10 Mother-in-Laws Who Went From Strangers to the Family’s Biggest Source of Care and Love

My MIL kept inviting my husband to dinner alone, saying, “Your wife shouldn’t come.” Last night I followed him. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw my husband, my MIL, and a young woman sitting together. I called my husband while looking at them. He hung up. Seconds later, I got a message from my MIL saying, “Wait. He’s with me.. Please don’t call him again tonight. We’ll call you back. I promise you’ll understand.” I barely slept that night. My husband came home late, then went to work the next day, and I spent the whole day imagining the worst. I’m actually laughing typing this because, between the kids, school, and family chaos, I had completely forgotten our university anniversary. That evening I gave him the silent treatment until midnight, when suddenly the door opened and our old university friends shouted, “Surprise!” and my MIL standing there with the young woman from the restaurant. I just stood there completely confused.
My husband finally took my hand and said, “You really forgot, didn’t you? Twenty years ago tonight was the first night we met at university.” She had been helping my husband organize a surprise anniversary party with the young woman, who was a real party organizer I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop crying. My MIL hugged me and said, “I know you think I don’t like you sometimes, but I would never help my son celebrate the best thing that ever happened to him without you.”

The day after we lost our baby, my mother-in-law let herself in with the spare key and started stripping our bed. I was lying on the couch, and I remember being annoyed, because I didn’t want anyone to see me like that. She didn’t try to talk to me. She just ran the washer, made chicken soup from scratch (the kind that takes four hours), and told my sister-in-law over the phone that we weren’t up for visitors. On the third day, she sat down next to me and told me she had lost two pregnancies of her own in the ’80s, and her own doctor had told her to “get over it.”
In seven years, I had never heard a word about it, and I don’t think my husband knew either. I’m not going to pretend we’re suddenly best friends, because she still drives me up the wall about how I load the dishwasher. But I trust her now in a way I didn’t before, and that came from her compassion that week.

My husband’s mom is amazing, she’s like a second mom to me. If we were the same age we’d be best friends; my husband and his siblings joke I’m the favourite child and we truly have the best relationship. I find it so sad how many people don’t have this; it seems like it would make marriage unnecessarily hard. I love my husband more than anything and I’m so eternally grateful for him; but it’s true that you don’t just marry the man, you marry the family, and I go so lucky with both.

Frankly, I like my MIL better than I liked my late mother. I described it this way. I loved my mom. I even took care of her in hospice her final days. But, I didn’t really like her very much. She was very self-absorbed and didn’t really have time for me growing up with all the bad and good that entailed. I not only love my MIL, I actually like her. I don’t know how healthy that is. But that’s my position. My mother passed nearly 4 years ago. My life really didn’t change all that much when she passed. Life is complicated. People are messy. Love them anyway, even if you don’t like them very much from time to time.

I love my MIL. We get along quite well, and she’s not particularly meddlesome. She actually texts and calls me much more than she does my husband. We will go out to get coffee or lunch sometimes, often with the kids while my husband is at work. She’s easy to talk to and a good mom and grandma. I could find petty things to complain about, but it would be just that, petty. Mostly we get annoyed at the other’s cooking; I use too much spice (she thinks garlic is “spicy”) and she uses margarine. So, super petty.

Posting this as a mother-in-law, since most of these stories come from the other side. When my son married Camila, she’d been in the States for less than a year, and I watched her go completely silent at family dinners because everyone talked over each other. So I asked her to coffee on weekends to practice English, and she offered to teach me Portuguese in return.
I’m 64, and my Portuguese is still embarrassing; I once told her waiter friend I was “pregnant with excitement.” She corrected my grammar so patiently that I started looking forward to Tuesdays more than she did. Her English is now better than my nephew’s, frankly. The best part is that she and I have our own relationship, separate from my son, and that’s what I’d wish for any mother-in-law. It just took paying attention to who wasn’t talking at the table.

I was a hospice RN for about eleven years, mostly home visits, and one family stuck with me. The patient was in his mid-forties with ALS, and by the time I was assigned, he was on a BiPAP machine and couldn’t speak much. His wife worked days at a warehouse and nights cleaning offices, so the person who was there for every one of my visits was his mother-in-law.
She was around seventy, took two buses to get there, and had learned to do his oral suctioning better than some aides I’ve trained. I asked her once, half joking, if she ever got a day off. She shrugged and said he’d been good to her daughter, so this was the least she could do. He passed on a Thursday afternoon with her in the room, and I’ve thought about her on and off ever since. You see a lot of family dynamics in hospice, and most aren’t that loving.

Adored my late MIL. She was forbidden in her MIL home because she felt her son could have done better. Even after they had kids she wasn’t allowed in her home. Fast forward years later she became ill and moved in with them. MIL took care of her until she passed away. I think that’s why she treated all her DIL’s as her own. I remarried and my husband’s family is strange. We’ve been together 16 years and his parents had never been to our home.
She’d call on birthday’s and literally talk for 2-3 minutes before ending the call. Never showed any interest in getting to know me. They lived 30 minutes away. They were close to his ex wife when they were married but after they divorced wanted nothing to do with her. IDK maybe they didn’t want the same thing to happen again. Both his parents have passed.

My MIL and I could not stand each other for about the first five years. She thought I was too young for her son, and I thought she was controlling, and we were probably both a little right. Then my car stop working on I-75 around 2 a.m. on my way back from my grandpa’s home, with my two-year-old asleep in his car seat and my husband deployed. My phone was at 4%, and hers was the only number I had memorized besides his.
She answered on the second ring, told me to lock the doors and turn on my hazards, and showed up an hour and a half later in a bathrobe and her husband’s work boots. She didn’t lecture me about checking my oil, which honestly would’ve been fair. We still argue about pretty much everything, including whether you put sugar in cornbread. But I stopped wondering whether she cares about me after that night.

I got married in 1979, and my mother was very sick at the time, so my mother-in-law quietly took over a lot of the wedding planning. She never made a fuss about it or made me feel like a burden, which I appreciate more now than I did at 22. On the morning of the ceremony, she pinned her grandmother’s brooch to my dress, a little silver one shaped like a bird, and told me it was mine. I’m now a mother-in-law three times over, and frankly, I haven’t always lived up to her. I was pretty cold to my oldest son’s first wife, and I regret it. Last year, I pinned that brooch on my youngest son’s bride and told her the whole story, the good parts and the parts I’m less proud of. She’s the first one I’ve told about how I fell short, and it felt right to be honest with her.