Apron Strings

When my husband, Tony was a child, his mother was an obsessive cleaner. His house was always immaculate and hyper-organized. When he woke up in the morning, everything was sparkling clean and the table was set for breakfast. In short, everything was clean and neat and ordered for him with no effort required on his part.

To this day, when my mother-in-law comes to my house, the first thing she does is start cleaning. She’ll clean my kitchen, hand-washing each dish in scalding hot water. Then she sweeps and picks up. If I have laundry to fold, she starts to fold it. When we first got married and she visited, I would get insulted. Did she think I wasn’t a good housekeeper? Was she disgusted with the mess and dirt she saw? Did she think I wasn’t good enough for her son? Over time, I have come to accept it. This is just the way she is. Cleaning my house is actually her way of sharing, so now, I just relax and let her do it.

When we got married, Tony expected that I would act the same as his mom. “Maybe,” he might have reasoned to himself, “the reason she has never been a super cleaner before is that she wasn’t married yet. Now that we’re married, she will change.” In addition to tidying and scrubbing, he also expected me to make his doctor appointments for him, cook and serve him food even if he didn’t ask or said he wasn’t hungry, bake multiple pies and dozens of cookies to serve to friends or give as gifts at Christmas and send out Christmas cards to everyone he ever came in contact with, just like his mom used to do. Let me point out at this point that I am Jewish. I never did anything around Christmas time except light the menorah and eat potato latkes.

But forgetting for a moment the cultural and religious issues, the idea that I should be more like my mother-in-law has been the cause of lots of fights over the last 14 years of our marriage. Don’t get me wrong – we have a good marriage and we don’t fight that often. But when we do get into it, the problem usually centers on a variant of the same thing, which is “I’m not, nor will I ever be your mother.” The arguments have gotten less the longer we’ve been married. I have gotten better at cleaning, and he has gotten better at not complaining. Every once in a while, though, that little boy still comes out and reaches for his mother’s apron strings and finds that mama has left the building.