Everyone wants to live happily ever after after they say “I do”, but it isn’t always easy when you don’t get on with the other side of the family. Happily, there’s a secret to making it work.
When you marry, you don’t just marry a person. You marry a family. Your simple “I do” is enough to introduce you to a whole new set of histories, connections, and relationships.
If all goes well, your married life will be enriched by these new horizons. If not, well, that’s what mother-in-law jokes are for. Funnily enough, you hardly ever hear a father-in-law joke, which is a bit of a joke in itself.
But seriously, as the saying goes, if in-laws were outlawed, only outlaws would have in-laws. So where does that leave the rest of us?
To find out, our Iris Session host, David O’Sullivan, invited two special guests, radio presenter and author Sam Cowen, and actress and entrepreneur Hlubi Mboya, into the BrightRock studio to share their reflections and reminiscences of life with the in-laws.
For Sam, whose books delve candidly into the joys and travails of motherhood, the cliché of the “difficult” mom-in-law rang true from the start.
“I married into a very proper family, tea at half past three every day,” says Sam. “My mother-in-law made it very clear that she disapproved of me. She worried that my husband, Martin, would marry someone who wasn’t very proper. She gave me a book once on how to be a good Catholic wife.”
Sam and her mom-in-law disagreed on everything, politics in particular, which left her father-in-law to act as the “UN peacekeeping force” in the family, striving to find neutral topics that wouldn’t lead to a fight.
Still, Sam found herself “boiling with resentment” at the tensions in the family dynamic, even as she tried hard to fit the strict template of a “proper” wife: “I tried to bake, I wore long skirts, I knitted in public, because she knitted in public.”
It was only much later that Sam came to realise the secret of a good relationship with her mother-in-law. Compromise, tempered with empathy and understanding. “The important thing was for me to realise that she wasn’t going to change. I always say, do you want results, or do you want to be right?” says Sam.
Happily, she was finally able to reconcile with her mother-in-law, and she now has fond memories of watching old-fashioned musicals on TV with her: “I would watch the same movies with her, over and over again. That was the way I could show her that I loved her.”
For Hlubi, negotiating the in-law divide has been made somewhat easier by the fact that her Scottish husband Kirsten’s parents “are both not on the continent”. But she quickly makes it clear that this is just an in-law joke, and she actually gets on very well with them.
“It’s a beautiful relationship that we have,” she says. “I do have respect for them, and I make their son happy.”
While both sides of the family only manage to get together during the holidays, Hlubi especially enjoys her time with her mom-in-law: “We’re very similar. We’re both Pisces, we’re both creative, and she was very much an activist in her day and age. It’s just two women, loving the same guy.”
Yes, she does have the occasional argument with her in-laws, admits Hlubi, “but by the time they’re at the airport, I want to have left things in peace.” And as for our Iris Session host? Well, maybe he’s got it all figured out.
“I’m the older dad, always,” says David, who was 39 when he got married. “It was easier for me to establish a relationship with my father-in-law. We connected almost immediately. I wasn’t the son-in-law, I was the buddy-in-law.”
*For more advice and insights on living with the in-laws, watch the full Iris Session.
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