Whether you love your mother/daughter-in-law to pieces, or you secretly wish she lived in another country, you’ll get some good pointers from this latest addition to the MotherU Buzz, What’s a Mother/Daughter-in-law To Do, written by sociologist Deborah M. Merrill. The advice is drawn from her book, Mothers-in-law and Daughters-in-law: Understanding the Relationship and What Makes Them Friends or Foe. Merrill, a daughter-in-law herself, explains that she was drawn to the subject personally as well as professionally:
There were two things that drew me to this topic. I am a family sociologist, and I think that the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship is one of the more fascinating and unique of the various family relationships. This is because you are expected to treat one another like family and assume all of the obligations of an adult child even before you get to know one another and without all of the benefits of family, such as having a shared history.
I was also interested because of my own experiences as a daughter-in-law. We live in a society with a high divorce rate. Like many other women today, I have two mothers-in-law in my life. I have never quite understood why my relationship with my mother-in-law (i.e., my husband’s mother) is so much more difficult than my relationship with my father-in-law and step-mother-in-law. I wanted to hear about other women’s experiences: how they handled the role and how well they got along with their in-laws. I wondered whether or not I was alone in expecting to be a part of my mother-in-law’s family and feeling that I was on the outside looking in on it.
