How Dare You?
Dear universe: I would like to surrender my superpower of “attracting crazy people.” If an equivalent exchange is required and requests are permitted, I would like to instead have the superpower of “instantly identifying title, artist name, and release year of any song after hearing three seconds’ worth of the track.” Thank you for your time; I await your reply. So, while I’m waiting to see if my superpower exchange goes through, here’s a story about how my superpower exchange has not gone through. I innocently went to the drugstore to fill a prescription and this happened.
While I’m sitting in the pharmacy waiting area, a young mother and an older woman are in the baby supplies aisle. The young mom looks, frankly, like dung on a Triscuit. She’s pasty, her hair is lank, she’s wearing a profoundly rumpled set of scrub pants and shirt that aren’t matched in color, has no jewelry aside from a wedding ring, and she has the exhausted, thousand-yard stare of someone for whom sleep is but a curious fusion of cruel joke and fond memory.
She’s leaning on the push bar of the cart as if it’s the only thing holding her upright. In the cart is a carseat with a baby in it, and the kid is engaged in intense fussing noises, punctuated about every 10 seconds by a wrenching hiccup. The older woman is flawless, turned out in a stylish emerald-green twinset, with slacks one shade darker. Her hair is a 1940s-Rita-Hayworth cascade of glossy dark waves, not a strand out of place.
She’s wearing Louboutin pumps, diamond earrings, an array of tasteful rings on her manicured hands, a Panthère de Cartier-style gold and enamel leopard draping around her neck. Her makeup is camera-ready. And her peach-slicked lips are flapping nonstop, venting criticism. “My son” should have picked someone who could keep herself put together better. “My son” should be taking care of these things. “My son” doesn’t understand how much trouble it is to take time out of a busy day to do a run to the drugstore.
“My son” ought to understand how important the business deal is that she’s brokering. Also, she doesn’t see why her daughter-in-law is breastfeeding when formula is so much easier to deal with. Yes, of course, it’s far easier to buy, store, transport, measure, mix, and prepare formula than it is to pop out a breast that literally dispenses infant sustenance by itself and feed the sprog at any time or place. She’s apparently able to breathe through her skin, because I swear she didn’t interrupt her rant for anything as mundane as respiration. And this goes on for five solid minutes while the daughter-in-law stares at the shelves and, I suspect, daydreams about going temporarily deaf.
As the baby’s fussing ramps up, the mother-in-law stops abruptly, forcing the daughter-in-law to halt the cart suddenly to avoid plowing over her (I privately wished she would). The mother-in-law turns around to lean over the baby and coo in the most unbearably irritating voice… MIL: “Aww, whassamatter, baaaaabyyyy?! Is Mama not doing anything to stop those terrible, teeeerrible hiccups?!?!” My eye spasms. My hands close into fists. And then my mouth opens by itself… “What in the heck do you expect her to do about the goddarn hiccups, lady? Throat-punch the baby?”
The mother-in-law spins around with a look of shock, like no one has ever spoken to her that way in her life. Quick overview: I’m wearing a cowboy hat, grey sweatpants, combat boots, and a T-shirt from The Mountain that depicts a cat and a Tarot spread. No makeup. No jewelry aside from my own wedding ring. On a scale of Scabies-Raddled Hobo to This Polished Woman, I am standing on an overpass in the rain holding a cardboard sign that reads “Please Help, God Bless.”
The mother-in-law, in a tone that suggests she just found me stuck to the hot-rod-red bottom of her left pump: “What did you say?!” Me, constitutionally unable to stop myself from responding to that tone: “Are you this hard to be around all the time, or is it a special day?” MIL: “How dare you?!” Those three words feel like the key turned in the lock of the cage that keeps my inner witch hidden from the world. Me: “How dare I? How dare you? I’m a complete stranger, and I can see that your daughter-in-law is exhausted. She needs support and rest.
She doesn’t need to be berated in public by the Wicked Witch of Wall Street.” MIL, spluttering: “We’re leaving!” Me, bit between my teeth and running free: “You don’t have to leave with her. I’ll drive you home.” The daughter-in-law dissolving quietly into tears: “YES. PLEASE. YES.” And then I drive a sobbing young mother home in her own minivan. We leave the Wicked Witch of Wall Street screaming furiously on the sidewalk outside the drugstore to call herself a cab. The daughter-in-law tells me that the last month has been really bad.
The baby is going through a period of vast discontent; her husband got a promotion and is overseeing a major IT server migration at his job and has been working all kinds of weird hours (and the baby is a Daddy’s boy, which probably explains the discontent); Her sister, who normally helps out, flew to another state to help her own in-laws with a family emergency; her best friend, who also helps out, is down sick along with her own two young kids.
Her sister is due to come home Wednesday, but the daughter-in-law is flat out of supplies and thought she could handle just a quick ride to and from the drugstore with her mother-in-law. Mother-in-law is obnoxiously classist and materialistic as heck, but normally manageable. She’s only gone full-bore witchface since the baby was born and her son got that promotion, because now her son and daughter are always so overwhelmed and “can’t handle their own lives.”
I’m planning to get myself a cab back to the store to get my car, but when I pull into her driveway, there’s another car there. She gasps and says “My husband’s home!” My first thought was that the mother-in-law must have called him at work and now he’s going to chew his wife out for being mean to Mommy. The front door opens, and the husband comes jogging out. I have to note here that he’s a physical carbon copy of his mother with a Y chromosome. He’s freaking beautiful.
He rushes up to the van, opens the passenger door to ask his wife if she’s okay, kisses her, says a hasty “thank you” to me, then goes to the back door to get the baby, who goes from fussing to happy giggly noises, because Daddy. I stare at the guy for a moment, then turn to the daughter-in-law and say, “My God, you are so freaking lucky. He’s Henry Cavill with Godiva-chocolate eyes.” She smiles (first smile I’d seen on her) and happily says, “I know.”
Turns out, he’d gotten a screaming voicemail from his mother and is kind enough to play it for us. When I heard it, I nearly burst out laughing. “YOUR SORRY WITCH OF A WIFE LEFT ME AT THE STORE AND DROVE OFF WITH A TOTAL STRANGER WHO INSULTED ME FOR SPEAKING MY MIND! SHE’S PROBABLY BEING KIDNAPPED AND MY GRANDSON WILL NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN! SHE’S HURTING MY GRANDSON, HE WON’T STOP CRYING! HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!”
I translate this as “I am a harpy and your wife abandoned me here for Satan to pick up at his infernal convenience, so you should go home and get her side of the story.” The pair of them also crack up laughing, which is an improvement over the daughter-in-law starting to cry again. I get a ride back to the drugstore from Henry Cavill’s clone. Fortunately, his mother is gone, and I say “fortunately” because he spends the entire drive snarling “I can’t believe she would do this.
I can’t believe it. She knows what’s going on in our lives, and she treats her that way?” “She thinks she won’t tell me what really happened? She thinks I’ll get mad at her on her say-so? She thinks I’ll get mad at my tired-out wife who’s just trying to hold the house together while I work? No. No, she’s not getting away with that.” I think if she’d still been there, he’d have torn her seventeen new ones and jammed a football cleat up each and every one. Incidentally, he didn’t just drop me off; he went in to get the stuff his wife hadn’t been able to pick up because she was busy fleeing from her mother-in-law. So, how was YOUR day? Story credit: Reddit / GeneralBystander