Mothers-in-law, eh? You can’t live with them, you can’t turn out all the lights and pretend not to be in when they come to visit. That’s the sort of cartoonish mother-in-law-as-harridan stereotype that Carolyn Bourne has reinforced with her now notorious e-mail to her stepson’s fiancée.
Never using one insult when two spring to mind, she details her future daughter-in-law’s uncouth lack of manners, her social gaucheness and — deep breath here! — her ignorance of the well-known fact that: “No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity-style behaviour.”
To be fair, the fiancée, Heidi Withers, if she is even half as ill-mannered as she is painted by Ms Bourne, sounds like a human toothache. She’s fussy about what she’ll eat, helps herself at will and sleeps in long after the rest of the house has risen.
Yet if it’s a question of good manners and upbringing, then Ms Bourne has some explaining to do herself. She seems to belong to that breed of mothers who spend two decades fawning over their son’s intelligence and maturity, but who — the minute he brings home the woman he plans to marry — decide he must need his head examined.
Certainly, Ms Withers sounds like a handful whose charms are evident to her fiancé but visible to others only under a very powerful microscope. On the other hand, Ms Bourne comes across as the sort of matriarch who makes you see why the penalty for bigamy is said to be two mothers-in-law.
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Is Ms Withers discourteous? Certainly. Insensitive. No doubt. But is Ms Bourne very much less so — venting her fury and shame at her stepson’s choice of wife by passing it off as advice to his fiancée “for your own good”? They deserve each other. If not that, then at least their own reality TV show.