How NOT to Treat Your Mother-in-Law This Thanksgiving

How NOT to Treat Your Mother-in-Law This Thanksgiving

Family serving Christmas dinnerThanksgiving Day 2003, my wife and I were hosting dinner at our house with a few guests, including my sister and my wife’s mother, Jeannie. And as cliché as it may be, before the meal had even been served, I had already had enough of my mother-in-law’s company.

Out on the back patio, I complained to my sister about how I thought Jeannie had made too much of a production of how she had to be the one to cut the turkey because it had to be done just so. I explained how I thought she was a little too proud of her electric carving knife, how she had to cut exactly the right sized pieces, and how one just couldn’t appreciate the meal without a properly cut bird.

While I blathered on with my nitpicking, my sister smiled with a knowing look on her face. Then she told me she recalled having a similar frustration a decade earlier with our grandfather, Ping. In Ping’s later years, Val had become his full-time caregiver. She told me about how he tried to micromanage her every move. “He told me exactly how to set the thermostat, and which way to put the mail in the mailbox so the mailman would be sure to see it. I was a grown woman! Did he think I hadn’t picked up mail at my own house for the past twenty years?”  

At that point, I assumed my sister was just commiserating with me. But I soon realized she was actually teaching me a valuable lesson in humility.

Continuing her story, she explained that she ended up so frustrated with Ping that her patience became short and her temper even shorter. Then she started thinking about him and how his life had been up until just a few years earlier. His working career began when he had to drop out of school in the fourth grade to help support his family, and it ended some eight decades later when he retired at the age of eighty-nine. He worked hard his whole life, was one of the most generous men either of us has ever known, and by then was in his nineties and in the final few years of life.

What Val realized was that he had spent the past several decades as a leader in his industry, at times managing large teams of people. He was accustomed to telling people how to do their jobs more effectively.

Then all of a sudden he wasn’t in charge of anyone, except for me.”

Her conclusion from this soul searching was this:

It’s late in the game for him. He’s close to the end. I don’t need to try to change him. I need to change me. He just wants to feel useful like he did for so many years. And my pride was getting in the way of that. It’s not going to hurt me to have him give me more instructions than I need. But it will make him feel useful again.”

That’s when Val turned the analogy to my problem. Jeannie had just retired a few months earlier from her own forty-two-year career. As a single parent, she was used to providing for a family. But now her only child was all grown up and married and had a family of her own.

For years, Jeannie was the one who cooked the turkey and hosted Thanksgiving dinner. Now she was a guest waiting to be served. The only thing she wanted was to feel useful again and maybe get a little acknowledgment for her contribution. Who was I to begrudge her that very small and understandable desire? All it would take on my part was a little less pride and a little more humility for the woman who raised the mother of my children.

Indeed. It was an eye-opening realization and the beginning of the better half of our Thanksgiving Day that year. More important, it was also the beginning of a much-improved relationship with my mother-in- law.

If you find yourself short on patience for someone in your family today, consider the life they lived long before you became a part of it. Then consider how much better the rest of Thanksgiving will go if you had a little less pride, and a little more humility.

Source: Parenting with a Story: Real-life Lessons in Character for Parents and Children to Share, by Paul Smith.

Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on business storytelling. He’s a keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and bestselling author of the books Lead with a StoryParenting with a Story, and Sell with a Story.

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