Did you know the French word for daughter-in-law is belle-fille, meaning either beautiful girl or beautiful daughter?
The first time I heard the word I didn’t have any daughters-in-law, but I loved the name; now I have two, one of them French, and I call them both my belle fille. I’m not saying French mothers-in-law have a better rapport with their belles filles, but surely it must be better to start the relationship with a compliment in the name, rather than an obligation of law.
It seems to me this obligation might be one of the main sources of difficulty between mothers-and-daughters-in-law.
It’s not a chosen relationship, it’s imposed on both - we both love The Boy. And somewhere in that love lies the second source – the complex psychology of mother-son relationships. We love our sons, but in a sense we possess them, they came out of us, they are ours – and now another woman ‘possesses’ them. It’s an old-fashioned but still tasty recipe for woman-to-woman conflict.
I’ve seen mothers-in-law tip-toeing around on eggshells trying not to upset sensitive daughters-in-law, and daughters-in-law raging against the interference of dominating mothers-in law. Everyone’s life is fraught and all the boring old mother-in-law jokes in the world come home to roost.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. From my seven years experience as a mother-in-law of two belles- filles, I’m going to be so bold as to suggest a list of Dos and Don’ts.
• Don’t’ engage in a power struggle with your daughter-in-law. It’s never worth it. All relationships have a sliding scale of power, each person is more or less powerful, but a mother has an enormous, heady amount of it – even, for several years, the power of life and death. And then sons find someone else and the power reduces at an astonishing speed. We need to accept our loss of power gracefully, otherwise everyone is doomed to endless tiring battles.
