We often hear stories in which mothers-in-law are depicted as evil. Sadly, they sometimes really are and the reason behind it might be that they feel like their daughters-in-law ‘steal’ their sons from them.
A woman named Janisse shared the story of how her MIL plotted against her in order to turn her husband against her.
It was Janisse’s husband’s birthday and she was looking forward to the party she was preparing for him. She planned to invite all of Carl’s friends and family and wanted everything to go according to plan.
But just as she was getting ready to start preparing the food, Carl’s mother, Sally, called her and told her she wanted to help her with the preparations.
As Janisse always got along with her husband’s family, or at least she thought so, she told her MIL that she was more than welcome to lend her a helping hand.
When Sally arrived, she did help with the food, but in the afternoon, she started acting weird. As she was digging around the fridge and sighed every few minutes, she accused Janisse of not purchasing certain ingredient she needed for some special cookies.
“I can’t find any ingredients for the cookies I wanted to make. I told you that I would make the cookies I’ve made every year for Carl,” Sally said.
“We have so many desserts and the cake as well. So, I think it’s okay. We can do it another day for him,” Janisse told her.
“Janisse,” Sally sighed. “It’s really important to me, okay? It’s a tradition I started when Carl was only three years old. Can you go out and get the ingredients?”
As there was not much time left until the guests were about to arrive, Janisse decided to go to the store, which wasn’t that far, and grab the ingredients her MIL needed.
On her way home, Janisse felt like a superhero because she knew the party would be a great one, but her joy was short lived.
The moment Janisse opened the car’s door, Carl burst out of the house like she’d committed a crime and he wanted to catch her in the act. He accused her of leaving his mother all alone to prepare everything for the party. When she explained that wasn’t the case and it wasn’t as it looked like, he told her she wasn’t telling the truth.
Janisse tried to tell him that she was the one who prepared most of the food and that she only took a short trip to the store to grab the ingredients for the traditional cookies his mom made for him, but he said there were no such cookies and that she was childish to believe that ‘cookie tradition.’
Still unaware what was going on, Janisse went to her room. She had a quick shower and shortly after the guests started to arrive.
Carl avoided Janisse all evening, and when the time came for the cake to be served it was Sally who brought it to the table and started singing “Happy Birthday.”
Sally acted as though she was host and it looked like she was the one who was throwing the party for her son, not Janisse.
When the guests left and Janisse and Carl were alone, she tried to explain what really happened and that his mom plotted against her, but he didn’t want to listen because he was certain his mom would never do such a thing.
The following morning, Carl woke Janisse up and apologized for not trusting her. Janisse was puzzled and asked him what made him change his mind about the entire situation. He then explained that his mother was bragging to someone about her master plan, but she accidentally sent the message to Carl.
Carl then went to the other room, in which his mom spent the night, and tried to talk to her in order to learn why she would do such a horrible thing. It turned out that contrary to what Janisse believed, her MIL didn’t really like her because of her political and religious beliefs. Janisse was shocked because her MIL never mentioned anything about it before.
However, no matter what Sally did, Carl and Janisse decided to forgive her eventually.
“We’re going to Bali to celebrate your birthday next year,” I told him. “No friends, no family, and absolutely no drama!” Janisse told her husband.
Actress Anne Heche Dead at 53 After High-Speed Car Crash
Anne Heche has died of a brain injury and severe burns after speeding and crashing her car into a home in the residential Mar Vista neighborhood last Friday, Aug 5. The building erupted in flames and Heche was dragged out of the vehicle and rushed to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.
The 53-year-old, Emmy Award-winning actress is best known for her roles in 1990s films like Volcano, the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, Donnie Brasco and Six Days, Seven Nights.
Holly Baird, a spokesperson for Heche’s family, sent NPR a statement Friday afternoon saying: “While Anne is legally dead according to California law, her heart is still beating, and she has not been taken off life support.”
Sponsor Message
Baird added an organ procurement company is working to see if the actress is a match for organ donation, and that determination could be made as early as Saturday or as late as next Tuesday.
Heche launched her career playing a pair of good and evil twins on the long-running daytime soap opera Another World, for which she earned a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991.
In the 2000s, Heche focused on making independent movies and TV series. She acted with Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright in the drama Birth; with Jessica Lange and Christina Ricci in the film adaptation of Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling book about depression; and in the comedy Cedar Rapids alongside John C. Reilly and Ed Helms. She also starred in the ABC drama series Men in Trees.
Heche made guest appearances on TV shows like Nip/Tuck and Ally McBeal and starred in a couple of Broadway productions, garnering a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the remount of the 1932 comedy Twentieth Century.
In 2020, Heche launched a weekly lifestyle podcast, Better Together, with friend and co-host Heather Duffy and appeared on Dancing with the Stars.
Heche became a lesbian icon as a result of her highly-visible relationship with comedian and TV host Ellen DeGeneres in the late 1990s.
Heche and DeGeneres were arguably the most famous openly gay couple in Hollywood at a time when being out was far less acceptable than it is today. Heche later claimed the romance took a toll on her career. “I was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres for three-and-a-half years and the stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years,” Heche said in an episode of Dancing with the Stars.
But the relationship paved the way for broader acceptance of single-sex partnerships.
“With so few role models and representations of lesbians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Anne Heche’s relationship with Ellen DeGeneres contributed to her celebrity in a significant way and their relationship ultimately validated lesbian love for both straight and queer people,” said the Los Angeles-based New York Times columnist Trish Bendix.
Bendix said that while Heche was later in relationships with men — she married Coleman Laffoon in the early 2000s and they had a son together, and was more recently in a relationship with Canadian actor James Tupper with whom she also had a son — “her influence on lesbian and bisexual visibility can’t and shouldn’t be erased.”
In 2000, Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed Heche in advance of her directorial debut on the final episode of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a series of three HBO television films exploring the lives of lesbian couples starring DeGeneres and Sharon Stone. In the interview, Heche said she wished she had been more sensitive about other people’s coming out experiences when she and DeGeneres went public with their relationship.
“What I wish I would have known is more of the journey and the struggle of individuals in the gay community or couples in the gay community,” Heche said. “Because I would have couched my enthusiasm with an understanding that this isn’t everybody’s story.”
Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio in 1969, the youngest of five siblings. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household.
She had a challenging childhood. The family moved around a lot. She said she believed her father, Donald, was a closeted gay man; he died in 1983 of HIV.
“He just couldn’t seem to settle down into a normal job, which, of course, we found out later, and as I understand it now, was because he had another life,” Heche told Gross on Fresh Air. “He wanted to be with men.”
A few months after her father died, Heche’s brother Nathan was killed in a car crash at the age of 18.
In her 2001 Memoir Call Me Crazy, and in subsequent interviews, Heche said her father abused her sexually as a child, triggering mental health issues which the actress said she carried with her for decades as an adult.
In an interview with the actress for Larry King Live, host Larry King called Heche’s book, “one of the most honest, outspoken, extraordinary autobiographies ever written by anyone in show business.”
“I am left with a deep, wordless sadness,” wrote Heche’s son with Lafoon, Homer, in a statement shared with NPR via Baird. “Hopefully my mom is free from pain and beginning to explore what I like to imagine as her eternal freedom.”
Leave a Reply