On our wedding day and me with presents up to my chin.

The first time I met my future mother-in-law was about 7 p.m. on the night I picked Janet up for our first date. We went to a double feature. One movie had Mick Jagger playing Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. The other movie starred Joseph Cotton and a woman in a gold lame jumpsuit. There was a flying lion in it too, I think.
None of them matched what I saw when Janet’s mother walked out of her bedroom to say hello. Maude—by the way that was her name–was already in her nightgown and was applying gobs of cleansing cream to her face. Thank God she didn’t offer to shake hands. Janet’s father was already in bed so I didn’t meet him which is just as well as I later learned he slept in his underwear.
It seemed her father liked to wake up at 4:30 a.m. so he could leisurely take his shower, shave, dress and eat breakfast before arriving at work an hour earlier than everyone else. That way when they walked in the door coffee was brewing and he was halfway through his day’s work. I presumed he thought it was a nice gesture to intimidate his fellow employees that he was more on the ball than they were. Maude slept in until 6 but she still liked to go to bed at the same time her husband did.
Through the years I realized this was the first clue that life with her family was not going to be normal. This is not to say my family was normal. We were all Looney Tunes but I was born into that den of dodo birds. I didn’t have any choice. But there were plenty of warning signs about entering this new circus.
Wouldn’t you think Maude, at least, could have postponed her nightly beauty regimen until after her daughter’s date picked her up and left the house? Was she being totally clueless or was she being a master of passive aggressive behavior? Perhaps she wanted me to know that while her daughter was excited to go out with the new guy in town, she was not impressed at all.
I must say that when I continued showing up at the house, Maude did go out of her way to make a nice meal, although the meat course tended to be burnt on one side. She liked to talk on the phone while she cooked and if the gossip got extra juicy she’d forget to flip the meat in the frying pan.
And after I proposed to Janet only three months later Maude didn’t protest. She couldn’t really. She was sixteen when she eloped. The next morning she informed her mother by handing her the marriage certificate as she walked back out the door.
Maude made up for the good behavior during the courtship by her antics on the wedding day. First thing she did was to load me up with all the presents that had been brought to the wedding ceremony. So when we walked out of the church you saw the radiant bride and a groom with boxes piled up over his face. Then some lovely child thought it would be fun to stick her foot out to trip me and cause all the boxes to fall down and go boom, including some old lady’s porcelain pickle plate which smashed into a million pieces. For years Maude lamented how I broke that cherished bric-a-brac. She forgot the part about how I was tripped.
I thought I had photographic evidence of what happened but recently I examined the wedding pictures to find them lacking. In the picture with the girl’s leg stuck out I had only one box in my hand, obviously taken after the fall. And another picture showed the presents only went up to my chin and not over my face. The fact remained I still had to carry them out the church door. Maude defended herself.
“Well, they had to get back to the house some way.”
After we drove the one block from the church to their home, I waited for Janet to change into her smart white traveling suit. Maude walked up and smiled sweetly.
“You know her doctor said Janet was very small ‘down there’ so you might not want to have sex.”
That’s always the first thing you want to hear after saying I do.
Finally, before we walked out the door, she looked into Janet’s eyes and said, “You know that if it doesn’t work out you can always come back home.”
Wow, wasn’t that a great set-up. Insert an important doubt in my head and give Janet clearance to land back in mama’s arms. She must have been upset when the marriage plane didn’t crash and burn.
The flags were huge and waving red, but I didn’t care. I chose this circus, these monkeys and these clowns, but only because I adored Janet so much.