The Mother-in-Law Story: A tale about visits that last too long, boundaries that get trampled, and the cost of silence.

But grateful is not the word you would use to describe how you feel when she walks through your door, when her presence begins to seep into every corner of your home like smoke that won’t clear. And of course, she doesn’t come empty-handed. She came carrying opinions, expectations, and authority that was never hers to wield in your house.

How it goes down…

Stage One: The Mother-in-Law Descends

She calls to “suggest” a visit, though of course it isn’t a suggestion at all. The bags are packed before the words even leave her mouth. She arrives with the certainty of someone who believes she belongs here, in your space, and you already know resistance will be met with disapproval at best and accusations of ungratefulness at worst.

Stage Two: Insincere Pleasantries

At first, things seem almost… pleasant. She hands out gifts, albeit plastic toys that will break within the week and knickknacks destined for the donation bin. She compliments your cooking with no backhanded insult, and pats your arm in that overly familiar, loving way, and smiles with her mouth and her eyes. For a fleeting moment, you allow yourself to hope. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe she’ll stay in her lane. Maybe… you could have a meaningful relationship.

But the hope is fragile, and deep down you know better.

Stage Three: You Are Doing It All Wrong

It doesn’t take long before the mask slips. Suddenly every choice you make is under her microscope. The laundry isn’t folded properly. The children’s bedtime is too early, or too late. The food you serve isn’t nutritious enough, or it isn’t fun enough. You’re too rigid in your parenting, or not strict enough. She doesn’t just openly question your decisions, she is now questioning your capacity to be a good mother, a good partner, a good person.

And your partner, who grew up in the shadow of this criticism and emotional immaturity, shrugs it off, telling you you’re overreacting. The betrayal of their silence stings almost as much as her words.

Stage Four: The Takeover

Then comes the moment when you realize you’re no longer in control at all. Your bed is taken over and you’ve been exiled to the basement guest room “for her comfort”. Your kitchen has been reorganized without permission because “it makes more sense that way”. That lamp from your grandmother, the one that carried her spirit into your home, all of a sudden vanishes, replaced by a sterile Ikea knock-off. You are told to relax, to be grateful, to just put up with it since she’s only here for a short time and because she is “helping” with the children.

But grateful is not the word you would use. Angry, erased, smothered, alone… those are closer.

Stage Five: Your Kids

Now it isn’t just your space that’s under siege; she’s moved on to your children. She tells them her stories, reshaping their memories. She disciplines them in ways that make your stomach twist, overriding the rules and boundaries you’ve set. She whispers criticisms of you into their ears under the guise of “wisdom” and grandmotherly guidance.

She is claiming them, bit by bit, while you watch helplessly, wondering if you are losing the most precious thing you’ve ever had.

Stage Six: Depression

You stop fighting and wait for it to be over. You retreat into yourself, into the basement bedroom that no longer feels like yours but is better than out there, with her. You spend long afternoons at the park just to breathe fresh air and sit in the car in the driveway for too long after coming home. You avoid being in your own home because it doesn’t feel like your home anymore. The walls echo with her presence, her dominance, her certainty.

You are displaced in your own life, and your partner is still willfully complicit.

Stage Seven: Just Make Nice

Then comes the pressure – from your partner, from family, from society itself – to just smile. To just smooth things over. To keep the peace. To stop making waves. To accept being treated like garbage. Harmony, they say, is more important than your discomfort. You’re made to feel unreasonable, ungrateful, irrational. The silence expected of you is a violence all its own.

Stage Eight: Finding Your Voice

One day you crack. Maybe it’s small at first. You insist on keeping your lamp or you stand up to her asserting your children will follow your rules, not hers. Maybe it’s louder, a confrontation, a boundary named out loud, an argument with your partner. It doesn’t come easily, and it doesn’t fix everything, but it reminds you that you are not powerless. That this is your home. That your voice matters. It is the first step toward reclaiming something that was always yours.

Stage Nine: Performative Apologies

She apologizes, but it’s hollow. “I’m sorry you feel that way”, she says with that look on her face. She offers hugs, makes vague declarations at dinner about “family unity”, maybe even writes in the family group chat or on Facebook about how she values respect.

But when you look around, your furniture is still rearranged, your rules still ignored, your parenting still subtly undermined. The apology is a performance to avoid any real accountability and need to change.

The harm remains.

Stage Ten: Sacred Rage

And then, finally, there is the rage.

Not the out-of-control kind, but the sacred kind. The kind that is rooted in grief, in love, in clarity. The rage that says: no more. The rage that sees through the gaslighting, the pressure to conform, the false apologies. The rage that ignites you to act, to name the truth, to refuse to be silent any longer, to reclaim your home.

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Now take this story and the suffocating presence, the erasure, the forced gratitude, the undermining of your authority, the displacement in your own home, and stretch it across hundreds of years.

That is colonization.

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples describes Canada’s colonial history in four stages:

1. Separate Worlds (up to 1500 AD) – Distinct Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies.
   
2. Contact and Co-operation (1500–1870) – Trade, alliances, fragile coexistence.
   
3. Displacement and Assimilation (1871–1969) – Policies of control, land theft, residential schools.
   
4. Negotiation and Renewal (1970–present) – Ongoing struggle for recognition, sovereignty, healing, and justice.

For Indigenous Peoples, this “visit” has lasted not days, not weeks, but centuries. Imagine being told, over and over again, generation after generation, that your home is no longer yours. That your children belong to someone else’s system. That your voice, your knowledge, your way of life are inferior, invalid, disposable. The takeover has reshaped nations, broken families, and created wounds that travel through bloodlines, a trauma so deep it lives in bodies, in memories, in the silence of those who survived, and in the absence of those who didn’t.

And today, “negotiation” often looks more like coercion and “renewal” far too often means protecting the status quo, defending privilege, and preserving systems of power under a friendlier name.

Why This Matters on September 30th

On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we remember the children who never came home from residential schools, honour Survivors, and reflect on the ongoing impacts of colonization.

But remembering is not enough.

The 94 Calls to Action, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and the Calls for Justice from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People (MMIWG2S+) are not abstract documents. They are roadmaps. They are survival plans. They are blueprints for change created by Indigenous peoples themselves.

And yet, too often, they are treated like polite suggestions rather than urgent imperatives.

The Call to Action

Colonization, and all its buddies like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, will continue unless you decide to interrupt it.

This isn’t about guilt. It’s about responsibility.

It’s about recognizing when you’ve been the silent partner in the story, and making a different choice.

If you’ve ever felt that knot in your stomach when someone took over your space, silenced your voice, or undermined your role as a parent – you know the ache of injustice. You know the helplessness of being told to “just get over it”, the fury of being gaslit, the grief of watching what you love be stripped away.

Now imagine being told that the only way forward is to forgive and forget, to do what your MIL wants the way she wants and then she will treat you better, while nothing about the situation actually changes. Imagine being asked to accept a hollow apology, a token gesture, while the takeover continues. Imagine being told you should be grateful.

That is colonization on a very small, personal scale.

If you are a non-Indigenous person living on these lands, you are the partner in this story. 

Don’t be the silent partner in colonization. Don’t condone rather than confront the injustice unfolding right in front of you.

If the story of the mother-in-law filled you with rage, sadness, or indignation – good. Hold onto that feeling. It is pointing you toward empathy and hopefully igniting your sense of social responsibility. Use it as fuel to act differently in this much larger, real-world story.

Reconciliation is not about making nice. It’s not about smoothing things over or asking Indigenous Peoples to fit themselves into colonial structures that were never built for them.

Reconciliation is about colonizers taking accountability. It’s about change, not comfort. It’s about healing, not denial. It’s about repairing a relationship so that it honours Indigenous agency, sovereignty, and the right to live freely in one’s own home, on one’s own lands, in one’s own culture.

Believe Indigenous people when they tell you what has happened, what is happening still. Listen when they lay out the roadmaps for repair; they are instructions for restoring peace, healing relationships, and building a future where everyone can belong. And then, take accountability. Not for what your ancestors did, or didn’t, set in motion, but for how you uphold these systems now with your silence, your prioritized comfort, your inaction.

If you are a non-Indigenous person on these lands, you have a choice. You can remain the silent partner or you can act to restore peace.

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