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She stayed with us for six weeks to watch her grandson in November and December of the same year, so that my wife could go back to work, and just before our son would start daycare.īut there’s one conversation that really and truly encompassed the evolution of our relationship over the years. She came here to Silver Spring and watched at Sibley Hospital in DC as my wife gave birth to her one and only grandchild in 2003. She shared a hotel room with my mom in 2000, just a few months after me and her daughter eloped. She drove me and her daughter to the Greyhound bus station in “dahntahn Picksburgh” in August 1999, so that we could begin our 20-plus years of living in the DMV, the Washington DC area. She attended my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon the following year.

Martha made herself available for nearly every important event in my life since my then girlfriend introduced us on the last Saturday in January 1996. There are so many conversations, so many arguments, so many moments I could discuss that made me see all the facets and contradictions of my mom-in-law. The woman had nearly 39 years on me, but the battle-axe of a geezer could just as quickly be affectionate and a never-ending fountain of love and optimistic clichés. Sometimes our conversations could be contentious, like professor-student, or like two bickering friends, or brother-sister. That I first met Martha Mae Guinn Levy (1931-2020) a month after my twenty-sixth birthday meant the nature of this relationship was never going to be strictly parent-to-child or mother-to-son. I’m mostly concerned that some will see what I have to write about my mom-in-law as an indirect slap toward my own mother and parents/guardian in general. No, I’m a bit nervous because this will be my first blog post about any specific member of my wife’s family, Thanksgiving 2001 excepted. I often write when I’m in an altered state emotionally or psychologically. I have nothing but good things to write about her. Not because I have nothing good to say about my late mom-in-law, someone I’d known for nearly half my 51 years. Martha with her grandson, Silver Spring, MD, December 25, 2009.