Strollerderby : mother-in-law

Toddler Injured in Xmas Tree Fight Between Mom and Grandma

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:15:00 GMT

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and put your irritation with your mother-in-law on hold—particularly when it’s Christmas Eve, your toddler is in the room, and you’re wielding a large Christmas tree like a weapon.

A 21-month-old is in the hospital after receiving a serious eye injury during a tussle between her mother and her grandmother over a four-foot-tall Christmas tree, over which they each claimed ownership. (It really is amazing how often Christmas becomes a time to completely obliterate the Christmas spirit.) The holiday did not begin auspiciously for the family, as they were celebrating in a motel after a fire forced them out of their home.

The mother, Sandra Price, is being held on charges of reckless conduct, and it is not yet clear whether or not her daughter will lose sight in her eye.

Photo: thetelegraph.com

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Your Mother-in-Law Really Is Bad For Your Health

JeanneSager — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:35:00 GMT

If you're one of those people who read that headline and shook your head in denial, good for you. But let me tell you - you just aren't normal.

Lucky, yes. Normal. . . well, let scientists in Japan be the judge. Because a study by Harvard Medical School researchers showed Japanese women who live with their mothers-in-law are three times more likely to have a heart attack.

Making this study even more significant? Japanese women are traditionally at a much lower risk of cardiac disease than those of us living in the states.

The study followed ninety-one thousand men and women ages forty to sixty-nine over a ten-year period, determining men had little affect on their health when Mom came to live with them while their wives saw a decrease in cardiac health. The women were less likely to drink and smoke (maybe because they had someone breathing down their neck, clucking every time they picked up a wineglass?), but despite not having had any cardiac issues before the study began, six hundred seventy-one participants had been diagnosed with coronary artery disease by the study's end and three hundred thirty-nine had died of heart disease.

On the positive end for parents, the women who had both a mother-in-law and her own children living at home were actually better off than those whose kids have already flown the coop (it's like multiple children - more than one person for the old bat to heckle, er, watch over). Rather than tripling her chances of having a heart attack, the woman's chances were doubled.

So, Dads, it's up to you - which Mom needs your help?

Image: Amazon

Source: New York Times

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A Grandmother's Right? Or Totally Obnoxious?

Kate Tuttle — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:23:00 GMT

A Canadian grandmother's essay about essentially crashing her daughter-in-law's birth -- including arriving after a C-section and getting to hold the baby while her daughter-in-law was still in recovery -- has prompted lots of angry comments on the newspaper site where it appeared last week.

Rhona Bennett writes of rejecting her son's advice to wait until he called to announce the baby's birth, hopping a train to Montreal, and (in cahoots with her co-grandmother) bum-rushing the hospital after a few-hour's gap in the update phone calls he was providing. The two bubbies called the hospital looking for word, and naturally were rebuffed, so off they went, in search of information, affirmation, and a grandbaby.

I think you can look at this a couple of ways. It's obviously very sweet to read of how excited Bennett was at becoming a grandmother for the first time, and you'd have to be pretty cold not to appreciate this:

On that day a vast and dazzling blend of joy, love, amazement and profound gratitude surged through me with such power, it would have shattered the mortal body that holds my spirit if my tears hadn't poured out and spread my happiness through the room and beyond.

On the other hand, she mocks her son and daughter-in-law's birthing plans (making fun of doulas, etc.), expressly disobeys their wishes, and makes it all about her. If my mother-in-law had done something like that, I don't think I'd be ready to forgive her yet, and my son is two. So, what do you think? Loving or obnoxious?

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A Mother Stalks Her Young Son’s Crush

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“He did not linger long enough for me to squash him completely into myself….”

The above is not, unfortunately, a sentence from a soft core porn novel. It is an excerpt from a New York Times essay in which a mother describes her obsessive, jealous, and blind love for her nine-year-old son. Thanks to Jezebel for directing me to this gem of a Modern Love piece.

The only thing creepier than the essay’s title—“The Tiny Hand that Robs the Cradle”—is the fact that this tiny hand belongs to a third grader who has a crush on the author’s son. Somebody call a family therapist, stat.

Kate Krautkramer is a teacher at her son Sarvis’ school. When she learns that one of his classmates has scrawled “I ‘heart’ Sarvis” in the bathroom stall, she completely loses her mind. In hopes of discovering the identity of this “little vixen” who was so unforgivably bold as to publicly proclaim an interest in her little boy, the jealous mother turns first to the principal, then to her son’s female classmates, who all “acted innocent in their double braids tied with impossibly pink ribbons.”

With no leads, Krautkramer takes to using the bathroom stall with the Sarvis graffiti every single day. She leans her body against her son’s name and traces the heart with her hand. She comforts herself with the thought that “Graffiti Girl,” as Kautkramer derisively terms her son’s classmate, “didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed.” But she also torments herself with thoughts of one of Sarvis’s nine-year-old peers “turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes.”

I understand that there is irony at work in this essay. Yet no amount of irony can take away the extreme mortification the author’s son will have to withstand for the rest of his life, now that his mother has publicly confessed not only to having Oedipal urges that would make Freud blush, but also to being clinically insane.

Besides, the irony frequently gives way to disturbingly honest reflection: “I knew it was only an innocent crush, yet I truly lamented that some little girl was pushing my boy into a vaguely sexual consciousness.” Actually, neither Sarvis nor his classmate are displaying any "sexual consciousness." They’re just kids. The mother is the one who sexualizes youth by referring to the girls’ “tiny blue jeans and frilly tops,” and by describing Sarvis’s hair as “brown ringlets” that “hung in heart-stopping whorls down his neck.”

If Kautkramer’s goal is to make sure that her son never marries (or goes on a date), mission accomplished. No girl in her right mind would ever put up with this woman as a mother-in-law.

Photo: New York Times

Do Your Kids Go to Camp Grandma As Much as You Did?

JeanneSager — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:05:00 GMT

The day my daughter gets married, I won't be losing a daughter. I'll be gaining a title. Mother-in-law. It makes me shudder.

With my daughter banned from dating until she's at least 47 (less of a chance of her getting knocked up on the first date that way), it's not something I think about often. I'm not quite that narcissistic (I said not quite). Still, reading the story in Britain's The Telegraph over the weekend pronouncing mothers-in-law are no longer a joke, I felt betwixt and between about my very distant future.

The wife's mother, they say, is no longer stuck at home and thus in your face, telling you how her dear little Snookums likes his eggs and wants his pants pressed. Good to know - as I don't press pants and my breakfast-making skills are more of the "grab whole wheat frozen pancakes from freezer, pop in toaster oven, slap on plate with slab of butter" variety.

Because it's out of London (with a host of mother-in-law jokes I haven't heard stateside, better brush up), most of the statistics quoted in the piece are Britain-specific. But I'd imagine they'd translate rather closely to life on this side of the pond - they point to women getting married later, more women working, all social phenomena we're seeing in America. Of note? Mothers-in-law are spending less time with the grandchildren because of the changes.

It's meant to show they're butting in less, which this daughter-in-law supports, but it made me a little sad. If, by some miracle, my husband lets his little girl out on unchaperoned at say, 36, and we end up grandparents, will the fast pace of today's life have jumped to such hyperspeed that we never get to see the little munchkins? While I grew up in the same town as one set of grandparents, the town where the second set had a second house, my daughter has one set of grandparents living four states away. My own parents ask to see her frequently, but factor in my job, my husband's and the jobs of both of my parents, and there are weeks that go by without the schedules jiving just right for a meet-up.

If that's the kind of future for the new mother-in-law, I'd rather have the jokes.

Image: CopyBlogger

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