Open Writing

One of the seldom mentioned aspects of being married more than once is that, generally speaking, each marriage comes with a mother-in-law. Unlike wives, mothers-in-law do not become exes, and many times continue to figure in their one-time son-in-law’s lives. Contrary to the hoary, vaudeville and Borscht Belt one-liners from which I drew my title, I had good relationships with my three mothers in law. In fact, I had a better relationship with the first two than I had with their daughters.

Each one had a very different personality, and their lives contrasted, but they shared a remarkable ability to deal with the adversity that each of them had been dealt. They were all widowed early, and two were left with still-dependent children. None of them were highly educated, and had only limited skills with which to earn a living after their husbands died. Yet all of them prevailed, and in each case sacrificed much to ensure their children’s future.

My first wife’s mother, Freda, was widowed in her thirties, and was left with a daughter and younger son to raise. The house that she could afford to rent was wedged in a fork between two roads. Just inches separated the house walls from the traffic, which on one side included a bus route. The only lavatory was on the bus route side, and the proximity was unnerving at times. Her home was sparsely furnished, with a few small rugs placed at strategic points on the otherwise highly polished, linoleum covered floor.

Her daughter was a very bright girl who had an unwavering ambition to be a nurse. Fortunately she was able to win a scholarship to one of the best nursing colleges in England, the Radcliffe in Oxford, but even so, sending her there placed a greater financial burden on her mother. With just a junior school education, and with only home-making skills, the employment Freda could most easily obtain was cleaning houses, which didn’t provide more than a subsistence level income.

But she became highly skilled at making the little she could earn go a long way. She probably knew every available source of free berries and fruit in the village, also the people who grew but didn’t eat rhubarb. So there was a lot of canning and jam and pie making. She also knew a great deal about good, inexpensive foodstuffs that more privileged people would ignore. She introduced me to pig’s cheek, which I now consider to be a delicacy. For a celebration, there was always the dandelion wine that she’d made, which was surprisingly good, and quite capable of providing the requisite buzz.

Her son had musical talents, but music lessons were out of the question, so she persuaded the village band to take him under their wing. Eventually he became a respected traditional jazz trumpeter and played with major bands in Australia and America. Late in life she married a professional gardener, and set about marketing to great effect the produce he grew. She lived on into her eighties.

My second mother-in-law came from a well-to-do family. Her father was the city architect of Birkenhead in Cheshire, England, and she and her sister lived privileged lives. She married and had three children, two boys and a girl, and was widowed when the youngest child, her daughter, was in her early teens. Her husband had been sick for several years prior to his death, and was unable to work at his job in commercial shipping. A wealthy relative bank-rolled the family into managing a pub, which my mother-in-law ran with help from her children until her husband died.

As a widow, she worked at a variety of jobs, none of which paid a living wage, but being an excellent pianist she supplemented her income by playing in pubs and clubs for many years. Often the places she was engaged to play were located some distance from her home, and since she was not a driver, the trips usually involved wearying journeys on public transportation, late at night and in all weathers.

Late in her life, her widowed sister, who had become very wealthy through her husband’s business ventures, needed a companion for her extensive travels, so my mother-in-law's life then took a turn for the better. Returning from one of their trips to Turkey, the DC 10 Jumbo Jet they were on crashed outside Paris and all on board were killed.

I have previously written at length about my wife’s mother in an American Pie column titled “Bertha.” http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2004/12/bertha_1.php#more At 6 years old she fled Russia with her mother and two brothers, and lived for eight years in Cuba before settling in the USA. She and her two brothers had strong, volatile personalities, which was probably just as well, given their tenuous early life in the US. The three children lied about their age so that they could work, and the two boys soon had their own, businesses.

Later, Bertha married and bore two daughters, my wife being the younger. But then she began to exhibit signs of bi-polar disease, which, added to her natural volatility, seriously impacted the family. On two occasions she left the home, the first time without providing any clue to her whereabouts, and was eventually found some weeks later. The second time she told her two young daughters that she was off to Arizona and that they should tell their father when he came home from work!

The two girls and their father later joined Bertha in Phoenix, but family life continued to be unsettled by her behavior. Eventually her husband left to live in Los Angeles, and they subsequently divorced, only to remarry later. Bertha was widowed not long after, in her fifties, but was able to support herself with book-keeping jobs and as a women’s clothing store assistant, both of which she apparently did very well.

She was in her seventies by the time I knew her. Some of the fire had gone out of her volatility, but the bi-polar behavior still simmered. Despite her afflictions, she was a highly intelligent woman, and generous to a fault, both materially and in her acceptance of the beliefs of others. Raised strictly in an orthodox Jewish family, she later became extremely ecumenical. She died in her eighties, possessed of all her faculties, but physically damaged by years of inappropriate, self medication.

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