'In-law' is too unfeeling a term to describe loving relationship

The Boston Herald

I have never called her “Mother.” She isn't my mother. She's my mother-in-law.

Such an awkward, stiff word, as if the law is binding us, as if the vows her son and I took nearly three decades ago are our sole connection.

We had nothing in common when we met, other than loving the same man. I was 18; she was 54. I was Catholic; she was Protestant. I never ironed; she ironed everything, even underwear. I was noisy; she was quiet. I was a Democrat; she was a Republican.

I try to remember the first time I walked into her house. I can see her in the kitchen, baking blueberry muffins, frying sliced tomatoin bacon fat, making cream of mushroom soup, whipping up some icy drink in the blender, laughing at something her husband said, feeding Lance.

I can see her in a pressed skirt and a blouse with straight creases in the sleeves, her silver hair neat, because she was always neat and always in the kitchen cooking or upstairs washing windows or in the sewing room ironing or outside gardening. She was perpetual motion, hurrying to Sydney's to get her hair done, racing to church for choir practice, driving to New York to visit her sister, packing for some trip or unpacking from another.

When did she slow down? When did she first begin to have trouble walking, catching her breath, seeing, keeping her blood pressure down and her blood sugar up? And when did I stop taking her for granted and start appreciating her?

I kept her at a distance for so many years, all the time my mother was alive, because I had a mother and I didn't know you could have two. And when I let her into my heart, it was slowly, bit by bit, and not into the part of my heart that was already taken.

Even now that part remains my mother's. I couldn't give away what will always be hers. But what happens, I think, is that a heart grows as you live. It has to, to accommodate all the people you don't know when you're young, all the people you will someday love: the children you'll have, the grandchildren, the friends you've yet to make, the mother-in-law who will become your confidante, all the people who will come into your life at different times and remain in your heart for always.

She has been in my heart for so long now that I can't remember when she wasn't there, any more than I can remember when we first met or when she grew old. "Like" turned to "love," and "I have to see my mother-in-law" turned into "I want to see my mother-in-law," and one day we just looked at each other and realized it wasn't her son or grandchildren who were linking us.

Take all of them away - and sometimes they all were away, on a business trip, at school, at work, living in another state - and we would still get together for tea or dinner or a trip to the Dairy Queen.

For the last few years we have celebrated Mother's Day quietly. We have sat in her backyard or in mine and devoured lobster and scallops and scones and listened to the birds and watched the world come to life. Hardly exciting, but nice, comfortable. My husband and kids would routinely ask, "Don't you two want to do something?" And we would say no. We were like two old folks, content just to be.

Last December she had her right leg amputated. Four days ago she lost her left one.

She had learned to walk with one leg, to put on a prosthesis and stand and balance and take small, careful steps. She had worked so hard to achieve this independence. Then her good foot got bad, and now she can't walk and she can barely see, glaucoma stealing her sight while the rest of her is fighting just to live. She is in pain and she must be terrified because she's trapped in a body that no longer does all the things it used to and she has such a hard road ahead of her, one that I can't even bear to look down.

You don't get choices, she says. You do what you have to do. She has courage and faith even now.

I don't know where her faith and courage come from. I don't know what sustains her. All I know is that she continues to sustain me.