Q Dear Miss Abigail:
What should I do about my mother-in-law? She is gregarious and outspoken. Frankly she appalls me. Which brings me to another question – should a grandmother wear leopard skin capri pants?
Signed,
Simply Shocked
A Dear Shocked:
Leopard print! I bet the grandkids love that. So please, for the sake of the children, accept your mother-in-law for the wild woman that she is. I’m betting you’re never going to change her, so it’s time to relax, and enjoy as much as her personality as possible. The following, from Eric Hatch’s 1956 Spousery: Her Edition, won’t help you do that, unfortunately, but I found it entertaining.
1956: In-Laws
One of the things that in any microscopic study of In-Laws is too often forgotten is that In-Laws are people! In plainer language – in order to get to be In-Laws themselves, however unlikely it seems, they had to have In-Laws! Furthermore, their In-Laws’ In Laws had to have In-Laws. The Mathematical Progression principle applied to this produces staggering results. Viz: It takes four In-Laws to produce one married person, thus there are, at a given period in your married life – say when you’re around thirty – perhaps eight times as many In-Laws in the world as their are married couples – not counting step-In-Laws.
Source: Hahn, Emily, and Eric Hatch. Spousery: His and Her Editions. New York: Frankin Watts, 1956.
~ p. 35-36 (“Her” edition) ~