MIL and the Chinese Man

My MIL apparently really enjoys cleaning, and she's very nosy. She used to bring her cleaner over to my house and they'd make a fine old time of it, coming to me every 15 minutes with some interesting object to ask what it was. Or to ask if they could throw it away. A lot of times these things came from deep in drawers where those two really had no business being, but I just went with it. Sort of. More like gritting my teeth and asking myself, "Do they honestly think I don't know where the garbage can is or how to use it? Do they think I brought something all the way from America so I could throw it out here because our garbage cans there aren't good enough?"

The complete and abysmal failure of some people's logic systems never ceases to amaze me. Anyway.

While I was in the US, BE called the cleaner to come and tidy up the evidence of his two weeks alone here without me. He told MIL he'd done this. Naturally, MIL invited herself over to "help." I wasn't home to stop it, and BE admonished her to not rearrange, throw away or otherwise remove a single thing from the house. She's been bawled out about this enough times to get it, but it took a lot of times.

Note: My cleaner, BTW, is on my team on the MIL issue. She reports that MIL "helps" by ironing everything in the house, and making sure to get a good look at everything else. This explains why all the clothes in drawers are inside-out after MIL has been through.

Now.

I have this picture on my night-table:


I put the pen there to give you an idea of the size of this picture. It's very small. The picture came from an art history book (and no, I didn't cut it. I don't cut books). It's a photograph of a statue of some god of wisdom. I've had it around since college. It's actually the frame I like most.

Every time, *EVERY TIME* MIL has a chance to get into the bedroom, this picture disappears.

Or should I say gets misplaced? It's always somewhere weird, like behind the bed or face-down under the night-table or like last time, on the floor in the corner under the curtains.

Unlike the fish mystery of the previous post, this mystery is solved, but only partially. It's definitely MIL doing it. Don't blame poor LE on this one, because it started happening before he was born, and his interest in this picture waned months ago.

But the real question here is, why the hell does she do this? Does she just hate the picture? Does she think it's something bad or scary? Is it the long ears? Or the fact that it's a Chinese man? Maybe she thinks he's an old flame I flaunt at my husband by keeping a photo of him at my bedside? Goodness knows.

BE doesn't believe me that this happens when his mom comes through. I asked him if she used to throw away or hide stuff of his she didn't like when he was little, and he said "Yes," yet the idea she's been hiding the Chinese man is inconceivable. It's not just knee-jerk mother protection either, because BE said "I know she's nuts but she's not that nuts."

I, on the other hand, have some serious reservations.