We met our in-laws in LA during Thanksgiving, and our precious kids joined us.
While we were driving to LA, our daughter did one thing unthinkable — she shared her location “indefinitely” with me and suggested I do the same. She emphasized the word “indefinitely” twice as if I were a tech illiterate stay home mom.
“Do you know how significant this is?!” I waved my phone to my significant other, who was babysitting the auto-piloting Tesla cruising smartly among the Amazon trucks full of holiday gifts and minivans full of crying babies and kicking youngsters.
“You are getting too old, so she needs to keep an eye on your whereabouts?” The significant other replied as a matter of factly.
This guy always knows the best way to sabotage my enthusiasm for trivial things, but this was something way too good to have anyone any words to dampen my moment of triumph feeling as a mother who was forced into stalking her daughter for decade(s).
“She is a younger version of you but now shares her location indefinitely with me. When will it be your turn?” I threw back some bombs, pretending I cared. It did the justice. I saw him flinch with a soft groan from the corner of my eyes as if his civil liberty rights were on the line.
That’s the advantage of having a daughter over a son. No matter how wild, unruly and independent the daughter used to be, she would almost always get closer and closer to her parents, especially her mom, when she got older.
“Oh, you don’t know how hard I could get anything out of my son’s what-about-to-happen these days,” My in-law whispered to me over the dining table while watching my son-in-law, who was deep in conversation with his father. Her blue eyes flickered with passion and tenderness so deep that you almost felt it hurt.
I still remember that special moment when I saw my mother-in-law watch her fast-sleeping son intensively and self-absorbingly on one hot summer noon when I first visited them. It was so hot that noon time. My then-boyfriend husband had no bed to take a nap, so he slept on the floor of the living room while I was taking the rest on the bed in the other room.
His parents were busy at work in the hospital nearby.
I woke up after a short siesta and slowly walked into the living room just to find out that my mother-in-law sitting quietly on the sofa, watching my boyfriend, who was fast asleep on the floor. She looked at her beloved son with such intensity and concentration, with a half smile on her kind face. She did not notice me at all.
That moment was a bit too long, almost to feel me intruding, so I withdrew and then made a loud entry.
My mother-in-law turned her face towards me, smiled apologetically, put her finger on her lips, and hurried out of the apartment.
“I just want to watch him sleeping one more time.” She confessed later.
I was so young that I did not know I should have apologized to her for stealing her son from then on.
In the end, the mother of a daughter is almost always the winner who takes it all: a husband who statistically proven almost always immediately abandon his own mother after dating exclusively with her, a daughter who gets closer and closer spiritually when she gets older, and lastly a son-in-law who is almost always (statistically proven) more charming than her own son or husband.
I am living proof of that.
