Mother in Law?

Despite having all my difficult final exams behind me (and passing them all with the exception of Gerontology), I was so nervous yesterday I couldn't actually eat.

I was meeting my future mother in law for the first time.

I cannot tell you how scared I was. Based on some presumptions, which Bryan kept assuring me were incorrect, I had created this person in my mind who would most definitely not like me.

I am a healthy weight, I am a curvy weight. I am neither fat nor thin. I am comfortable in my body, and have grown to love it. But my future mother in law is a woman at the end of the fifth decade of her life, has borne 3 children, is the same height as me, and weighs almost 10 kilos less than me. Her email address, as my own (plump) mother read aloud in shock and horror, is slim@___.com

You can see why I was afraid.

Here I am marrying this person's first-born child, we've never met, and I know that back in her working days she was a cosmetician and her email address describes a figure-type neither I nor my mother will ever reach. [Bryan later told me that "slim" is Afrikaans slang for clever].

So when Bryan's parents came through the Arrivals section at Ben Gurion last night, I was more than shocked. Actually, due to engagement eye and my own vanity, because I could not get my contact lenses in my eyes, but did not want to meet her wearing glasses, I was blind as a bat. So I didn't really "catch a first glimpse" of her - I had to wait until she was up in my face to see. She looks exactly like Bryan, just with a bit more hair. And she was nothing like the stuffy, over-coiffed, perfectly manicured talons, matching suit, pumps and pearl necklace mother in law I had anticipated.

The first words out of her mouth (after she stopped crying over the joy of meeting her eldest child's choice for a life mate) were, "The never told me how beautiful you are - you are absolutely gorgeous!"

As you can see, I really had nothing to be worried about at all.