Relationships in life are a blessing of the divine; relationships keep you grounded, keep you stable, and keep you happy. It doesn’t matter what a relationship is called. What matters is the emotion, the bond, and the connection with the other person. We meet hundreds of people in our lives. Some stay on the surface while the others penetrate inside the heart and make a home there, they stay there, and we let them because they mean a lot to us. Relationships are simple. It takes love, basic efforts to keep up, empathy, and understanding. When a relationship is strong little things can make someone the happiest person ever, and little things can break their entire world down. It’s our responsibility to keep them safe and close. Many relationships are gifted to us as soon as we are born, even before that, but there are a lot of important relationships that we choose for ourselves. These include our friends, our partners, our in-laws, etc. Talking about in-laws, in-laws are the second set of parents that we are blessed with right after we get married to the love of our life. And they are equally important as our parents.
We often flood our fathers and mothers with surprise gifts and random stuff that we buy for them, but how often do we do it for our second set of parents with the same enthusiasm and not just formality? Especially for our mother-in-law, a happy relationship between a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law is generally mocked as being toxic. Still, the truth is that nothing is stronger and purer than the relationship between a mother and child. Life gives you one mother, and life gives her another child. There should be no doubt that you were meant to be together. But, how often do you show your mother-in-law the love you have for her in the form of gifts? Occasionally, right? If you’re living abroad, you might send flowers to Delhi for her, or might connect with her on a video call, or might send her little things on special days. Still, there’s something more that you need to do. Though there’s no greed in your mother-in-law’s heart for gifts, the material expression of your feelings does make a huge difference when there is physical distance. When you’re close or live together, this should be done without a single excuse.
You can make your mother-in-law’s day by sending mother’s day flowers to her, paying her a surprise visit, giving something to her that she needs, and giving her quality time no matter how far or how near you are. It’s confusing as to what to give your mother-in-law as a gift on any occasion, so here’s a list for you that would make the selection easy for you:
- Recreate and Reveal: Try to get old photographs of your mother-in-law, photos of her young age, her posing somewhere, normal pictures, and her pictures, and try to get her old clothes, the ones she must have worn years ago, if you can’t get the clothes, then the photographs would do. Try to copy those styles, poses, and attire, recreate your mother-in-law’s photographs, make a collage, get it framed, or put them in an album and give it to her. This would surprise her by all means, and it would symbolize that you idolize her, you look up to her, and she’s the kind of woman you want to grow up as. She’ll be the happiest person on the planet, without a doubt.
- Go Girls: Gift a trip to your mother-in-law anywhere she wants to go. You can try to make it the girl’s trip, with just you and your mother-in-law. Try to have the best time of your lives, talk a lot, eat whatever you want, sleep till whenever, do clothing-twinning, be like best friends for a few days, trust us, once you become her best friend and she becomes yours, there’s no going back.
- Say ‘Surprise’: Plan a surprise party at home, call all of her friends, call her close relatives and extended family members, get the menu sorted, the decorations sorted, get some board or card games, and other games that can be played indoors. Gift her a beautiful outfit, something that she’d like to wear with comfort in mind, and ask her to wear it. Once she changes and comes out of her room, she says ‘surprise’ to all of her favorite people in the same room. Having ‘her’ people together is the best surprise she can ever get. Her smile and the shine in her eyes would tell you the rest.
- Handwritten Heart: Write your mother-in-law a handwritten letter expressing everything nice that you feel about her. Tell her how much you love her, tell her what she means to you, how she’s changed your life for the better, how easy she’s made adjusting to a new environment for you post your marriage, tell her what all you learned from her, tell her how special she is for you, pour out your heart, and gift her a framed favorite picture of you two together. You could see her heart melting through the tears of happiness that would flow out of her eyes after you do all this. Don’t forget to have a nice together, and maybe some ice cream.Â
Your mother-in-law handled the entire house before you came into her life. You are the only person she can trust for continuing her legacy of having a happy family, making a happy family, acknowledging her, appreciating her, loving her, caring for her, and expressing your heart to her. Having a mother is surely a blessing, but having two is a blessing.
