By Anna Rahmanan
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“Ask your mother what she thinks,” I often want to say to my husband when we disagree about what to do with the kids or how to deal with our ridiculously annoying landlord.
Sometimes, when I ask him for the 400th time to please get rid of the suits that no longer fit, I have the urge to outsource the matter to his father. Surely another man could explain that an ill-fitting jacket that’s been sitting in his closet for three years should no longer be considered an active member of the wardrobe.
Then I remember: my husband’s parents are no longer with us.
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His father passed away before we started dating, so I never met him. His mother died 40 days before our wedding, after years of being wheelchair-bound following a stroke. I technically met her, although she could no longer speak. Her eyes suggested that she understood I was the girlfriend of her youngest—and evidently most prized—of eight children. But I never really knew her: her likes, dislikes, annoying habits or, well, her love.
This is all to say: I understand that I do not entirely understand. I have never had a mother-in-law question how I feed my children, arrive too early, stay too late or offer an opinion so intrusive that it requires an emergency debrief with my husband. I have been spared the aggravation of having in-laws, but only because I have also been denied, at the fault of no one, the experience of having them at all.
And yet, that absence has made me increasingly impatient with the endless stream of social media posts devoted to exposing supposedly unbearable in-laws. The grievances arrive as videos, confessionals and screenshots of text exchanges so exquisitely unhinged that I suspect at least some were written specifically to incite comments and engagement.
Let’s be clear: I’m not jealous, one way or the other. I’m annoyed.
I’m annoyed by the suggestion that every unsolicited opinion constitutes a boundary violation, that every grandmother who calls a child “my baby” is staking a territorial claim and that every mother-in-law who buys the wrong pajamas or asks too many questions about preschool must be confronted and perhaps blocked.
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Some in-laws are genuinely destructive. They manipulate, humiliate and interfere in marriages in ways that are neither benign nor amusing. Nobody is obligated to tolerate cruelty in the name of family harmony.
But much of what gets presented online as toxic behavior looks to me like the ordinary aggravation of being related to other people. Perhaps it is because I’m a Persian Jew and sprawling family connections are simply a fact of life—“Did you meet Rachel? She’s your first cousin’s wife’s sister-in-law, once removed” is a perfectly normal question where I come from—but I tend to consider being related to more people a good thing.
Families are intrusive by design and I am part of the narrative. I ask my sisters where they are at all times, ask my brother what he had for lunch and tell my cousin's wife that her baby should be wearing socks when in public. During family gatherings, I am often confronted with an aunt or a brother in law's opinion I did not ask for. My dad is constantly giving my kids sugar in various forms even after I said no sugar in any form, and he then explains that an ice pop is barely any sugar at all. It is maddening, sure, but it is also, in many cases, what it looks like to have people invested in your life.
We live in the complaint economy, where every irritation is eligible for public airing if it can be packaged amusingly enough to earn comments. Social media has made grievance entertainment and relatives its easiest recurring characters. But perhaps not every family annoyance needs an audience. Some are better kept private, accepted as the unavoidable noise of having a family around you.
What a privilege it must be to find that irritating.
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