Like every married man, I believe that there's something wrong with my mother-in-law. She's not right in the head.

But lately I've begun to understand what drove her over the edge: her children. Two of my wife's sisters are visiting at the moment and I am slowly unravelling.

There's a certain thing about sisters, of course -- a closeness not really seen in other kinds of relationships. My brother and I are relatively close, but we've never once gone shopping together and come home with matching outfits. We don't spend hours and hours and hours (and hours) reciting quotes from films that we watched as teenagers. We don't think up dance routines and perform them in our living room.

We don't, like my wife and her sisters, become a tornado of noise and activity that leaves chocolate wrappers and make-up kits in its wake.

The sisterly relationship is hard to define, but for an outsider its most obvious aspect is that you're not a part of it. When sisters come together, everyday things like husbands become irrelevant. I try to take part in conversations, but once the 15th reference to 1987 TV movie "A Hazard of Hearts" is dropped, there's simply no denying that I should probably be elsewhere.

Add to this the fact that my wife and her sisters were born in the western United States. Westerners may not know this about themselves, but they are enormous people. They aren't actually any physically larger than anyone else, of course, but they act that way. Westerners like to occupy three to four times as much space as they actually need.

If I were to do an interpretive dance about people from the West, I would stumble around in a circle, arms akimbo, yelling and bumping into things. Westerners are bulls in a china shop where all the china has a little picture of a matador on it.

So, this female siege army has set up in my home, shaking its foundations with its bunker-buster laughter. The sound that my wife and her sisters make is physical -- it muscles me around as if I were Hillary Clinton at a GOP convention. But that's not even the thing that's testing my sanity.

What's wearing me down, the thing that almost certainly made my mother-in-law go crazy, is the task of constantly trying to set the world right in the wake of the sisterly storm. My wife and her sisters are adults, but I feel myself acting a bit too much like a parent as I follow after them, picking up articles of clothing, turning out lights when no one is in the room and reminding them that they need to use their inside voices.

It hit me just how bad things have gotten, in just a week, when I had this actual conversation earlier today:

ME: "Oh for the love of Pete, don't just hang your stockings on the railings. This isn't an Old West brothel. Whose are these?"
WIFE: "They're not mine."
SISTER 1: "They're not mine."
SISTER 2: "They're not mine."
ME: "OK, there are only four people in this house, and these stockings most certainly don't belong to me. One of you is lying."
WIFE: "They're not mine."
SISTER 1: "They're not mine."
SISTER 2: "They're not mine."

I was only barely able to keep myself from shouting, "Go to your rooms, all of you."

I hereby offer commiserations to my wife's mother, who had to put up with this for decades. And my wife has two more sisters! The fact that my mother-in-law is anything more than a babbling wreck is truly testament to her character.

But I can see why she put up with it. The sisterly interaction is wholly unique, and when my wife is with her sisters some part of her comes alive that isn't seen at any other time. She is animated, giggling, talkative and her face filled with the color that comes from laughing all the time. My wife isn't a miserable person away from her sisters, but with them her personality is magnified.

There is something so warm and welcoming about my wife's laugh. True to her Western rearing, her laugh seems to come from someone several times her size. And the fact that I get to hear it so often these days makes worth it that I am constantly inhaling perfume, and never able to use my own toilet.

I'll be happy to have things return to normal in a week or so, but I will very much mean it when I tell my wife's sisters that I hope they'll come visit again soon, because it's worth it to see my wife so happy. And next time I'll know to stay in a hotel.

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.