answer questions about this boy I had met barely days ago. His favorite food, his preferred colors, his dreams and aspirations and whether or not I wanted to bear his kids.

Obviously the ex answered them flawlessly. And in his attempt to soften the blow on me, my boyfriend wrote his preferred answers on sheets of paper and passed it under the table to me. I refused to look at them… in fact I told them to go and stick it where they cared and walked out.

Four years later I went into a shop to purchase Christmas cards and run into my ex’s future mother in-law. She didn’t remember me; I decided to keep it that way. I helped her pick some cards and her last words to me were…

I have a son, recently divorced. He would die to meet a lady like you.

“Thelma Louis” is a GhanaCelebrities.Com weekly column with no borders on the speed and distance it will take your imagination, while tackling some of our everyday issues—in reality and in fantasy.

All Thelma Louis’ write up will be filed under her name column-Thelma Louis.