Self-portrait Sunday

I've given my mother-in-law a lot of play on this blog, particularly of late. She's a nut, that woman, real blog fodder. A real laugh riot.

She makes me think of a story I read once, written by a college student with a prosthetic leg. This victim of childhood bone cancer had made it through junior high and high school by being the funny girl, laughing her ass off about her hilarious wooden leg fueled mishaps; her leg falling off at the skating rink, that kind of thing. Then, as a sophomore in college, she found herself suddenly bawling like a baby in the middle of reciting a formerly funny lost-leg anecdote to her Speech class. She'd realized that the story wasn't funny anymore. And furthermore, a big part of the story had never been funny at all.

My mother-in-law is crazy. But she's rich, and when you're crazy and rich that makes you merely eccentric. Her own mother is a diagnosed schizophrenic, with the interesting sub-diagnosis of hypergraphia or compulsive writing. If my MIL could only tap into the hypergraphia, maybe she'd finish the dissertation that will finally give her an official PhD in Psychology. She currently works as a therapist, although her clients keep leaving her as she diagnoses them with cases of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or whatever she happened to see on the Discovery Channel the night before. She's dangerously engaging. She can talk a good talk. But make no mistake, she's crazy.

Some actor once gave a definition of tragedy versus comedy; Dutch probably knows who it was. When someone else slams his hand in a car door, it's comedy. When you slam yours in a car door, it's tragedy. My MIL recently learned that my brother-in-law Jeff, her eldest son, has taken out a life insurance policy to protect his wife and daughter in case of his early demise. She consequently jumped to the conclusion that his wife, Laurie, was going to hire a hit man and have him knocked off for the cash. That was comedy. My parents left yesterday after a week-long visit, and my MIL took Cedra for an overnight stay on cuckoo's nest row today. As she left I gave her a tube of Aquaphor and carefully explained the treatment for the diaper rash that Cedra has developed as the result of her mother forcing her to wear fashion tights seven days a week. She called me two hours later to inform me that she suspected my father of sexually abusing Cedra. No, I'm not laughing. That's a fucking tragedy.

I've been crying for two hours. I opened a cheap bottle of wine to console myself, and that's been a little more cathartic. I think I've hinted before that this blog, begun in January of this year, was actually a therapy assignment. I was supposed to keep a journal. But a journal requires introspection, honest feeling, sincere expulsion of heartfelt sentiment onto a written page. Hell if I was going to do that. It was much safer to compose a public blog, with the requisite expectation of providing entertainment, humor, comedy to the reader. I've been prone to depressive episodes lately without the help of this type of cruel catalyst. I don't need this shit. She's not funny anymore, and I don't think she's ever really been funny at all. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I'll be here rocking back and forth in a puddle of my own piss all week.