My mother had a terrible relationship with her mother-in-law, and she was certain she was going to do everything differently when I got married. She did everything differently and still managed to have a pretty bad relationship with her daughter-in-law for most of the rest of her life. It was sad. Neither woman really appreciated how much they had in common (unfortunately, that included a strong sense of always being right), and they constantly rubbed each other the wrong way. My wife felt by turns excluded from my birth family (my sisters never married or even had long term relationships, so my wife was the only outsider) and smothered by it. My mother could be very demanding, in contrast to her own mother who was at times almost ego-less.
There was definitely competition between the mothers, which didn’t help. My mother was threatened by the fact that all my children’s first cousins were on my wife’s side, and her mother had a vacation home large enough to hold everyone. Her mother was threatened by my mother’s big personality and much greater resources, and by her large, snobby, and demanding extended family.
So now we have a son-in-law and daughter-in-law, and we’re determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past and . . . we’ll see how that goes.
Things are relatively easy with our son-in-law. We sense he doesn’t particularly like us, but his social skills are so good, and his sense of fairness so acute, that his personal opinion hardly matters. He’s always gracious and enthusiastic with us, and he’s willing to give us an appropriate amount of time. Plus he loves our daughter (we have that in common!) and they are great together. We try to be gracious and enthusiastic back, with him and with his parents and siblings. We hope to have a deeper relationship over time, but things are fine for now.
With our daughter-in-law, there are more shoals. In theory, we’ve known her much longer than our son-in-law, but we have spent far less time with her. For most of our son’s and her involvement pre-marriage, they lived in different (though close) cities, and she was in medical school. Her time off was largely devoted to her own large, active extended family, and she had basically promised her parents (who were not so happy about her relationship with my son) not to travel with him. So we hardly ever saw her. If we were visiting him, she didn’t come see him that weekend. When he visited us, he came alone. We heard a lot about her from him, but we didn’t actually have a personal relationship with her.
She comes from a filial-duty culture, and she’s very close to her own parents. She wants to be close to us – and we to her – but it’s clear that just being in the appropriate relationship and having good will isn’t the same as real closeness. We said something around the time of their wedding, and both we and she are trying hard to create appropriate opportunities simply to spend time together and to get to know one another some. It’s a long process.
Of course, children (none yet, but that will change) and the vicissitudes of life are likely to throw a wrench into these processes.
It’s got to be hard on my sister, because as wonderful as they usually are, my folks haven’t been able to hide their feelings.