My mother-in-law can easily be compared to the character “Marie” on Everybody Love Raymond. When I cook, my meals are criticized. My house is not immaculate, so I’m constantly reminded about how when she was younger, she’d work for 12 hours and then come home to cook, do dishes, and then clean house and do laundry until midnight. Then she’d add, “I just don’t even try with this house now.” (I promise you that we do dust and vacuum at least every couple of weeks, so there are no “hoarder” stories to be told.)
A few years ago, “Gert” loaned me a punch bowl for work. It wasn’t an expensive one, but had been a gift from one of her friends. When we made the punch, the box was put on the floor next to the kitchen cabinet. After the party when everyone pitched in to clean, a colleague picked up the box (which still had the ladle inside) and hauled it to the dumpster. I did not know this and searched for a week to find that box.
When I learned what happened – after the garbage men came – I had to fess up to Gert. Six years later and I”m still hearing about it.
So tonight at my daughter’s 20th birthday party, Annie decided she wanted to take the leftover red velvet cake back to the dorm with her from the restaurant. I kicked into paranoid daughter-in-law mode,
“You guard that cake carrier WITH YOUR LIFE, girlie! It’s Grandma’s!!!”
She promised she would. We all went our separate ways – Annie off to college, me to drop off my other daughter’s boyfriend, and my husband to Kroger.
When my husband got home he asked, “Did you see what Annie did? She left the cake carrier on top of the car and drove off.”
I nearly had a cow, but not like the one Gert had, “She did WHAT? That cake carrier is older than she is!!”
While I was frantically searching for a brown lunch bag to breathe into, the husband added, “Yeah. She stopped and Mike* hopped out of the car to get it.”
Geez. That was a near fiasco.
*Not his real name.
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