Direct Answers - Column for the week of November 3, 2003

My mother-in-law drives me crazy! She is an antisocial, critical, know-it-all who can't find anything decent to say about anyone but herself. Every time she comes to visit it puts such a damper on my relationship with my wife, it takes us days to recover.

We have never really gotten along, but lately it has gotten much worse. She left yesterday after a week's visit, and my wife and I didn't talk the rest of the day.

My mother-in-law barely gets along with her own sisters who live next door to her, and she is estranged from her own mother. She has only two friends in the whole world and no social life. She spends hours each day watching television and doing genealogy research.

When we got married 11 years ago, she said, "Don't call me mom, and don't expect me to love you more than my own children."

She divorced her husband after eight years and four children. She then devoted her life to her kids, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. She constantly talks about what we can and should do with our house, our property, and our money. Every time she comes over she points out things she thinks are wrong in our house.

The final straw came during her second to last visit. She blamed me for telling her to park at a train station where she got a parking ticket. I wasn't with her at the time, and I didn't tell her where to park. But she told my wife, "If I hadn't listened to your blankety-blank husband