Mother-in-law

Mother-in-law

Thanks to Hollywood, the term mother-in-law brings up some stereo typical images of meddling interfering opinionated middle aged woman.

My experience has been very different.

I first met Margaret McGonnell, who would become my future mother-in-law when I was 17 years old. Yes, that’s right 17.

My early memories of Mrs. McGonnell (AKA Mernie, later AKA Nanny) included her amazing cooking, sense of humour, intelligence. and strong opinions on things that really mattered to her.

I spent a lot of time at the McGonnell’s and enjoyed Mernie's great meals.

As a shy, slim, relatively fit 17 year old [Yes, that’s right shy, slim and fit'ish] Mernie seem to always insist I was well fed. I could sense her keeping an eye on me as I ate. When I finished what was on my plate, she was right there with more insisting I needed to “finish it off, it would only go to waste, etc, etc”.

I will always remember,

- the words she said to me the day Janice and I got married
- how quickly she came to help out for a few weeks when our three children were born
- how she made a cake at the kitchen table with a couple of kids standing with make shift aprons helping out
- how she and my 2 year old son marched around the house banging pots with wooden spoons in some kind of parade
- how genuinely interested and proud she was of everything that was happening with our family, and how I would hear the tiniest details replayed back from other family members months later
- how she had so many great friends and how much fun they always seem to have. It was cool to hear much later how she was often the life of the party
- while she never once said anything to me, how sad she must have been when we move too far away for her to see her grandchildren on a regular basis
- when she and Roy drove all the way from PEI to Ontario in the middle of the winter to visit us, and brought us a 50lb bag of PEI potatoes :)
- how our birthdays were only a few days apart and she always reached out to remind me that all the special people were born in November
- how later in life, even when she was not well, she never lost her spunk and drive to make things better for people

Mernie passed away just about two weeks ago now. It was amazing for me and our children to hear stories of how she touched peoples’ lives in all different ways.

While it was not that obvious to me then, I now realize how privileged I was to have a mother-in-law like Mernie.

Rest in peace.

Your son-in-law