Intellectually, I understand and accept this painful reality. But emotionally, I'm struggling. I want to control them. I want to press a button on the in-law remote control that makes them stop doing whatever it is that makes me feel crazy. But there is not such remote control and as a consequence, I keep having an urge to throttle them. I have been here for less than a week and already feel like I am traipsing through a minefield in a foreign country whose rules and norms I do not understand.
Minefield number one: The car.
To ride in the car with either my father or mother in law is driving is to take your life into your own hands. Driving, for them, is a very sophisticated form of battle where the winner takes all and the losers are damned to some indeterminable form of hell. They all but burn rubber as they take off from red lights and leave rubber tracks as they slam on their brakes. They curse slower drivers as they tailgate them and glare at them when they whip around them. They get so angry that their faces turn red and I worry that they will have a heart attack.
Driving with them in the car is not much better. My mother in law is a total and complete back seat driver. She tells us when to change lanes in order to be in the correct lane for each stop light, when to slow down for less smooth sections of the road, when to speed up in order to pull ahead of the car beside us and when to pull out between speeding traffic. There is, however, one detail that she routinely fails to attend to: she does not tell us what street to turn on until we are about to pass it. It literally takes both of us to manage, one to drive and one to try to distract the back seat driving.
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