I would come to understand this in the weeks and months after my wedding, as I watched her specific, patient, methodical approach to a situation that I had been ready to detonate with my bare hands. I would come to understand it more fully over the next three years of marriage, as the full picture of what she had done — and what she had understood that I had not — became visible to me.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let me start where it started, which is at a gift table at my wedding reception, at approximately ten o’clock on the most expensive and theoretically happiest evening of my adult life, when my cousin leaned over and said, very quietly, Is your mother-in-law supposed to be taking the envelopes?
Let me tell you about Linda first.
Linda Marsh — my husband Daniel’s mother — was a woman of extraordinary conviction. She believed, with the certainty of someone who has never been meaningfully challenged on a core assumption, that her perspective on any given situation was not only correct but was in fact the perspective of the universe made manifest. She was not malicious in the ordinary sense. She was not a villain. She was, instead, the kind of person who moves through life with such complete confidence in her own rightness that she rarely considers the possibility that other people have legitimate views that differ from hers.
She had been lovely during the engagement.
She had attended the engagement party with a generous gift and had hugged me with apparent warmth and had spoken at length about how happy she was that Daniel had found someone. She had offered opinions about the wedding planning that were frequent and specific and not always invited, but I had attributed this to enthusiasm and had navigated it with what I considered reasonable diplomacy.
