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.