Listening to Margaret Visser this morning and she mentioned that marriages were a way of joining two families ... either for the purpose of expanding the family wealth or of making or keeping peace. I got to thinking about what a friend told me yesterday about her daughter's husband's parents. Several months ago they moved to the town where she lived and didn't once get in touch. So much for the joining of families.
All that aside, I want you to look at how I have described the conection of those folk to her. I could have said "her son-in-law's parents" but it is still cumbersome. Why, in our western culture, have we never developed a relationship term that describes the connection between two sets of parents whose children marry one another?
Equally as uninformative are the terms "brother-in-law" or "sister-in-law". Why don't we have special terms that delineate their exact relationship to us? Is my sister-in-law my brother's wife? Or is she my husband's brother's wife? Other cultures have exact labels that tell the hearer whether a cousin is male or female and whether the connection is through the mother or the father. Similarly with uncles and aunts and even grandparents. I suppose we can make do with "maternal aunt, cousin, grandparent" etc., but it seems awfully casual for a culture for whom family is, and historically was, supposed to be paramount.
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