And you thought yours was bad…

A lot of my readers and friends know the history between my mother-in-law and myself. For those that don’t, settle for the short version of the story. We call her Marie, like Ray Barrone’s tv mom. The only difference is that tv Marie keeps her house clean. Our Marie doesn’t. The meddling, veiled insults, and being convinced she’s the queen of everything? Yes.

She’s not all bad. She does have her moments where you almost want to like her. She loaned the hubby gas money so he could get to work a few weeks back and then told us to hold on to it and pay it back after about a month, so we could catch up on other things. She did this without us asking. She also loaned us money to help get a car when both of ours died horrible deaths in the same week last year. Then when we got married, she told us to keep that money and consider it a gift.

Those things make her sound like a real peach and while I do appreciate them, it doesn’t excuse the way she turns on a dime and claims to love a specific person (whether it be one of her kids, her husband, her sister, or another person) one day and then the next day she tells them they’re a horrible bastard and she wishes they’d die. She’s… off.

When we went on our honeymoon, she kept the youngest two kids. I wasn’t pleased with the way she cared for them, and my husband wasn’t either. A huge fight ensued and I made the decision that I was done with her. I don’t care if the hubby takes the littler kids over there to see their grandma because they’re blood and I won’t get in the way of that. I’m an adult though and I’m not going to sit and take it.

So for the most part, I haven’t had anything to do with her in 6 months. When he takes the kids over there, I go shopping or do homework at a restaurant, or I just stay home. I use it as my baby free time each week, and I also don’t have to get sucked into her web of crankiness. The only time I ever hear from her is when there’s bad weather. Now, in her defense, I understand that she’s worried as a mother and grandmother. Still, I’m able to see a weather report and I know what a tornado is.

Tonight was one of those nights. I knew as soon as the weather turned sour that she’d be texting. I was right. I told her we were fine, that I’d keep her posted, and that we’d go to the basement if we needed to. All of these things are true, of course. I did text her later to let her know that the tornado passed over us, and we were okay.

As a side note, I don’t think that was very funny, Mother Nature. I watched the tv and put moving any kids off until the absolute last minute. As the tornado reached the town to the west of us, I ran upstairs to get little man from his crib and I came back downstairs to hear something to the effect of “There’s a tornado overhead. Nevermind, it’s canceled.” I’m sure glad there wasn’t a tornado but really? Couldn’t it have faded away 3 minutes sooner? Funny one. Ya got me this time!

Back to what I was saying… my mother-in-law got wind of the idea that my husband is at work tonight. He works in a hospital so they have power because of the generators and anything could happen but it’s reasonable to assume they’re safe there. That information wasn’t good enough for her, though. Oh no. First she calls the house phone. I didn’t want to talk to her so I let it go and she texted to ask me to call my husband and have him call her before he left work.

I know her MO. She thinks she’s going to talk him into staying at her house overnight. I know better. I know he’s going to be extremely busy on a night like this, driving people to their cars and helping nurses get patients into the hallway. Then you have the homeless people that pretend they attempted suicide so they have a dry place to stay. It’s hospital policy to have a guard sit with anyone that has made a suicide threat. Then someone has to drive around to the other buildings to make sure there’s no damage and so on. People need to be relieved from lunches. You get the idea. If I call when there were previous threats of tornadoes over my house and scare my husband half to death just to tell him to call his mother, he’s going to be rightfully upset with me.

She knows this. That’s why she won’t call. She doesn’t want to get snapped at. So I told her the storm knocked the phone out and I’d try to call him later. She was satisfied with this. She wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, specifically, but it did basically come out that all she wanted was to have him sleep at her house because the roads might have flash floods. Every time it rains heavily, there’s a flash flood warning. When everything flooded in 2007, it made the weather people paranoid. Now it’s like an inch of snow in Southern California. Everyone freaks out.

I’ll tell him to call her when he gets home. That’s good enough. He’s a big boy. If the weather is too bad for the road to be passable, he knows to turn around.

So that’s the story of my mother-in-law, at least the short version. This catches us up so I can just write in the present tense from now on. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pace by the window because the mother in me is just as paranoid as the mother in her.