by Lois Mcmillan

Created on: December 25, 2007   Last Updated: July 07, 2008

"You are cordially invited to dinner at Milhalldown Plantation at 8:00 p.m."

My first introduction to my future in-laws was this engraved invitation to a sit-down wedding rehearsal dinner given by my future in-laws for one of their closest friend's daughter. I was absolutely trembling during the hour-long drive because I was fearful of not making that good first impression. Having to make it while meeting 75 of my future family's friends and associates (strangers to me) all in one evening was terrifying beyond words.

My inlaws knew I had been a church organist for my teenage years and thoughtfully, I suppose, seated me at a small table for four with my fiance, the Presbyterian minister and his wife. Our table was near the bar, which had been set up in the Library of the plantation, and after a few scotches and soda, I began to warm to the occasion. The minister and my fiance told hilarious jokes, and stories of their hunting and fishing exploits. The evening turned into a wonderfully surreal and memorable adventure.

So, it was into this atmosphere that I was drawn into the fairy-tale world of being engaged to a charming man with a charming family who had no negative qualities at all.

This dream world was shattered at Christmas five years after my marriage when my mother-in-law (having had too much to drink as usual) announced across the long banquet table in the 12 foot ceiling formal dining room that she had always wished "Tom had married someone rich and beautiful!" What a blow; a conversation stopper. His baby-sister looked at her mother with sheer disbelief on her face saying, "Mother, what on earth would make you say something like that? Have you lost your mind?" These drunken soires of my mother-in-law were more often interjected with hugs and gifts and statements that "You're more a daughter to me than my own three daughters could ever be." Oh, what a schizo relationship the two of us had. I never let her walk over me as she did her own children with threats that she would "cut them out of the Will!" I refused the gift of the plantation because to have lived in that place would have denied me my own being and space. I know that their dream was for us to move in and live there with them. An outsider would not understand the prison that would be for me.

On the other hand, no one could have ever asked for a kinder father-in-law than mine. The grandchildren called him 'Big Daddy'. He was a physicist with a brilliant, analytical mind. Even before I married his

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