When Your Children Marry by Merrill Deborah M.;

Author:Merrill, Deborah M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Mother, Son, and Daughter-In-Law Triad

What is it about the triad between mother, son, and daughter-in-law that poses such a challenge? Traditionalists would argue that the new wife is taking the place of the mother, but such an argument infantilizes adult men in our society. Nor would I argue that mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are so dependent on men that they are actually competing for them or battling to control them. However, there are a number of structural factors that challenge the triad of mother, son, and daughter-in-law.

Earlier researchers have examined the factors that lead to difficult relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.14 In-laws lack a shared history that otherwise binds family members. Likewise, in-laws are neither totally in nor out of the family but are thrust into situations where they are expected to treat one another like family and meet all of the obligations of family. Daughters-in-law feel particularly alienated when the boundaries around her husband’s family are impermeable and the family does not incorporate her. Likewise, mothers-in-law become resentful if they feel that their daughters-in-law have not bridged the gap between them or included them in their sons’ lives. Thus, much of the tension revolves around the creation of a new and separate family. Hostilities tend to remain in situations where the initial separation of families goes poorly. Problems also arise in situations where the families disagree about the acceptable degree of separation from one another.15

What about the relationship between the mother and son, though? Results of this research suggest that additional structural factors account for the unique changes in relationships between mothers and their sons following the sons’ marriage. In particular, mothers become dissatisfied with the relationship in situations where the couple spends more time with the wife’s family than the husband’s family following marriage. According to the adult children in this study, couples are only slightly more likely to spend more time with the wife’s family than the husband’s family.16 Yet mothers suggest that it happens more frequently than this. According to the mothers, couples tend to spend more time with the wife’s family than with the husband’s family. This confirms earlier suggestions that men get pulled in to their wife’s family more frequently than women get pulled in to their husband’s family.17 In fact, any decrease in time that men spent with their family was experienced negatively by many of the mothers. While mothers did not see this as “losing” their sons, they did believe that it was a lessening of ties, which some mothers resented.

Sons expressed frustration at the conflict between their mothers and wives. One of the sons said, “When my back is to the wall like that . . . caught between them . . . I go red and I just have to leave for a couple of hours.” When asked what he meant by his back being to the wall, he said, “It is usually a situation where my mother wants to do one thing and [my wife] wants us to do something else.

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