On mothering

I am the worst daughter-(out-law) there is. Instead of celebrating my mother this past Sunday, I asked her to help me sand/paint. That didn't happen because she overslept (or did she fake it just to get out of it, like so many others have?). But worse yet, after having a preemptive Mother's Day dim sum brunch on Saturday, I went food shopping with her, where she gave me the list of things I should do as a daughter-in-law (it was a very long shopping outing!):

• Treat my out-laws as my parents... Boy, what would she think if she knew that I refer to them as out-laws, let alone not calling them "mom and dad" (which I still have major issues with and which she really wants me to do). Don't get me wrong, they are nice, kind people, but I see my *occasional* annoyance at them as being as familiar with them as I can get, like when a child will yell back at his mother but if someone says something bad about her, he'll get defensive and say 'Don't talk to my mother like that!'
  
• Visit my out-laws at least once a week... This seems nearly impossible to me -- there are just 2 days in the weekend, TV to watch during the week (haha, j/k on that one), butt-loads of things to clean each week after returning home from work, plus cooking, etc. We barely have time to do all these things, how can we fit this in? And does that mean never visiting my parents lest we miss the weekly visit to the out-laws?
  
• Bring over fruit when visiting my out-laws... Completely outlandish, especially since I haven't done this in such a long time it would be weird to start up again. Plus I was once chastised for buying bad fruit and now when we try, there is this big to-do about how we shouldn't have, how they have so much fruit already, and the fruit is pushed back and forth for at least 15 minutes total that it's easier to just accept the fruit they got us. I know I'm breaking the Chinese code of being super-polite but we have to stop the insanity!
  
• Help my out-laws with chores around the house... Like the fruit thing, I tried in the past but it just doesn't work. I once washed the dishes while my MIL was on the phone (the only way that I could do so) and afterwards there were exclamations of things being done wrong and in the wrong place.
  

But according to my mother, if I do these things, they will think "What a great daughter-in-law I have." Fat chance, they probably hate me already. Sometimes being Chinese is too restricting -- there are too many expectations and enough guilt to coat _____ (fill in blank here, I can't think of a way to finish the metaphor -- the back of a spoon? a couple of macaroons?). And being American, I get the "visit your in-laws once a month but call them every so often" from magazines like "The Nest." Don't they know Chinese people (or at least I do) have issues communicating? I can't imagine picking up the phone and calling.

Anyway, while also at this dim sum gathering, we got our first face-to-face, older generation, "Go have children, produce grandchildren for your parents" thing. As if! I don't think we ever really got the "When are you going to get married" thing from the older generation even though we dated for over 6 years, but 6 months into marriage, we get this crap. Is the sole purpose of marriage to have children? Why is there so much interest in having grandchildren -- to see that the family is not dying out? What peeves me most about the incident was that I hadn't met the woman until 5 minutes before she audaciously questioned Dear. Troubling also is how my MIL shook her head and made a face when the stranger said 'grandchildren,' as if she didn't want any (or am I reading too much into it?).

Quick poll: how often do you visit your in-laws?