I always thought he was just making up excuses to hang up. The reality is that I’m the one cooking dinner; I’m the one who drives the girls to their club meetings; I’m the one who cleans up before the guests arrive. Not him. ALREADY.
During my mother-in-law’s last visit, she said to my husband, “It’s so great to see you FINALLY get a chance to sit down and relax. I know all you do is work, work, work and go, go, go, and you deserve to take a break every once in a while. It’s not fair that you have to work as hard as you do ALL THE TIME.
I finally saw the light: my husband takes credit for all the things I actually do. She hates me so much because she feels like my husband is doing EVERYTHING while I sit around doing nothing. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
How can I get her to see the real picture instead of the one my husband made up? How to set the record straight without causing an argument or having to call him a liar in front of his mother? (He is, apparently, but I don’t want to stir the pot more than necessary.)
The good news, miss Manners will say – as we do when we’re about to give worse news – it’s that your problem isn’t, at root, with your mother-in-law.
It will be hard enough to change the ways of a 17-year-old without also assuming (or, perhaps, acknowledging) any bad intentions on your husband’s part.
Better tell him that you’re worried that his apology has unwittingly made his mother feel like he’s 100% in charge of raising the children and the household. And rather than contradicting it the next time you see your mother-in-law, you can insert your own anecdotes about the time you spend with the children.
Dear Miss Manners: When notified of the unexpected death of a person, is it better not to ask the cause of death, out of respect for the privacy of the family? He was not mentioned in the obituary.
The objection to such an inquiry is not privacy, but compassion. Miss Manners assumes the purpose of your communication with the bereaved was to convey sympathy and comfort – a difficult thing to do when you’ve just brought the widow to tears by having to dwell on unpleasant details.
New Miss Manners columns are published Monday to Saturday at washingtonpost.com/board. You can send questions to Miss Manners on her website, MissManners.com. You can also follow her @RealMissManners.
