Dear Aunt Silvia, Please, help me. My wife does not like my mother; I lost my father recently and requested my old mother to come and live with me and my family, but she is having a very difficult time with my wife. When I ask my wife about it, she dismisses me saying that I only listen to my mother and not her. What surprises me is the fact that she has openly told me to return my old mother to the village where she is all alone, or she packs her bags and leaves. In this kind of a situation how do I choose between my mother and my wife?James
Dear Aunt Silvia,
Please, help me. My wife does not like my mother; I lost my father recently and requested my old mother to come and live with me and my family, but she is having a very difficult time with my wife. When I ask my wife about it, she dismisses me saying that I only listen to my mother and not her.
What surprises me is the fact that she has openly told me to return my old mother to the village where she is all alone, or she packs her bags and leaves. In this kind of a situation how do I choose between my mother and my wife?
James
Dear James,
When it comes to your own mother there is nothing to choose from. Remember that friends come and go, wives come and go-but mothers will always remain to be, because you can never have two mothers, never James! If your wife is threatening to pack her bags; tell her to pack and see if she will even move an inch.
What surprises me about the gender that I belong to, women, is the way most tend to treat their mothers-in-law once they get married? Most think that getting married gives one a certificate to start mistreating their in-laws.
Listen here and listen well. Your mother is yours and yours alone, not even your own wife can take that from her. Something that you ought to know is that when it comes to people who are closely related to you, the only person you are so sure to be related with is your mother.
Truth be told, sometimes even the men we have called fathers- we are not so sure if they are truly ours or it’s just another story – but no one has ever doubted their relation to their mothers.
Something else that women ought to know; is that there is no way you can claim to love a man, and hate his mother. How is that possible?
This is a woman who gave your husband life, brought him up through thick and thin, and then you dare come between what they share? God can never forgive such a person.
It is in such instances that I always ask my fellow gender to place themselves in such shoes. You treat your mother-in-law with contempt forgetting that tomorrow you will be in the same place when your son gets married.
How would you feel if your daughter-in-law treated you in the same way? By the way what goes around comes around; such women will be treated by their daughters-in-law even worse.
Forget about you being the man here; even me as a woman no man can come between my mother and I, even if it means giving up a relationship or marriage for that matter; this is how important someone’s mother is.
Stop developing feet made of clay; stand as a man-there is nothing much to negotiate here, if you feel you want your mother to be close to you and her grandchildren then so be it. If you take her back to the village to live there alone she will die of loneliness. I know some readers might say that you employ a servant for her, but do you know that having a servant live with you is not like having your family around?
James; parents especially our mothers represent the love that God has for his children, how then can you send such a person away to live a miserable life as if she has no family of her own?
Let your wife know about your decision and see if she will go anywhere; my dear- those are cries of the frog that don’t prevent cows from drinking water at the river.