My mother-in-law’s (MIL) apartment is being painted. Time to remove unwanted shelves and screws from the wall so the whole wall looks nice and smooth. Some new holes were also drilled in the wall to move things to a better spot. Ana/MIL also wanted two paintings on the wall in one of the bedrooms. These had once been brought from Madrid by my MIL and had been lying neatly and safely in the closet all this time. They were made by one of Ana’s aunts, and they were two paintings with Chinese text/symbols on them.

The drilling went well. Plastic plug in the wall and a hook screwed on. Then I temporarily hung up the paintings so we could verify that everything was correct and I noticed something. Huh, the first painting had ‘ana maria’ written on the back. Funny. Then I saw the other one… ‘antonio’? That’s Ana’s ex. What?! Sometimes a story is just too good to let it rest. This was one of those stories.

Hey Ana, I finished hanging the two painting in your mothers bedroom, the ones with the chinese text for Ana Maria and Antonio.

When I told Ana, she immediately became defensive. It was a piece made by her aunt, the Chinese characters were unreadable, it didn’t mean anything, she never expected I would notice, blah blah. My MIL also claimed she never though about it. The whole story seemed completely normal to Ana and my MIL. That my MIL kept a relic from 20 years ago from one of Ana’s exes, brought it along on a trip from Madrid to Las Palmas, kept it in a closet for years, and then hung it prominently in the bedroom, apparently that wasn’t strange at all. Ana also thought it was perfectly normal. It was the artistic value of the work, and nothing else. Yeah sure.

Ofcourse I talked about the Antonio painting/situation a couple of times. When I mentioned it while we were meeting with a friend, it immediately became clear that I wasn’t the only one who found it odd. Even when I asked the AI the reply indicated it was just plain weird.

Now the whole situation has become tense. Removing them isn’t an option, because it was all so innocent and not strange at all, so why would you do anything about it. Leaving them hanging… well, if the family wants to have Ana’s name and the name of her ex on the wall, in Chinese characters, then sure, that’s possible. Apparently only the artistic value matters, and these paintings are apparently the only artistic value we have available. For me, all the typical MIL stereotypes start bubbling up.

The mother-in-law is stereotyped as bossy, unfriendly, hostile, nosy, overbearing and generally unpleasant. They are often depicted as the bane of the husband, who is married to the mother-in-law’s daughter.