by Maureen Webb

Created on: July 23, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Somethings funny here. My mother-in-law is a two way street. She is nice when she wants to be and she is also mean when she wants to be.
Since I live with her it is even harder to keep the peace. She owns her house which is good, but she wants to sell it so she can go to another state to be with her boyfriend. I can understand where she is coming from. If I were separated from my husband(her son,) who lived in another state, I would be anxious.

I am taking care of my two boys who are five and six, so it starts to come clear why anyone would be upset with the whole situation. I can't drive so I have to get rides into town which is about forty miles away. We have to plan carefully and we can't forget anything. We go about once a week, sometimes once every two weeks, depending on our food status.
She will do nice things for me all the time, little things. I notice them though. She'll buy a small article of clothing that's on sale for me. She will take me to the dollar theater to see a movie once in a while if we don't have a million things to do in town. Once, we went to the mall and we ate lunch there. She took the boys and I to an ice cream party. When she had to go to the airport for a trip out-of-state, she let my husband use the car while she was gone. Then when she got back, she treated us all to a nice meal at a restaurant near the airport. So she can be nice.
When she gets upset, stay out of the way! She yells when she is upset and will screech and beg us to treat her house like it were a nice house and not to break anything else. When she gets home from a trip or from going to town, she will say that her house is destroyed if the floor isn't vacuumed, if I didn't finish washing the dishes, or if the boys didn't pick up a small amount of toys. She started yelling at the boys for putting too much toilet paper down the toilet, when they weren't putting any in (they were afraid they would get in trouble so the stuff they wiped with went into a trash can next to the toilet.) She has a septic tank so we do need to be careful. I just don't think she has to go to extremes.
She yelled at my youngest boy for something he didn't even do. This has been a growing trend with her, if something breaks, blame it on the little guy. Since this has happened often, he now lies openly with no remorse because she lies about him doing the bad deed. It could have been the cat or dog and she would see it but still blame it on him. She will make a great meal for adults, but get upset if the boys don't eat it (a lot of the meals would be extra spicy and I would try to explain to her that the boys have more sensitive tongues, but she would not listen to me.) So later I would have to fix a meal that they can actually eat and she would get upset because I don't instantly clean up the mess or she would complain that she will be in the kitchen all day cleaning up my messes.
Am I not capable of cleaning up my own messes? I've done it before, it's not a problem. My husband says she just finds things to complain about and I think he's right. I had the house spic and span when she came home after a month long trip and she got upset because she thought I didn't water the grass in one spot of the yard. It had just been over 100' outside for the last week and I had watered the yard every day sometimes twice a day. So I have found that I just have to keep it at a level playing field and things will go smoother. She is nice when she wants to be, and she's also mean when she wants to be, especially when someone is living with her.

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