The best of mothers-in-law always sees in you an intruder, a rival, a man who has robbed her of her daughter, and since she is good she will not worry you; but she will make scenes of jealousy; she will not plot against you with your wife, but will swallow so much bitterness day by day in the secret silence of her house as to enlarge her liver, so that some day or other her moral jaundice will be scattered through the atmosphere of your home, and you too will feel the bitterness.
I understand and am indulgent. That bitterness is distilled from the deepest and most delicate regions of the heart. To have loved a daughter for twenty or thirty years, to have brought her into the world with pain, to have suckled her with spasms, to have educated her with a wise love, after having breathed the same air, eaten at the same table, shared bread and tears; and then for the first comer, just because he wears trousers and has an impudent moustache, to rob her of all that treasure with an arrogance as if he claimed and took his own—that is hard. And as if that were not enough, the daughter, the angel of her domestic temple, runs after the trousers and moustaches, and goes away, abandoning her mother’s and her own house, as if she were leaving a room at an hotel in which she had passed the night.
Let us be just! Who will dare to throw the first stone at that poor woman, the pitiable mother? Who would dare ill treat her if she asked as a charity the favour that her daughter’s new home should be near hers, if she implored you to allow her to visit her often? Man is egotistic and feels paternity less than woman, but even if only in a slight degree he ought to understand the hidden hell of a mother-in-law who has to watch her daughter leave her own nest.
The marriage of a loved daughter is an event expected and desired, but it is like a birth, a blessing accompanied by tremendous pain. Elect natures feel the pain, but do not show it, lest they should give pain to others, and never convert it into hate.
Others, on the contrary, transform every drop of bitterness which they swallow into a feeling of vengeance, which they ruminate on for some time and hatch with cruel patience, to launch it against you when least you expect it.
I may suppose you to be patient and good, to be an optimist in your philosophy; you will be deaf to the most mellifluous insinuations, you will say Thank you when your foot is trodden on, and Thank you for the rhubarb lozenge which will be offered you—in short, you will take the points from all the darts launched against you; but there will come a day in which patience, goodness, philosophy, will be scattered to the wind, and you, with so much repressed wrath, will burst out all at once, and placing yourself before your wife, will say:
“There must be an end to all this; it must be either I or her!”
The proverbs of all European languages, the satires of the poets, the wit of dramatists, have always agreed in compassionating the sons-in-law, and hurling darts against the mothers-in-law. This experience of many centuries has taught us that a good mother-in-law is very rare, and that in marriage she is an element most pregnant with danger, most fruitful in disaster.
From all this we ought to learn two things:
1st. Before taking a wife to study the character of the future mother-in-law well, and to try and discover whether we shall find in her an angel or a harpy, an ally or an enemy.