I hate my mother in-law

Okay, so for the record, here it is: my mother in law isn't evil, or demented per se. She loves my kids and would do anything for them (and, at times, has).

Now that that's out of the way, I can't stand the woman. Okay, so for the record, here it is: my mother in law isn't evil, or demented per se. She loves my kids and would do anything for them (and, at times, has).

Now that that's out of the way, I can't stand the woman.

My mother in law is, to put it bluntly, a cross between Edith Bunker and Rain Man. Not only gratingly ethnic, but oblivious to the point of near-autism to boot. The kind of person who, when you tell them they're annoying, says "no I'm not" -- the logic being that, if she's not annoying herself, she couldn't possibly be annoying you. In fact, I've told my wife that the woman's personality has two settings: annoying and asleep.

I know "retarded" is a bad word and I truly, truly mean no disrespect to the disabled. But there's simply no other way to describe the woman. Case in point: the first time my parents -- who, mind you, are world travelers and have lived abroad numerous times -- came to her house, she heard that they were from California and ran out of the room with an excited look on her face. And promptly returned, clutching a jar filled to the brim with seashells.

"Look," she said. "From my trip to California."

It's not like she's gotten any wiser with age. Last year, during the brunch from my son's bar mitzvah, my cousins were trying to catch a flight home. Except that my mother in law had just gotten a new bed the week before and, desperate to play show and tell, decided to drag my cousin's wife over to her house.

To show her a piece of furniture.

Like I said; I know "retarded" is a bad word... but...

Just so you know what I'm dealing with, her entire cell phone consists of the following numbers: her daughter, her son, her grandchildren, a few other relatives, and a litany of doctors. So when she's not checking in on a relative, or under medical supervision, she's calling us. Between twelve and fourteen times per day. It's like a nicotine fix; first thing in the morning, before she so much as rolls out of bed, she picks up the phone. At night, before she goes to bed (and well past eleven, since it's not like she has anywhere to be in the morning).

Let's look past her weird foibles; the obsession with hospitals (she used to drive all the way to UCLA Medical Center just so she could eat in their cafeteria), the inability to correlate always being cold -- and subsequent need to tell us all to wear sweaters on 78 degree days -- with the effects of aging (but instead attributed to, as I remind her, the effects of global cooling). The insistence that Red Lobster is a better restaurant than Wolfgang Puck's signature Chinois on Main, or that Coors Light is a better beer than Heineken, or that Cindy Crawford is "nothing special"... the list goes on and on. What I really can't take is the flat-out disingenuousness. Because it's one thing to be needy and clingy; it's another to pass off a need to cling and smother as selfless devotion to one's family.

Now my mother in law is a widow. But so is my aunt, and she was widowed much younger than my mother in law was. And six years later, my mother in law is still clinging to this crutch of being a widow as an excuse not to have a life. Claiming that she could have all the friends in the world, but she's just too devoted to her family.

We tell her to date. We tell her to go out and make friends. And beggars can't be choosers... but you'd never know that from the way she talks. One time a guy expressed interest in her, and all she did was complain. "I would prefer an intellectual man." I reminded her that "prefer" implies you have a choice in the matter; what she's really saying is "I would prefer to be alone" except it's clear that "alone" is code for "draped all over my family."

I've seen other sites with light Bob Hope-type jokes. I've seen others with true, unfunny horror stories. But there's an insidious in-between... and this is my particular purgatory.