The departure was uncomfortable. It required a conversation that had some pain in it. It required Daniel to hold a position with his mother that she did not initially welcome. These are real discomforts. But they were not the hard part.
The hard part was the three months during which I was in a situation I had not agreed to and could not seem to name clearly enough to address, during which the primary thing I was doing was absorbing and adjusting and occasionally raising and then accepting an insufficient response and absorbing some more.
The hard part was figuring out that I had been mistaking absorption for patience. Patience is a virtue in the sense that it involves accepting delay for something that is coming. Absorption without end is not patience. It is just absorption without end, and it costs something.
This is also not a story about a difficult mother-in-law, in the sense that I am not drawing conclusions about mothers-in-law as a category. Patricia is a specific person with specific anxieties and specific habits, and those habits were in specific conflict with the arrangements of a specific house. The conflict was real. It was not representative of anything beyond itself.
There are mothers-in-law who visit and are wonderful and go home without incident. There are mothers-in-law who stay and integrate into a household in ways that work. The story I am telling is not proof of a rule. It is one instance of one situation that required one set of choices.