One evil effect of pasquinade and sneer is to put the prospective daughter-in-law on the defensive, and prepare her mind, unconsciously to herself, to regard her future husband’s mother as her natural enemy.  Many a girl marries with the preconceived notion that, to preserve her individual rights, and to rule in her own small household, she must carefully guard against the machinations of the much-decried mother-in-law.  Nine times out of ten, had not this thought become slowly but securely rooted in past years, the intercourse between the two women might be all peace and harmony.  The young wife’s mind is, insensibly to her, poisoned before she enters the dreaded relation (in law).  She is on the alert, defensive, ready to impute motives to the mother-in-law she would never dream of attributing to her own parent, in like circumstances.

Yet, many a girl has never known what maternal love means until at her marriage she was welcomed by the open arms and large heart of her husband’s mother.  It is not only orphan girls who have this experience, for some parents never bestow upon their children the peculiar brooding tenderness which all young people need, even when they have almost attained man’s and woman’s estate.  Said one youthful matron to me—­“My own mother has been an invalid for so many years that I have not felt that I could go to her with all my worries and perplexities, for my annoyances only added to her troubles.  Therefore, never until I was married did I know what real “mothering” meant.  Then my husband’s mother seemed as much mine as his.  I was her “daughter.”  When my first baby was coming, all the dainty little garments were furnished by this grandmamma, and her care and tenderness for me were such that the remembrance of them fills my heart to overflowing with gratitude.”  Another woman told me with a moved smile that she was “so fortunate a woman as to have two mothers,” while a man I know openly declares that his mother-in-law is “the best mother in the world,—­next to his own mother.”

One elderly woman, who has been a mother-in-law five times, informed me the other day that in her heart she knew little difference between her own daughters and sons and their respective husbands and wives.  “You see,” she said, “they are all my dear children.”

I cite these instances merely to prove how happily harmonious this oft-abused state may be, and what a pity it is that it should ever be otherwise.

If you, my reader, do not enjoy the relationship, allow me to suggest a cure for the trouble.  Put your own mother—­or daughter—­in the place of the offender, and act according to the light thrown upon the subject by this shifting of positions.  Say to yourself—­“This woman means well, but she does not know me yet well enough to understand just how to put things in the way to which I have been accustomed.  She loves John so well that she seems unjust or inconsiderate to me.  She could not, in the eyes of John’s wife, have a better excuse for hasty speech or harsh action.”