The Thanks I Get

Looks like an ordinary, poorly-drawn kitchen, doesn't it?

This is where I make dinner. I cook for my family. Most things get made from scratch. Healthy, good-tasting, well-balanced meals. My MIL is part of the family and I try to make things she likes. I cook things that she can eat considering her lack of teeth above the gum line. I even get a plate ready for her and cut everything up and put all the garnishments on it, and then bring it to her room along with a fork and napkin, because she likes to eat in private.

It sounds so lovely, doesn't it?

So when I've got cranky kids I take them upstairs and get a movie going for them on the computer and sit with them while I eat. The husband is working late, it's just us. Dinner was particularly tasty so I figure, hey why not get second helpings. I walk downstairs to the place where everything used to be delicious.

Suddenly I have lost my appetite.

My MIL has left an invisible, gaseous present for me on her way back from putting her dishes in the dish washer. This is not the first time it's happened, but I just had a beer and am feeling particularly nauseous. That's why I share. To make my misery yours. Only, since you're not here, in my house, walking through the Brown Cloud, you're not really miserable the way I am.

Weird Things Old People Say

So sometimes my mother-in-law will come out with some oddball question or statement. At first, they concerned the answering machine on the telephone. We had it set on the fake-computer-voice guy telling you that no one was available and to please leave a message after the tone.

My mother-in-law insisted that the answering machine announced that "Eight people live here." She would ask me, day after day, every time she heard it play, why it keeps telling everyone that eight people live here. I insist that it doesn't say it at all. I tell her what the message is playing. I play it for her. She thinks I'm full of shit or stupid or something, and goes on insisting that it's telling everyone eight people live here. I consider changing my message.

Apparently when you lay in bed all day, refusing to get up for anything except meals, trips to the garbage can and the bathroom, your sense of hearing gets warped. Or sharpened, depending on who you ask. According to her, George Bush called and left a message for us. "Why did George Bush call and leave a message?" she asked one day.

Really? Huh, better check the answering machine! Nope, there was no message from George Bush. Not for a single one of the eight people that live here.

I moved the phone with the answering machine speaker upstairs where she can't hear it anymore. After two years of uneventful phone calls, she discovered last month that the little light on the phone flashes when there is a voicemail. She wants to check it. It could have been anyone. Anyone could call, maybe even our newest President. I tell her to leave it alone. It's usually the pharmacy.

Then, of course, there are the seasons. "Do the leaves on the trees come out, or fall down after winter?" Well, mother-in-law, you're looking out the window, at the snow and the bare trees. "What do you think?" I ask slowly, encouraging her to think about it for a minute. Just. Think. About. It...

"They grow?" she answers, unsure of herself. "Yes," I reply.

What happens when you try to be nice?

Accidents happen. Why do they have to happen when I am trying to be nice and helpful and encouraging? This happened two springs ago. I said, "Come outside and look at all the flowers on the trees."

And then, apparently slippers and mulch and an uneven grading are enough to destabilize someone who doesn't get out of bed very much. You know when you're stuck in a bad moment and everything goes into slow motion and your mother-in-law is losing her balance and falling very slowly, but you're even slower than her so as you go to reach out and grab her, it's too late and she's already hitting the side of the house with her head? Yeah, I know all about that, too.

And, is that why she barely goes outside and refuses to walk anywhere? Perhaps.

Lots of Bad for Everyone

In the first week of my mother-in-law moving in with me, she fell in the bathroom. It was her fault for munching her sleeping pills beyond what she was prescribed, and then getting up over and over to go to the bathroom instead of staying in bed and falling asleep like the directions said. She liked to take her pills and get kind of loopy and try and chat up everyone in the household while she swayed with the breeze.

She bruised her ribs but she was okay. I took her sleeping pills away from her, which made her angry. She admonished me not to treat her "like a child". I kept the pills in a dispenser in my room and she would start asking for them repeatedly about a half hour before it was time to take them, and then kept asking until she got them. She would call our cell phones repeatedly if we were out shopping late, to make sure we were going to be getting in the house in time to give her these pills. I have all kinds of pill stories.

Then about a week later she showed me how all her teeth on the bottom along the front had broken off at the gum line. I was horrified and told her we needed to go to a dentist. She adamantly refused. She'd rather die. Her teeth cracking in half didn't hurt so no reason to see a dentist!

The month before she moved in with us, she'd been in and out of the hospital over the course of three weeks for severe dehydrations and malnutrition.

The backstory is that she read on the back of the sugar-free Ricola drop packages that you buy in bulk at Costco that each drop was the equivalent of one piece of fruit. It was for a diabetic exchange, but she ignored this fact. She decided she would eat nothing but sugar free ricola lozenges and altoids. Every day she consumed an entire bag of ricola and an entire tin of altoids. Gastrointestinal distress is an understatement of the resulting disaster zone. My father-in-law didn't tell us what was going on. When we came to visit, she was in the hospital and looked like she might die at any moment. She pulled through and got better, but it was slow and gradual.

So when she started calling my name from the bathroom, sounding like something was wrong, and asking for help and to "come look", I thought there was something really, really wrong. There were bad vibes oozing from the bathroom door as I approached.

I went inside, worried, and asked what was wrong. That's when she got me.

Yup, she just wanted to show me her poop. And because I was caught off-gaurd I looked. I was traumatized. I told my husband and sister. She tried to call me in the next day to get me to look again and I refused. Then when I wasn't around she tried to show my sister, but since forewarned is forearmed, she escaped unscathed.

This one involves poop.

One time, my cat took a dump on the rug over near my toddler's play pen. I was twenty feet away in the kitchen, washing dishes. I was under the mistaken impression that if anything bad was going on between my kid and my mother-in-law, that I'd be able to hear it and intervene in a timely manner. Things changed after this incident, that's for sure.

My toddler, being a bright kid, knew that poop did not belong on the rug. She also knew that you don't touch poop. So since she was at that phase where she wanted to be helpful, she took a couple of toys and used them to scoop up the poop and attempted to bring it to me over in the kitchen. Of course the poop fell off the toys about halfway across the floor. This is where my mother-in-law comes in.

So while I'm there in the kitchen giving myself dishpan hands, my mother-in-law is asking my toddler why she doesn't want to eat the chocolate cookies. She picks one up off the floor so she can, I assume, attempt to shove it in my daughter's face. Of course, my daughter is having nothing to do with the poop. Mother-in-law now realizes these are probably not cookies, and calls for help. The reality is dawning on her and taking her to a Bad Place.

This last picture here is what I walk in on. Mother-in-law hunched over, a turd in her hand, my daughter looking at me unhappily.

"What is this?" she asks, uncertainty causing her voice to waver.

Slowly I look at it, and reply, "It looks like poop."

That was my favorite part. She wanted to fling it away from her and probably scream. She has germaphobic tendencies that must have been screeching in her head. She wouldn't let my husband keep goldfish as a child because of the "germs" in the tank. And now she's got a steaming pile of cat poop in her hand. She knows that she shouldn't be tossing poop back down onto the floor, but she doesn't know what she should be doing. Her hand is quivering.

"What should I do??" she asks, panic in her voice.

"Throw it out in the garbage can and go wash your hands." Rocket science.

I didn't see her for the rest of the day. I cleaned up the rug and the toys and my daughter and got back to the business of the day. I gave my cat a big pat on the head. I called my parents to snicker at her horrible experience. When my husband got home, she told him she couldn't get the smell off her hand no matter how many times she washed it.

One of the grossest moments

So when my mother-in-law first moved in with me, she was under the impression that she shouldn't have to do anything, ever, including taking care of her own personal hygiene. I was in the middle of packing up the house we were living in so that we could move into larger quarters. I had an 18 month old toddler to take care of all day. I was also about 8 months pregnant, and in charge of keeping the house running and helping close up the estate of my father-in-law and interfacing with the builders for the new house.

So one day my mother-in-law comes up to me.

Yes, she really did TELL me she needed me to sit down and bend around my huge pregnant stomach and clip her toenails. She sits down and makes a pathetic attempt to reach her feet, to show me how futile it all is for her. Impossible.

I say "Oh, God" in that picture because I know I'm going to do it for her. But it's even worse than I had anticipated. Not only do I have to touch her bare feet and clip her nails, she's been using vaseline to "moisturize" her foot skin, and her big toe is more like a wooden talon.

The nail itself is thick and a brownish yellow color. I don't know how it gets like that, she's been drinking nothing but ensure for months. The nail is thicker than the nail clipper can open, so I have to essentially clip away at it at an angle to get it all. The other toenails are of a similar quality, just not as massive.

It was pretty bad. Over two years later, I can still feel that giant greasy monster in my hand, the way the clipper splintered the nail as I hacked away at it, burping down late-pregnancy-induced stomach acid. I told my husband never again, we'd take her to a salon and have them do it with their professional tools. Why hadn't I thought of it before I did that? It's hard to think on the spot. I have to forgive myself.

It was bound to come up again eventually. By this time we were in the new house and the noob was no longer easily tended to inside my womb.

And then, something amazing happened:

Then VS. Now

This was me when I got married.

This is me now.