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Dear Care and Feeding,
My mother-in-law is a loving grandmother to our three kids, but she is very demanding. For example, she came to visit three times last year (we live on opposite coasts), we had two vacations with her and my father-in-law, and we FaceTime almost daily. We don’t enjoy these visits/vacations.
When we’re together, she insists on the type of meals we have, dictates how we spend our time, and talks incessantly—we don’t get to relax; we don’t get any time on our own. She always talks about how she wants to be a respectful MIL and mother and not “be in [our] business,” but her actions do the opposite. My husband finally told her that we needed to scale back the visits. He proposed they visit once a year and that we spend one holiday with them annually. She did not take this news well. She essentially said we’re ruining her “vision for how life would be with grandkids.” She’s an emotionally manipulative person who uses guilt-tripping to get what she wants and we’re tired of it. My husband is doing a good job standing his ground but it’s been a lifetime of this kind of intense pressure from her. I want to know how best to support him when she says things like, “Why are you doing this to our close family?” She is delusional about how “close” we are! She doesn’t see that her behavior is causing a lot of emotional strife for her son! Should I talk to her about this?
—Wishing I Knew How to Support My Supportive Husband
Dear Wishing,
Your mother-in-law sounds like a lot. I wouldn’t want to spend much time around her either. But then I’m not her child, and neither are you. So here’s something I wish I knew: Is your husband “standing his ground”—and did he propose this drastically reduced schedule of interaction—to support you? Or are you both on the same page about time spent with his parents? His motivation matters. If he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place (Mom = rock, you = hard place) and is doing his best to protect you from a MIL you find overbearing and intrusive, I guarantee that your MIL can smell that. So she’ll go in for the kill, emotional manipulation-wise. And your speaking to her directly about this is bound to be a disaster.
If, on the other hand, your husband wants also for his own sake to put some distance between himself (and you and the kids) and his mother, then yes, you would be supporting him by speaking up. So I would say that the first step here is for you to have a completely honest conversation with him. Set aside, for the purpose of this conversation, how frustrated you are by the ongoing relationship with his mother. Ask him how he feels. If he begins by saying, “Well, I know how hard it is on you…”, redirect him to take you out of the equation for a minute. Tell him you want to fully understand where he is. (If you’ve already done this—and that’s why you say “We’re tired of it”—forgive me. But in my experience, these are conversations that are often skipped over, which makes for greater unhappiness down the road.)
Your husband may indeed be just as frustrated and exhausted as you are; he may be longing for a permanent change in his relationship with his mother. And seeing her just twice a year might be exactly what he wants. But he may—and here’s where it gets tricky—sympathize with you and even agree with you, with some crucial differences: She’s his mother and he loves her. And he wants very much for his children to have a relationship with her. (Two visits a year won’t foster that.) There are ways to compromise if he’s going to support you but also meet his own needs and commitments. You could cut out the vacations with his parents but still have them visit three times a year—and you can set clear rules about what happens in your own home, where you’re the one, not Grandma, who calls the shots (much easier to enforce on home turf).
And/or your husband could be the one who visits them, perhaps taking just one of the kids with him on each visit—special time for each grandchild.
People talk a lot about “boundaries.” But that word tends to be a dumping ground for too many different kinds of self-protective measures. Sort this one out, keeping everyone’s feelings in mind (and yes, I do mean even the hard-to-take Grandma—whose grandchildren may end up feeling very differently about her than you do).
—Michelle
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