Pope Francis greets two elderly people on April 27, 2022 in Saint Peter's Square.VATICAN MEDIA HANDOUT (EFE)
It's so funny to hate mothers-in-law that at Christmas parties the whistles of the cotillion are called to kill them.
Sansevieria, a long, twisted, tapered plant, is commonly called "mother-in-law's tongue" for reasons that anyone knows, even the Pope.
The pontiff surprised his audience yesterday by addressing the mother-in-laws: “To you, mothers-in-law, I tell you: be careful with your tongues.
It is one of the sins of mothers-in-law, the tongue.”
There are, he said, "commonplaces about kinship ties created by marriage, especially between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law."
That is why he asked to overcome "the most common prejudices."
Of course, he asked for it just before reinforcing them before thousands of people in the Plaza de San Pablo.
To the daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, although more to the daughters-in-law, he exhorted them to be patient and empathetic: “Today the mother-in-law is a mythical character, I am not saying that we think they are the devil, but they are always said to be bad.
But they are the mother of your husband, of your wife.
They are older and one of the most beautiful things for grandmothers is to see their grandchildren.
It is true that sometimes they are a little special, but they have given everything.
At least make them happy, let them live their old age happily, and if they have any faults, correct them."
What are corrected?
How do you notice that he does not have a mother-in-law.
It is very easy to make the joke.
Ever since we were little girls, future daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law have grown up among similar jokes.
Fearing that, if we mate and have children, we will pass two vital exams, two existential catfights, with two female opponents: for the first we will never be enough, the second will steal our children's love.
In case someone wants to object that men also have their thing... there is the comments section.
We all remember Robert de Niro giving Ben Stiller a hard time, but the "myth" to which the Pope has referred is not comparable, just search Google for "father-in-law" and "mother-in-law" to see the millions more references he spits out popular culture about them.
History can also be used.
The book
Representation of the mother-in-law in literature, cinema, theater and television
(published in English by Lexington Books in 2018) deconstructs the figure from classical Rome to contemporary television.
Auba Llompart Pons, PhD in English Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, is co-author (with Lydia Brugué) of the chapter focused on the fairy tales of Perrault, the Grimm brothers or Giambattista Basile based on oral tradition and their translation to current films .
How do the mothers-in-law look in them?
"They come off very badly," she explains over the phone, "they are portrayed as manipulative, they are always an obstacle for their daughters-in-law and a threat to the patriarchal authority of their sons."
The mother-in-law "questions the patriarchy because she seeks to have power in the family."
The worst of them all for the expert is the mother-in-law of Sleeping Beauty.
But wasn't the bad one an evil fairy with no blood ties?
“That is the one that casts the curse, but Perrault has a second part of the tale that has been omitted from the canonized versions: the princess marries the prince, who becomes king, and his mother is an ogre.”
A literal ogre.
When the king goes on a trip, he tries to eat his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren.
“It is the most brutal portrait”, says Llompart.
And they are not few.
From the proverb ("The daughter-in-law for the mother-in-law, they shit on the door" / "Mother-in-law, neither good sugar; daughter-in-law, neither pasta nor wax") to recent releases such as
The mother of the groom
or
Game of Thrones
, where Cersey threatens to strangle his son's wife, the intergenerational war between women gives a lot of play.
I read with surprise in the doctoral thesis
The traditional ballads and kinship relations: the wicked mother-
in-law of Ignacio Ceballos, that that song by
Carrascal, carrascal
, what a beautiful serenade he gave the can with the verses "When my mother-in-law dies, that the bury them face down, because if they want to get out, they have to go further down.”
Does this historic hatred translate to real life?
The surveys are scarce and with small universes of a few hundred people, but the few that exist say that the majority of women get along well with their in-laws, while men are more reluctant to spend Sundays with their counterparts, also that brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law are more hateful than mothers-in-law.
Perhaps the "in-law" has replaced the bad guy in the family?
It seems that things are changing, albeit slowly, the only positive representation of a mother-in-law that I can think of, after also asking who she had on hand, is the sympathetic Meryl Streep in
Big Little Lies
and her son was an abuser… The most interesting survey, at least from the point of view of a daughter-in-law, is from the website Fatherly, from 2016, which comes to say that grandchildren are the turning point.
Without a survey to back it up, she plagiarized a friend who always said “when a baby is born, a mother-in-law is born”.
Every happy family is also happy in its own way.
Sorry Leo Tolstoy.
My mother-in-law made me a little nervous as a new mother.
Also many other ladies, who were not even from my family.
Then she passed me by, because she has given birth to the man I want and because she is wonderful.
The Pope is right that they deserve to be treated better, those who deserve it, I imagine.
In real life, because it is better to treat people well, in fiction, because it is more real.
Because anyway, as the expert says, the root of the myth of the evil mother-in-law is, again, the patriarchy, which she questions seeking to have power in the family.
There are wonderful mothers-in-law.
I have mine here, reading this text for a while while she takes care of my children.
I just told you that in the comedy
The Mother
-in-Law by Terence, an author during the Roman Republic, the daughter-in-law's husband was called Pamphilus.
And we laughed a lot.
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