Mother of the Bride

I don't know why I watch Dr. Phil. At first it was refreshing, but as time passed, it started to look more and more like Maury Povich. Dr. Phil is a part of the Ol' Boys club, and insults women everywhere by publicly making a mockery of his marriage by letting on that the main ingredient of any successful marriage is the man kowtowing to his bossy wife.

Yesterday's show hit a chord with me. It was about a young couple planning to get married who chose to ban the groom's mother from the wedding. I have no doubt that the mother of the groom was behaving erratically, but to blow it so completely out of proportion is ridiculous.

I think Dr. Phil saw through it all. I did, after all, I was just there! No one tells you that when your child gets married, it changes your whole relationship - it has to! This child who has depended on me to some extent for her whole life now has someone else to depend on. It should be this way. The rational part of every parent sees this, I'm sure. But the emotional part just doesn't get it.

The groom in the show was an only child. His mother was having an extremely difficult time letting him transition into his adult life. If she is like me at all, she spent hours and hours looking at pictures of him growing up, aching for that child that she would never again be able to rock to sleep. Growing up is a gradual process, but it has mile markers that sneak up and stick an knife right through a mothers heart and twists it until she can't even breath.

Marriage is one of those rites of passages that rips a mother to shreds. I have no doubt that when that mother went to see her son, she was very clingy and needy. Maybe this seemed inappropriate to the bride to be, but the way the bride to be responded was unwarranted. The events she set into motion will come back to haunt her.

When they banned the mother of the groom from the wedding, his entire family, including his best man, chose not to go either. His whole family is standing behind his mother. That says a lot to me, and it should say a lot to the young couple. If she loves him at all, the bride to be would stop this travesty. Cutting someone off from their entire family is not a sign of love, and it is a horrible way to start out a marriage. My guess is that this marriage is doomed. Eventually the personality traits that would allow the couple to treat the grooms mother so disrespectfully will seep into their relationship in insidious ways and destroy what they think they have.

I'm lucky. My daughter and her husband were very understanding of my mood swings, and I knew why I was suffering with such anguish. I did not get uninvited to the wedding, and things turned out well in spite of my strange behavior.

I don't things worked out so well for these folks. Dr. Phil should have tried harder to make the bride to be understand where her mother in law was coming from.