In-Laws Can Be Strange Creatures

My mother has taken up a torch on getting James to call her mom. This has been going on since back in July, now that it's evident us living together isn't going to send him screaming in the opposite direction.

Lena has student council after school today. They only meet once a month, but it's literally right after classes end and she has to be picked up at 3:30. If it let out at 5, I would have been able to make arrangements to skip lunch once a month to be there to pick her up, but there's no way for me to leave work 2 1/2 hours early without causing my boss to have a minor stroke. So instead, my mom has committed to doing it for me. While she now lives 45 minutes away from our house, once a month isn't so bad to make the drive for her. It gives her an excuse to see Lena and gets her out of the house a little at the same time.

This morning she sent me a text asking for permission to use our bathtub when her and Lena get back to the house. Her new place only has a shower and she's always been someone who's rather fond of taking a bath. However, she wanted to make sure to let me know so I could give James a heads up.

"I just want to make sure it doesn't freak him out to come home and find his mother-in-law naked in his bathroom when he gets home."

Now, neither one of us really cares. Frankly, her using the bathtub is piddly in comparison to when she lived down the street and used our house as a convenient and free grocery store. (It was almost like a game... Let's see what's missing today! Oh, only half the freaking brand new bag of Sam's Club coffee. No, we didn't need that last package of toilet paper, we like using our hands!). Get the point? So when I told him exactly what my mom said, what caught his attention wasn't the bath part, it was the mother-in-law part.

He pointed it right away that she was at it again. He insists that even when we do get married, he has no intention of referring to her as mom. He still refers to his step-mom by her first name and she's been around since he was Anne's age. My mom however is nothing if not persistent. She thinks she's being so clever throwing it out there at random and is convinced that one day she will get him to slip up. My dad also plays the "I love you" game at the end of phones calls with him to see if he can get him to say it back. That one is more likely to happen though, because he's almost gotten him twice now.

I'm just grateful that he's got a good sense of humor and can take my sometimes very strange parents in stride...