My Ex's Mother: A Narrative
Stories of the Queen of Mean.
I don’t know what it is about the mother-in-law jokes that we all participate in. It could be many things, but most of all, I guess it’s that they’re typically true. That the relationship between being the girlfriend/wife and the partner’s mom/mother-in-law is a hard one to navigate.
I never really, truly understood this until I had my own son and spent some time going down the future loophole of envisioning him leaving home and one day finding a partner. I know it’ll be hard for me to let him go, surrendering to the idea that someone else will be taking care of him. Some other person will be his emergency contact. I will not be the first one he calls when shit goes down. His partner will be annoyed by my innocent and loving attempts to mother him (ie: cook for him, clean his place, do his laundry, wipe the food off his face, comfort him, call him a lot). I mean, I get it. It hurts.
One day, I will be a mother-in-law and I hope they tread lightly. I hope they aren’t annoyed by me, but I’m sure they will be. They’ll likely blame me for all of his faults and say shit like, “How dare she try to give me advice on how to raise our children. Look what a bang-up job she’s done with her own son.” I mean, fuuuuck. I can only hope for the best.
But all of this to say, I know it can’t be and won’t be as bad as some of the shit I’ve experienced in past relationships. One, to be specific. And that brings us to Ursula. She was a spitfire of a woman who took great pleasure in making me squirm and even more pride in wedging herself between my ex and me.
As boyfriend’s mothers/mothers-in-law go, this one really took the cake. I’ll be honest and tell you that I still have nightmares about her sometimes. She’s long gone, but her torment still lives on. I’m not one to speak ill of the dead—who is? But I can’t be honest and give an actual account of this person if I’m glazing over the truth.
Ursula wasn’t the fun kind of crazy. You know those people. They’re like the wild card in the group. They bring the adventure. This woman was the kind of crazy you can only truly appreciate in hindsight. She wore copious amounts blush and liked to mix pills and booze. She made her own rules while driving on the road—much like she did in life—often pulling out in front of other people, as she calmly wagged her finger at them, as if they were in the wrong and not her. What applied to others never seemed to apply to her.
She once crammed herself between her son and me in the backseat of a car after insisting she come along to a street fair with a group of us. When my ex presented me with a pair of earrings I’d been eyeing, I ooh-ed and ahh-ed for a solid minute, maybe less. (He never did shit like that and it really meant something at the time. I mean, I was used to date nights at Wendy’s and gifts of cheap trial-sized bottles of perfume from Bath & Body Works. It was a big deal). Ursula leaned over, the ever-present beer on her breath permeating the air between us, and told me to knock it the fuck off, that she got the point. And the earrings were ugly, anyway.
My ex worked in a small restaurant and for whatever reason, decided to call me instead of his sister one evening, with a desperate plea to come and get his drunk mother out of the restaurant. Oh, and would I please drive her home? She lived a good 45 min away and it was late. I was pissed. But I was a sucker and a little bitch, so I did it.
When I entered the restaurant, I found her at a large table sitting by herself, a 6-pack of beer ready to go. It struck me then how very her it was, to take up an entire large table, just for herself. She was very egoic in everything she did, but I also somehow admired her ballsiness. She had a brazen belief that she deserved whatever the hell she wanted. And what she wanted was for me to crawl into a hole and disappear.
I motioned for her to follow me out the door and she wobbled her way to me, cheeks blazing with her signature rouge, her bleach blonde pixie somehow more severe each time we’d meet. She launched her purse over her shoulder and shoved the 6-pack into my arms as she breezed past me. “Well fuck you, too, you crazy bitch,” I muttered under my breath. Of course it was under my breath. I lay in fear of that woman’s wrath, as many others did.
When we got to my car, she stashed the 6-pack under the passenger seat and proceeded to open a beer. I eyed her from the drivers side and she turned to me, daring me to say something. And I’m sure you can guess … I didn’t. She didn’t speak to me the whole ride to her house. When I dropped her off, she got out and slammed the door. No thank you. Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. When I finally got home, I realized she stuffed her empty bottles under my seat. One was still half-filled and spilled out onto the floor. She probably laid in bed that evening, falling asleep to the quiet murmur of her own giggles and assholery.
In my late teens, I became a CNA & decided to work as a home health aide. I liked the freedom of not having to go to one place everyday. Working one-on-one with people suited me better. Ursula leached off of it the moment she heard—she was a home health aide as well, taking care of an Alzheimer’s patient who was more of a paycheck to her than an actual person. I saw people like her and thought, I’ll be the opposite of that and do something good in this world. My mistake was thinking I could help her patient, maybe sometimes free her from the neglectful care she’d been receiving from Ursula.
So when I took a week-long stint in this woman’s house, Ursula left me with barely any instructions and a flippant comment about not really needing to adhere to this woman’s medication schedule. Ursula made it up as she went, often feeding her pills to calm her down and keep her in a vegetative state as often as possible. So when I refused to do that, to really go by what her doctor prescribed, all hell broke loose. This poor woman lost her mind all day, everyday. She wandered at night, one time falling and cutting her head open. I was a wreck. And by the end of it, I collected my meager paycheck, only to find that Ursula had claimed over half for herself. She fucked me over so hard.
When my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend randomly showed up out of nowhere, I was horrified. She was gorgeous, seven years older, more mature, and I could tell my boyfriend still held a flame for her. Ursula sat me down one day and told me I should pack it up and move on. There was no competing with her. My boyfriend would sleep with her and he’d lie about it, she said. “Just move on before you get hurt,” she said. As if she cared.
So when my boyfriend admitted that he’d had her over one afternoon and that she came onto him, I wasn’t surprised and neither was Ursula. She whispered in my ear, “Do you really think he’s going to tell you what actually happened?” She taunted me every chance she got.
He said he turned her down. My gut said he lied. But trusting my gut was something I turned away from often as a teenager. And with Ursula’s laughing head resting on my shoulder, I couldn’t tell which was which. I never did find out if he slept with her, but I’m pretty sure he did. Ursula was a liar, but if she knew something was going to hurt me, she’d be the first in line to hand me the truth on a silver platter.
I can’t say what exactly she hated about me. Was it the seven year age gap between me and her son? Was she threatened that I’d take him away from her—convince him she was evil and to run far, far away with me? Was there something about me that reminded her of some part of herself that she didn’t like? Was I too nice? Too weak? An easy target?
I don’t bother myself with these questions anymore. We’re talking about things that happened over 20 years ago. She’s been gone for probably half of that time. But she does occasionally cross my mind, especially when I find myself in the crosshairs of a considerably heinous human, doing heinous things. I’ve painted a sliver of a picture for you here and decided to leave out some of the other things she’s done to not only me, but my family. Sometimes I laugh about these things. Sometimes I bristle. She caused a lot of pain.
I can only thank my lucky stars that I have a great mother-in-law, now. I like to think I’ve paid my dues for several lifetimes, and maybe it’ll spill over into the next generation when it’ll inevitably be my turn. Here’s hoping.
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