Mothers in Law - how do you get along with yours

[PollyOR]

My MIL is a very, very good person.  She only wants the best for her children and their families.

 

Here is where we struggle.   I believe my MIL manipulates for good.  If she believes you should do something, she will pave the way and make the path as smooth as possible.  But, manipulation, even if there are good intentions behind it, still feels like manipulation.  

 

For the first part of our relationship, I was just so thankful for all the nice things she did for me that I didn't recognize that I was being manipulated.  Then ... I recognized it but felt guilty for not wanting to go along with her plans because they were good plans.  And now?  I'm almost 50 and I'm tired of being manipulated because it constantly feels someone is trying to trick me instead of letting me be myself and make my own decisions.

 

I would say our relationship has actually deteriorated over the years.  It's sad, but that is the way I view it.

[Amber in SJ]

I need an other as well.  If you mean the woman who is Dh's mother, well, it is complicated.  She had an undiagnosed mental illness when I met Dh (I was 16.)  When Dh & I got married she left my FIL for another man and ripped her family apart.  We continued to visit her & let the kids see her even though we were the only ones in the family who did so.  When she found herself about to be homeless we paid off her house so she would always have a place to live.  When she became violent and manipulative we protected the kids from her but Dh & I continued to see her as much as possible.  She moved to another state to get a "fresh start.".  She lives in an assisted care facility now and refuses to live in one close enough for us to see her very often.  She has MS as well as being diagnosed as bipolar and having narcissistic personality disorder.  She was diagnosed at one time with dissociative identity disorder but later she bragged about 'fooling the doctors' with that one.

 

After my in laws had been divorced for a year, my FIL remarried and has been married to a lovely woman for the past 22 years.  She has been a wonderful grandma to my kids, and I never really had to worry about any kind of emotional issues because she isn't dh's mom.  It doesn't matter what she thinks about my housekeeping, cooking or parenting because I am not married to her baby boy.  She is a very nice person and we have a great relationship but it is easier for us to get along than it is for her other DIL who is married to her son.  Also Dh's youngest brother was only 7 when their parents divorced and because MIL was pretty much pursuing her own life rather than parenting it fell to FIL's new wife to parent.  She is much more critical of the DIL that married Dh's youngest brother than she is of me.

 

My mom is the world's best MIL and mother of adult children.  Never a word of criticism and always telling us what a great job we are doing.  She goes out of her way to be helpful & kind.  She makes a huge effort to stay connected to her far away grandkids as well as the close by ones.  She is amazing.  I hope to be half the MIL she is.

 

Amber in SJ

[Jenny in Florida]

My MIL is deceased as of a couple years ago, but I answered the poll according to the relationship I had with her. I couldn't have asked for a better MIL.

 

Same here, except that my wonderful MIL died almost 14 years ago.

[NASDAQ]

Never met her. Died when my husband was a teenager.

[Tress]

My MIL is deceased as of a couple years ago, but I answered the poll according to the relationship I had with her. I couldn't have asked for a better MIL.

 

This!

[foxbridgeacademy]

I answered "I don't have one" because she is a complete Nightmare and DH and I haven't seen her in 10 years(she cut us off first).  Which is really sad(DH's father is ok but very submissive) this is how DH wants it and we do have a less stressful life without her.  

[JeneralMom]

Both MIL and FIL passed away long before I met DH. He assures me they would have loved me and I choose to believe him.

[Heather in Neverland]

Other... Sort of. Dh's mother died several years before I met him. His dad remarried after dh and I were already married. So technically she is my step-MIL. She is very nice but our relationship is mostly cordial and superficial. We live on the other side of the world and have little contact other than birthday cards, etc.

 

So while we don't really have a relationship, there is no animosity either. Just polite civility.

[wendyroo]

My MIL questioned and criticized pretty much the first decision DH and I ever made as parents.  We recklessly took a nap in the hospital room while our hours old infant slept in his bassinet completely untended...well, he was in the room with us, with the door closed, within arms' reach of both myself and DH and he was wearing an electronic alarm bracelet...but other than that he was completely at the mercy of the rogue kidnappers that plague hospitals in MIL's reality.  Babies are kidnapped from hospitals every day she emphatically scolded us.  DH found some FBI statistics that showed that as long as DH himself abstained from kidnapping the baby that we were pretty much in the clear, but MIL's "statistics" had come from Regis and Kelly and were therefore above reproach.

 

She was sure she read somewhere that breast milk did not provide proper nutrition for a baby.  Why, oh why, would we not listen to her and start giving our 20 lb 4 month old the formula he desperately needed?!?!

 

She accused us of neglect when we allowed our kids to go outside in cold, frigid, practically arctic temperatures without coats...it was a 60 degree summer morning in North Carolina.  :huh:

 

She views education and learning in general as highly suspect and is very glad her kids did not try too hard in school and become know it alls.  I'm pretty sure that comment was meant to have a barbed tip as she hurled it at me.  So be it.  I let her comments about how I'm ruining the kids by reading to them too much and making them put their own clothes in the hamper go in one ear and out the other.  Thankfully she is an equal opportunity criticizer so she can only devote so much time to telling me my faults before she has to move on to DH, SIL, FIL, the neighbors, the gays, the politicians, etc.

 

I voted: I have major issues with her, but we deal with it 

 

Wendy

[SweetMissMagnolia]

DH just met  his real mom in 2011 so we haven't really known her that long LOL but she seems nice and laid back and all---plus she's a few states away from us and has her own things going on so she doesn't really try to get into our life too much.....so I don't have any issues with her...

[mommymonster]

My MIL is awesome.

 

Well, she's not my mother, who is very manipulative and moderately evil. MIL also raised my husband, which couldn't have been easy! She loves the boys, puts up with my quirky sense of humor, and eats my cooking without complaint. Can't ask for more! 

 

[OhanaBee]

Can I have an extra option: "It's not great, but we manage well enough with good manners and goodwill, I guess."

 

This pretty much sums it up.

 

In the early years of our marriage I would have said I had a great relationship with my MIL.  We lived fairly close to MIL & FIL and once my oldest was born I made a great effort to drive over the mountains to spend the weekend with them about once a month.  DH and I had a lot of problems during our early years, the effects of which have carried on to this day.  It wasn't until we moved to the East Coast that I started to realize my MIL was a major factor in our problems.  She likes to put people down and call it "teasing".  She did this to my FIL and DH a lot and I picked up the habit.  Honestly it made for great bonding between the two of us - let's pick on our husbands!

 

Once we moved away and I saw the damage she had done and continued to do in her marriage, it opened my eyes to what I was doing to DH.  She is also *very* manipulative with her family, painting herself as the long-suffering victim, and I totally bought into it!

 

A few years ago my oldest converted to LDS and got married.  My MIL stopped speaking to her except to write her these long letters basically condemning her to Hell if she didn't turn away from the Mormons.  That was when I stopped speaking to my MIL unless it was totally necessary.  I don't think she ever noticed.

 

So here we are, after 25 years of marriage.  My DH is in therapy and coming to his own conclusions about his childhood.  I've told him if he ever wants to confront his mom about anything, I've got his back; but frankly neither of us can see the point.  We just got an email from MIL telling us their vacation plans, along with OUR vacation plans for early summer.  Because, apparently, we will be having a family reunion in our area.  This was news to everyone, including my dd, her family and my sil's family. 

 

We've accepted that this family reunion will happen.  DH's dad has cancer and we need to do this for him.  But we're also working to make this much more "FIL Friendly" than it originally was.  It was all about what MIL wanted to do at first.

 

Wow, this got long.  Yeah, MIL and I do NOT have a good relationship but I smile and be as polite as possible when she's around.  What I don't do anymore is let her pick on my husband the way we used to do. 

[AimeeM]

I've never had the luxury of knowing her; she died the day after giving birth to my only brother-in-law, when my husband was a tender 11 years old.

From what I hear, she was a loud Italian (immigrant); my husband very fondly remembers her chasing him through their row home, shaking a spoon at him, because he made a cake fall in the oven. My husband says she would have loved me, and that I remind him of her, lol.

I wish she were here. I adore my FIL.

My husband doesn't really have a relationship with my mother - they're too close in age, I think (my husband is 15 years my senior, and only a few years younger than my mother). He tolerates her, at best; more than the age thing, they are just very different people. He does get along well with my father, but it's more like a buddy relationship when my father is here, again - the age difference doesn't really lend to much of a father/son-in-law relationship between the two of them. DH doesn't even pretend to tolerate my SM.

[ficbot]

I don't really have a personal relationship with her. He has a somewhat tricky relationship with his mother for various reasons; when we see her, the visits are usually pretty brief and I am polite and respectful with her. But I don't really speak to her on my own or have any sort of relationship with her other than seeing her at family stuff, and because of his difficulties with her, I tread carefully and try to stay out of the way.

[MariannNOVA]

I have no relationship with her. She is passive aggressive, sneaky, selfish, and I prefer not to deal with her. She never calls the house because she has no desire to speak to me nor I to her. I gave up going out of my way to be warm and loving to her about 15 months ago.....I don't know what she wants, but it is not a relationship with me.

 

I have kept my mouth shut about her, and she has basically dug her own grave as far as dh is concerned. He sees what a loon she is.

 

It is sad because dh's dad has Alzheimer's. She kept the diagnosis from us for almost two years. And her way of dealing with it is to basically "hide" her husband in the house with her. She is causing him to go downhill faster than he has to, but she told me that she doesn't want this to go on any longer than it has to.

 

She really makes me sick.

[WishboneDawn]

I am absurdly blessed in the in-law department.

 

I love my in-laws and every members of my husband's wonderful extended family. His sister's in-laws are also amazing and since we see them fairly often they're like an extra set of grandparents to my kids. My late brother's in-laws are great and we bonded when my brother died. My other brother's in-laws are warm and funny and I have a great time when I'm around them.

 

There honestly isn't a bad apple in the bunch and I'm very thankful that my kids get to grow up surrounded by these people.

[Susan in TN]

I deal with it by living several hundred miles away and keep direct contact to a minimum. Small doses are tolerable and sometimes even pleasant.

 

In all fairness, it could be much worse from the stories I've heard from Dh's brother's wife. They lived next door to in-laws and worked in their family business with the rest of the family. Fortunately, dh had heard rumors of his mother's poor treatment of her daughters-in-law, and so he told her, before we were married, that if she ever said anything to upset me she would never see us again. And MIL believed him and restrained herself as much as I think she was able. Plus, dh refused to move back home to work in the family business, and it wasn't too bad enduring the stories of God calling us "back home" through MIL's "dreams".

 

My "other" MIL was the dear woman who raised dh until he was 5, and really played an active role in his life until he left home. In many ways she was his mom and I credit her with the fact that dh is so much more normal than the rest of his family. We got along wonderfully and she loved our children and prided herself in that she could recite all their names and ages despite her quickly fading memory. She would often tell me on the phone that she praised God for sending a good wife to her "son" and let me know that if he gave me any trouble, she would give him "what for". :D She passed away almost 2 years ago.

[Audrey]

Just out of interest.

 

I answered for how it was when she was alive.  She was like a second mom.  Mine had been gone a long time and MIL was wonderful to me. I think I was very lucky to have been able to know her. I miss her.