We went to my in-laws for Thanksgiving.  When we got there, we found out that my mother-in-law should probably have been to the doctor instead, but she refused.  Apparently, she was not going to miss Thanksgiving with the grandkids to spend it in the hospital with a bunch of tubes in her instead.  Not a shock, I suppose.

     My mother-in-law has always seemed to draw her strength from family and from her faith.

     She’s very smart, but sort of a concrete thinker.  More whimsical or flight-of-fancy-type things make her uncomfortable, but she soldiers gamely on through all sorts of science fiction and fantasy movies and such for the sake of her grandchildren.

     While she values academics, she seems to view intellectualism with suspicion and derision.  She was openly dismissive of my determination to finish my degree after I was married to her son, until one day when we were having a discussion about it on one of our outings, and a little old lady nearby interrupted and said “I was always so glad I finished my degree because my husband died young, and I had to go to work to support my children, and that would have been much harder without my degree.”

     I never got any more guff for pursuing my degree.  In fact, my mother-in-law was the loudest voice cheering for me at graduation, but it was still difficult for us to find things to talk about that didn’t result in one or both of us getting annoyed, offended, or bored.

     She’s always tried to be helpful to me, and share with me the “best practices” that her superior experience had brought to her.  What other purpose could it have, after all?  She’d worked so hard to learn these things, and here I was, a young bride just starting out.  And make no mistake; if My Mother-in-law went on the Home and Garden Channel, or any of those other places where homemaking, cooking, crafting, budgeting, homemaking skills were featured, Martha Stewart would have to hide her face in shame.

     My mother-in-law can tell you, without pausing in a game of cards, EXACTLY where to find a pint of home-made apple butter, or a scrap of yellow-ish off-white fabric with a cornflower blue flower pattern on it.  The house is filled with cabinets and shelves, and trick sliding panels laden with piles and boxes and stashes of just about everything you might ever need.  They are orderly, out of sights, and dust-free.  Reams and reams of fabric are organized by cut-size, pattern size, color and shade…all cross-referenced in her head so she can find the perfect piece when needed.  Every kind of vegetable you can grow in a garden in Minnesota, whether canned, pickled or frozen is represented, and it’s exact location describable from memory at a moment’s notice.

     Spare clothes for the grand-children can be found, clean, perfectly sized, and ready to wear in any emergency or weather conditions.

     All of the grandchildren (including our God-daughter) have a spare toothbrush, labeled with their name, waiting for them in case they forget.

     Her focus is laser-tight.  Everything she has ever done has benefited her family.  Every hobby has increased the appearance and livability of their home and their lives, and it shows.  She once admonished me to “never have any hobby you can’t drop at a moment’s notice.”  She never saw any point to hobbies or pass-times that didn’t produce some useful outcome.

     Hence, the rub that set us at odds for a good decade-and-a-half.

     She would admonish me with advice about how to run a household.  Thing is, I’d already learned.  I’d been helping my mom and my aunt to run their households for years as a child.  I’d learned from my grandmas how to run a household, and they ran things very differently from my Mother-in-law.

     Our family lived very different lives than Rocky’s family had.  Not better, not worse, just more familiar.  I had no idea that there were families like theirs, focused on living an ordered, measured, focused existence.

     I hadn’t known that there were families where the kids didn’t all have four or five different activities, where the children didn’t go to school dances, and have over-nights with friends, and a very very heavy involvement in almost every church activity that could be imagined.

     The homes of my family were managed to get housework done and out of the way so that we could get on with “real stuff” like dance, karate, ice skating, music, gymnastics, swimming lessons; so we could get to the church for the youth group meeting and help elderly people rake their leaves; so we could get this rhubarb crisp to the church for the Nelson funeral.

     The things my mother-in-law saw as a sacred trust, a spiritual gift to her family, and an art form in and of itself, I saw as important stuff that had to be done before you could do “real” stuff.

     Needless to say, I think she may have taken my approach to home-making as an insult and a repudiation of her whole life and value system.  I KNOW I took what seemed to be her constant helpfulness as being a particularly invasive form of criticism, but more than that, as an attempt to force me into a mold that I could never fit.

     I could have reacted better.  Well, I couldn’t have…but someone with a better temperament and a better inter-personal skill set than I had at the time would have.

     But that’s all behind us now.  She’s on her second round in her fight with cancer, and it’s been much harder than the first time.  Chemo, dialysis, sleepless night due to discomfort...but she put on nice clothes, a full face of make-up, a necklace that I bought for her a couple of years ago, and a big smile.  She rebuffed her husband’s thoughts that she should go to the doctor just to be on the safe side to get some symptoms checked out, and she got her Thanksgiving dinner with her family.

     She watched the video we brought of Grasshopper’s orchestra concert, and she saw the verve with which he enjoyed the act of performing, his concentration, and his obvious pride at accomplishment.  She talked to the kids about their many friends and social interactions, and to Adventure Boy about his up-coming band concert.  They talked about Kung Fu and their new belts, and I think she understands (or certainly, has found a way to accept) why I do things the way I do.

     I saw the way she put on her best face every day and played games and visited with the kids even though she probably should have called us, told us not to come, and gone to the doctor for some tests instead.  I saw the way she relished our company, made great noises about the culinary exploits that were my apple and pumpkin pie (never mentioning that the pumpkin pie could have had more ginger in it…even though I KNOW darn well is should have, and even though I’m pretty sure her ability to enjoy the flavor is greatly diminished).  I watched her household continue to run like the well-oiled, hand-crafted, custom-build machine that it is, even under the ham-fisted ministrations of her husband, and I saw the results of a life well-lived; on her terms, to her values, and exactly the way she wanted it.