My mother-in-law and husband are Yiddish speakers. I am not. But my mother-in-law would have entire conversations with my husband in front of me, even at the supper table with only the three of us sitting there, which I couldn’t understand.

Early on in her visit, when I called my husband out on this, he told me if his mother would address him in Yiddish, it would be a chutzpah for him to answer her in English. So I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I couldn’t follow the conversation when she and my husband spoke in Yiddish and asked her if she could speak in English instead. She responded by telling me I should learn Yiddish.

When she spoke, my mother-in-law didn’t talk; she’d scream at my husband, who would try to pacify her. I had no idea what she was saying, but still, I hated her tone. I knew my husband had done nothing wrong.

Then she started laying into me, telling me off for the fact that my husband bathed the baby, washed the floors one Erev Shabbos, and served himself supper instead of me plating it for him. My husband was as quiet as a mouse. When I asked him in private why he didn’t stick up for me, he was utterly confused. That was just the way his mother was. Why was I getting upset? I should just ignore her.

Over the two months of her visit, I discovered a woman who cried or screamed to get what she wanted, and a man who seemed to think it was very important to give it to her. When I tried to discuss it with someone, I was blown off, told that my mother-in-law was old, and a widow — I should feel bad for her.

I didn’t feel bad for her. I felt guilty, but I also couldn’t shut out the voice deep inside me telling me something was wrong. Both in her behavior, and in my husband’s reactions to her.

While she was there, we had a problem with cockroaches, and I arranged for an exterminator to come to our apartment. We would have to be out of the apartment for the two hours he’d be there, but when he showed up, my mother-in-law — who would happily sit on the bench outside my apartment for hours every day reading — declared that she had an ingrown toenail and couldn’t get out of bed.

My husband refused to convince her to leave the house. Instead, he confirmed with the exterminator that it wasn’t actually dangerous for her to be in the apartment with her door closed while he was spraying it and that skipping her bedroom wouldn’t affect the job he was doing.

My husband and I fought a lot behind closed doors during her stay. Because no matter what his mother did, my husband saw me as the guilty party. “I never realized what a selfish person you are,” he said to me time and time again. “You have no concept of kibbud av v’eim. You’re young and immature, and you have a lot of growing up to do.” He was furious with me that I wasn’t helping him accommodate his mother’s whims, accusing me of making things harder for him and forcing him to choose between his wife and mother.

Eventually, the longest two months of my life ended and my mother-in-law returned to England.

But I was left brokenhearted. Something was now irrevocably different in my marriage. My husband’s view of me had changed. I tried to tell myself I was being melodramatic. Surely my husband would go back to seeing me as he once did. Wouldn’t he? But try as I might to convince myself, I saw that his opinion of me would never go back to what it was before his mother’s visit. I guess you could also say my view of my husband changed as well. I now knew there was a part of him not entirely stable or healthy. He was no longer the perfect husband in my eyes.

I was so down, my husband asked a rav in his yeshivah who gives shalom bayis vaadim if we could speak to him. When we spoke to the rav, it was obvious to him that there was a tremendous amount of love and respect between the two of us. He told us time would help us both recover, and advised me to work on learning to love my mother-in-law.

Time did pass. Before my mother-in-law’s next trip, we spent a couple of hours speaking to a different rav who had been recommended to us. He made it very clear that my husband’s job was to stick up for me if his mother criticized me, and to insist they speak in English in front of me. The rav demonstrated a few ways he could say these things with kavod. He also advised me to keep my mouth closed about anything that didn’t concern me. If my husband wanted to run errands for his mother that I thought were ridiculous, that was none of my concern if I didn’t need his help at the time.

She didn’t stay with us this trip, which took a lot of the pressure off of us, but many issues still came up. Giving my husband a script didn’t change my mother-in-law’s personality, but there was still such a dramatic difference from her last trip.

Months passed, years passed. Overall, I’d tell you we had a good marriage. My husband was usually loving, caring. He still wanted to hear about my day. He celebrated my successes. He bought me gifts and gave me compliments. If our fights were nastier, well, no one stays a newlywed forever. I had a loving, caring, devoted husband… as long as I didn’t disagree with him.

Whenever I expressed an opinion that was different from his, it was like I entered some alternate reality, with my husband angrily flinging an accusation at me that didn’t make any sense: “You always have to have things your way,” he’d tell me. No matter how gently and hesitantly I gave my opinion, I got the same response. I’d so, so carefully hedge, “I was just thinking, I’m not saying we have to do it this way, it’s just an idea,” but no matter how many conditionals I put into my sentence, I’d get attacked for being controlling and bossy.

Many times, I just didn’t bother saying anything. If it wasn’t something really important, I kept my mouth shut.

It was so frustrating and painful. But I didn’t know what to do about it. We tried therapy a few times. We dealt with some surrounding issues that were a result of this conflict, but never really reached the core issue. I don’t think we were even sure what the core issue actually was.

I considered the possibility that I was lacking in self-awareness. It’s hard for all of us to see our own faults. But there was another voice telling me that my husband’s behavior had nothing to do with anything I was doing wrong.

One of our common conflicts was bedtime. My husband would come home and start a game with the kids. If I voiced my concern that they had to get into bed or they wouldn’t get up in the morning, my husband would get angry and say I was pressuring him, and that I always pressured him. Wasn’t it normal to expect little kids to be in bed before 9 p.m.? I wondered. I wasn’t crazy, was I?

And when they were hard to wake up in the morning, and I couldn’t get them ready on time, my husband would blame me. “You need to wake up earlier,” he’d say.

I’m not a pushover. After checking in with myself and being sure that I was being reasonable, I decided what was worth conflict and what wasn’t. Even though this kept the peace, I was frustrated, sometimes to the point of tears, that I couldn’t have normal input with my family.

Sometimes I disagreed with my husband on things I thought were really important and I kept trying to make my point, even if it led to a fight. Maybe I shouldn’t even call them fights, because while my husband was yelling, I was usually speaking very calmly and evenly. “I just said it was an idea. I said we don’t have to do it my way. Why are you accusing me of taking control here?”

My husband would shake his head and look at me with disdain. “You really have no idea how you sound, do you? Ask your sister, ask your friends. Ask anyone who knows you. You always have to get your way.”

Occasionally, I did ask friends or family for their opinion of me. They all concurred that I was actually a pushover.

But I refused to be a pushover in my own home when it came to important things about my children. Sometimes I had to hold my ground. When our son with ADHD was going through a hard time in school and was at risk of being kicked out, we went to a specific neurologist on the advice of his therapist to adjust his dose of Ritalin. The neurologist suggested switching him to a slightly different medication with a twice-a-day dose. In the car home, my husband said that it was hard enough for me to remember to give him medication once a day, twice a day was too risky, so we should just stick to our son’s original prescription.

I strongly disagreed with that and carefully voiced my concerns. My husband blew up at me. I stayed calm and didn’t yell, but I argued back. “We spent hundreds of dollars going to a private doctor to get his opinion. You want to do something different than the doctor and you’re accusing me of needing to get my way? This isn’t about getting my way! This is about me voicing my fear that by not changing the medication like the doctor suggested, our son will get kicked out of school.”

I spent many, many nights crying myself to sleep. Over the years, there were many times I considered getting divorced, but we had a house full of children, and I didn’t think I was suffering enough to break up their home. Most of the time, I loved my husband very much and felt loved in return. When the anger and frustration subsided from the latest incident, I couldn’t imagine living without him.

It all would’ve made more sense if it fit with my husband’s personality. He’s reasonable, logical, and generally a very nice person. He can negotiate other people’s fights to bring shalom. When my sister’s husband did some of the exact same things to my sister that my husband had done to me, my husband was horrified and felt we had to get involved and reason with my brother-in-law.

When I stared at him slack-jawed and asked him if he realized he’d done the same things to me with his mother, he waved me off.

“It was totally different with my mother,” he said. “She was just visiting and his mother lives near them.”

I constantly mourned the marriage I’d had before my mother-in-law’s visit and wished she’d never come.

I even challenged him. “If you’re so convinced I’m such a control freak, how can you love me so much?” I asked him.

“Everyone is a mix of qualities. No one is perfect. You want me to think you’re perfect? You’re close enough to perfect. How’s that?”

It might have been fine if I actually had the negative trait my husband thought I did. But he was accusing me of wanting everyone to do my bidding when I didn’t feel that way at all. If I wasn’t such a stable person, I would’ve questioned my sanity.

Everything came to a head one night over something small and petty — dieting, of all things. I was trying to lose weight after the birth of my youngest, but nothing was working. I was sitting at the table, having just eaten a 99-calorie roll with tuna, and I was starving. I expressed my concern out loud that I was worried that if I didn’t eat enough, my dieting would backfire and would end up slowing down my metabolism.

“I don’t think you need to lose weight,” my husband said. “But what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. You’re going to gain weight by eating less? That’s not possible! A person lost at sea loses a pound a day.”

I explained that there’s such a thing as slowing down your metabolism with extreme dieting, but there was no one to talk to.

“Now, don’t go twisting this around,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to lose weight. I don’t think you’re fat. But if you want to lose weight, the only way to do that is to eat less. It’s basic math.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but my husband was already berating me for not being able to listen to another person. “You have a real problem, and the biggest problem is that you don’t even know you have a problem,” he said.

I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I sat on the couch in the dark and sobbed and sobbed. Hashem, You have to help me. I don’t know what to do. This is impossible. I can’t run a home with a man I can never disagree with.

It still just didn’t make sense to me. My husband was so reasonable in every other situation. So why did he keep insisting that I was controlling? Why did he keep insisting that I was the one with the problem? And then it hit me. He’s not accusing me to be cruel. He really believes what he’s saying. He really believes I’m demanding he do as I say. It doesn’t matter what I say, he’ll still hear that I’m demanding something.

And I realized: His mother. He sees his mother.

The thought hit me so hard, with the force of a physical object. I actually gasped.

In that one moment, 16 years suddenly made sense. Remembering my mother-in-law’s visit, I understood what was going on in my husband’s mind, what it was like from his perspective. The moment I started to express an opinion, he stopped seeing me. He was seeing that woman whose behavior had horrified me, who spent his whole childhood teaching him that he had to give in to her or he’d regret it. No wonder I could never get through to him.

Whoa, who knew projection could be real?

A few nights later, I started a conversation. I’m not sure how I did it. But Hashem heard my tefillos that night when I was sobbing on the couch and put the right words into my mouth.

“Can we agree, whatever you think about me, that I’m very honest?” I started.

My husband nodded.

I made eye contact with him, waited for him to return it. “So when you tell me that I’m being bossy, that I’m saying you have to do what I say, and I say that’s not what I’m thinking at all, how come you don’t believe me?”

I watched something change on his face. He knew I wouldn’t lie. But he also couldn’t deny what he was sure he’d seen in me.

“I think I know why you’re so sure that’s what I’m thinking,” I said softly. Speaking very slowly and gently, I continued. “Someone in your life, before you met me, made you feel that way. There was someone before you met me who insisted you do what they wanted.”

“How can you be so sure?” he asked.

I didn’t dare mention his mother; that would’ve triggered him beyond being able to hear me out.

“Because your reactions aren’t normal. Listen to the words I say that make you upset. I’ve never demanded you do anything. If I tell you all I’m doing is suggesting something, then that’s what I mean. The pressure you feel when I say something had to have come from somewhere.”

It was obvious my husband was hearing me in a way he had never heard me before. We discussed a dozen different scenarios where my husband had seen me in a bad light. He asked what I’d meant by so many different things I’d done or said. For example, about our struggle over our kids’ bedtime, I explained: It’s normal for a mother to want her kids to be in bed at a normal hour. It’s reasonable to request her husband end his games with them in time for them to wake up the next morning. That doesn’t mean I’m demanding you do things exactly my way.

My husband was horrified — and devastated. “Wow, I… I tortured you. I really made you suffer. How did you tolerate me? You must hate me.”

I reassured him there were other parts of our relationship that were good. He was pretty quiet over the next few days. He told me he was thinking over everything I said and trying to figure out if it was really true.

A few days later, I found a letter on my bed with chocolate apologizing for all the years of suffering and asking me to give him a chance to make it up to me. We never discussed it again — I knew that my husband felt, and still feels, terrible about the way he treated me. Dwelling on this would hurt him — and there was no need to. He had clearly taken this to heart. He did real, genuine teshuvah.

In the ten years since this conversation, I’ve never again heard him accuse me of being the boss in our relationship or needing things my way, or anything of the sort. I feel loved and cherished and respected. Always. We have disagreements, as any couple does, that we work out respectfully and lovingly.

That midnight conversation became the before-and-after line demarking a monumental change in our relationship.

I wonder where I’d be if not for that fateful trip of my mother-in-law’s. Did that trip change my husband’s perception of me enough to cause the years of problems between us? Or would that have eventually happened regardless?

What-if questions are pointless. This I know: For 16 years I mourned my mother-in-law’s visit. But if I’d never seen the unhealthy interactions between her and my husband, I wouldn’t have known how to resolve the situation between me and my husband. I also don’t know if I would’ve appreciated what a gift a wonderful marriage is, if I hadn’t experienced the years without it.

This is a very personal story, but I decided to share it, to give others hope. After years of struggle, my marriage turned around, quite literally overnight, when I was able to really see things from my husband’s perspective. I wasn’t trying to be empathetic, I wasn’t trying to be charitable. I was trying to understand him. And that made all the difference.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 968)