My Hong Kong Husband

I have to say that time I spend with my parents passes so fast. Can’t believe it’s been almost a week since they arrived. And next weekend we will leave them to go to Hong Kong. And probably come back with Momzilla. Actually, it sounds like getting sick ‘Hey, I’ve been to Asia and I caught that disease, you know, caused by Momzillus Inlawitis‘.

Since we started to date we had several occasions to all live in one place. Of course I prefer to live with my parents, they are more cool and they don’t complain about things like drinking cold drinks or using washing machine instead of hand washing. Momzilla is not that bad either, if you read my older posts in the end we even got along pretty well. And with this experience I made a list of pros and cons of living with your in-laws!

PROS

• Finances – in Ireland we have no problem with renting out a flat or even buying one if we wanted to, but since we plan to go back to HK we need to think about money. If you live with your family, you’re able to save over 10k HKD each month, your major expense is gone. We wish to live on our own, but to be honest – I’m pretty sure we will end up with Momzilla. And a baby. And a cat. I guess I need to pray for WahWah to move into his office once he retires or Sing will have to sleep with Biscuit in one bed.
• Help in housework – for some reason parents simply can’t enjoy their holidays. Doesn’t matter if we speak about my parents or Sing’s. They will cook, clean, buy stuff for house, terrorize the cat. In last few days my house has been cleaned to the point, that if our landlord has seen it he would make our rent higher. Finally I can rest after work, because my husband is not really a good house-husbands.
• Baby-sitting – or cat-sitting – Because why pay a random person when you can beg your parents to take care of the little Stinky Feet Cutie Pie (yes, I adore Biscuit). I couldn’t enjoy our last trip to HK as much as I wished since our old landlord didn’t like our friend to come over and take care of Biscuit, but now she will be left with two people I trust the most. Same for Momzilla when in November we go to Poland.
• House is alive – I easily get lonely, sad and bored. I love being around people, I love talking to them. With Sing working longer hours than me, it’s nice to have someone to talk to when I come back.
• Being able to learn from each other – my parents speak very little (or no?) English, but thanks to Sing they learn simple phrases. As for me, Momzilla is the only person who is willing to speak Cantonese to me. Besides Sing, I don’t have any other native speaker around me. For some reason he is too ashamed to speak Cantonese to me, so only Momzilla, native to Shanghainese, is making sure I will practice Cantonese.
  I complain a lot about her, but I appreciate what she does for me.

CONS

• Cooking wars – because my mom doesn’t allow me to cook so I can rest, because Momzilla doesn’t allow me to cook so I can rest and because everyone knows better how to cook for Little Prince. You also need to remember that your Asian mother-in-law can believe in local medical believes which will just add fuel to fire.
• No privacy – it’s not really a problem with my parents, they will be the one closing the doors to our room (of course once we got married, before that my dad was randomly entering the room so we don’t hold hands and make me pregnant), but Momzilla doesn’t have the word ‘private’ in her dictionary. She just enters the room when she wants to, we learnt her cooking habits and stop cuddling when the water stopped running.
• ‘I’m older, I know better’ – again, my parents are bit better in this case because they will make a suggestion ending with ‘but it’s non of my business, you will do what you want’. Momzilla just keeps pushing her thoughts and believes on us because she thinks what she does is the best for us. To be fair, in most of the cases she is right.

But let’s face it – no matter how much we love our own (and each-other’s) parents, I don’t think any of us could live with any of them for a longer time. Few weeks, a month – fine. Seriously, when I think of Momzilla staying with me for the whole pregnancy and post-pregnant period, it’s like an instant birth control.

After all, no matter what I say, there are always two sides of the story and I’m sure that what I would put as ‘con’, Sing might mark it as something good. In the end, my parents are my parents, his parents are his – no matter how they love their child-in-law. We will look at it bit different and we will judge their action differently.

Hopefully we will be able to live alone when we go back to HK in near future, but I won’t be surprised if we move in with Momzilla. Or at least be her first door neighbour and hear her knocking with a brush to our window in the morning saying ‘SaSa’ (it’s not SaSa, it just sounds like that and for a long time I thought it’s Sing’s childhood nickname).

Have you ever lived with your in-laws? Would you be able to do it for a longer period of time? What advise would you give to someone in this situation? Let us know, because it might be us one day, too! Haha 🙂