And I’ve found that Momwiches can morph over time, as I am now the middle part of one. I am the meaty sauce, the daughter/ mother in between my mom and my daughter, and the joe can get pretty sloppy some days. When we moved to Atlanta several years ago, my parents were already in the area living on the opposite side of town. My dad’s job took him on overseas trips frequently, so when Dad was out of the country Mom would stay with us so that she wouldn’t have to be alone. At the same time I was starting to travel more frequently for my own work and ministry, and Mom and Dad would come over on those weekends to help out with the kids.
After a few months it occurred to us that we could save a boatload of money if we combined our incomes and bought a single house large enough for all of us. It would solve lots of problems with one fell swoop. So we found a place with three floors (so we could all ding the bell and retreat to our separate areas should the closeness start to feel —well . . . too close).
When people would hear of our arrangement they would sort of drop their jaw in amazement and ask, "How does that ever work?" And we would explain that we were all pretty busy people and hardly ever home all at the same time and we just made it work. My dad and my husband were great friends and all the guys would do guy things, and my mom took over the laundry room (no problem with that here!), and we just sort of agreed on what rooms got decorated by whom. Mostly no problems.
Until my mom’s life changed forever.
My dad was Mom’s haven, her place to vent and work things through emotionally. Tragically, about a year and a half after we moved in together, my dad died of pancreatic cancer. My mom’s top part of the Momwich was scorched by grief. Within a few months of my dad’s death she had surgery on her Achilles tendon and was hobbled for months. I thought it was ironic that her body mimicked her emotional state —it was like she was having to learn to walk all over again at the same time she was having to learn how to live all over again.
No longer being a wife after twenty-five years of happy marriage, Mom’s core identity was suddenly undercut. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in scrambling to find a sense of herself and a meaningful role in our revised family dynamic, she latched on to her intermittent Momhood with new and vigorous . . . umm . . . enthusiasm. This time around, however, she was leapfrogging a generation and aiming straight at trying to get my kids to toe her line. She had some legitimate issues about them not always respecting her and not always being as helpful as they could be, but my thoughts were, "What kids are always 100 percent in either of those areas? And what if I kinda agree with them that your standards of cleanliness might be a little high?"
