Twinkle: Skype Tells All

So, y'all know how Mr. Twinkle's family refuses to admit that my child actually likes me. They can pull her out of my arms as she wails, "I want mommy!" and they'll be like, "What's wrong with her, Twinkle? Didn't you give her lunch today?" It's the general consensus in Mr. Twinkle's family that my daughter doesn't know or care about the difference between me and a Rhesus monkey in a blonde wig, and I have never, in almost two years of motherhood, heard any of them say (or even tacitly admit), "She wants her mommy." Not even when she's saying it.

So, yesterday the families fired up the Skype lines in an effort to introduce Twinklette to her new sweet baby cousin. We'd never used Skype, so at first we couldn't get/send a video feed and could only hear voices...and it was a good thing, too, because the very second we answered the call from Mr. Twinkle's sister, the very first thing we heard (in the background), was a baby make a small, innocuous cooing sound, and my mother-in-law saying, "Ohhhh...she wants her mommy!" You should have seen the looks on our faces...but it was a good thing nobody on the other end of that webcam could! (Funny, when my baby was a few weeks/months old, wasn't it my MIL who assured me that she was way too young to tell the difference between me and anyone else?)

I'm sure this is the first of many small or large inequalities that y'all can look forward to reading about as my sister-in-law forges the tricky waters of new motherhood with a grace and ease that my MIL thinks I never could manage. She already gave birth naturally and matter-of-factly in the span of a few hours, while we all know I'd have been dead on the stirrups table if they'd made me do that. That's probably why her kid loves her so much, and mine merely tolerates me.