Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I turned four years of being a daughter-in-law into an experiment.
I wanted to know whether she could respect me without knowing my title.
That is a lovely sentence. I have said it to three people and all three of them nodded.
It is also a confession that I spent four years collecting data on my husband’s family instead of telling them to stop.
I did not withhold my job out of humility.
I withheld it as a control variable. That is the correct term and I did not have it until the August.
Four years of a clean experiment, with one thing held back, to see what the family did with the rest of me.
And every time she said something at a table, I did not hear an insult. I recorded a result.
You cannot be hurt by a data point.
That is the entire appeal of running an experiment on people who are supposed to love you, and it works, and it is extremely effective, and I recommend it to nobody.
Thirty tables. A hundred small remarks. And I went home from every single one of them unbothered, because I was not at those dinners as a daughter-in-law.
I was the person conducting the study.
And it goes further, and this is the one that took eleven months and a professional.
Every time she told people I was unemployed, I said nothing.
And I liked it.
I was not being modest. I sat at those tables with an ace in my hand and I did not play it — because as long as I did not play it, I could not lose.
A woman who says actually, I’m an appellate judge can be met with well, you don’t act like it, and then she has to live with that.
A woman who says nothing stays perfect.
She is never wrong, because she has never made a claim. She is never diminished, because nothing of hers has ever been put on the table and valued.
And she is, at any moment she chooses, about to win — which is a feeling I enjoyed for four years and which is worth nothing at all when you are flat on a bed and cannot raise your voice.
Four years of being secretly more than they thought, which is the safest and most cowardly position available in any family.
