Problems with In-laws

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Dear Nana3,

What a mess. What an awful, awful mess. I will include you in my prayers.

If it were me, I’d unfriend and block your MIL from your DD’s account, period. End of story. No one does that to my kid and gets away with it. Your MIL is worse than sick. That’s evil. The woman cared more about getting sympathy comments from her friends than she did for the emotional state of her own granddaughter. That’s not someone you can trust to have your daughter’s best interests in mind at any time. Yeah, it will cause another storm throughout the family. So what.

🤷

You can’t win with them in any case, so do what you need to do to draw a firm boundary around your family, and protect your DD from these nasty individuals. Let them have their drama, and be consumed by it. Your husband probably needs therapy, and he also needs to cut them all out of his life. What good does it do to try and placate his mother, aunt, cousins, etc.? Does your MIL have money or something? Many times you see these types of dynamics when there’s an estate to be divided up upon their death. People can’t let go for fear they won’t get any of the old lady’s fortune. And then not infrequently, the old lady up and dies and come to find out, she left everything to the local Cat Society or something. :eek:

Life is too short. Say a rosary for her once a day, but keep her away from your daughter.
 
Dear Nana3,

I’m so sorry that the whole family is suffering the mental anguish a fracas like this causes. As others have said, you can’t reason with unreasonable people. You just can’t. Since you can’t change them, you need to change yourselves, whether that means cutting them off or learning different methods with which to respond to their tirades.

Watch the newspaper and ask at the library to learn about meetings or help sessions in learning to let go in situations like you’re experiencing. Maybe the “Y” or even other churches have sessions involving getting along with difficult people. Perhaps your priest could get a professional to conduct classes in your adult education ministry that would help parishioners deal with this sort of family turmoil. Such classes would help you learn new responses, heal your hurt, and verify that you’re not the only ones trying to keep this boat afloat. Your librarian may know of books that would be helpful.

You’ve not mentioned the age of your daughter. She should still love her grandmother: love the sinner, not the sin. She, too, needs to learn how to deal with this type of behavior, so that she doesn’t have guilt at not being able to make the hurt go away for the people she loves, and to deal with her disappointment and confusion.

I do think you and your husband need to discuss his seeming inability to defend you, but it sounds that his learned behavior is that of someone who has been browbeaten by his mother, so that’s understandable. Even so, he needs to learn to stand up for his immediate family and his personal beliefs, especially in dealing with her. Help him with his hurt at his mother’s unkind words, for that’s a brutal undercut that is most difficult to bear and almost impossible to heal.

Remember to pray. Prayer confounds tremendous odds. Let your daughter see that you and your husband are being reasonable, respectful, and prayerful, all good examples for her.

I pray that all of you are able to move forward, and that you’ll receive the strength to do whatever you need to do. Special blessings to you during these difficult days.
 
ThyKingdomCome said:
Sometimes you have to grieve the loss of a relationship. Even though no one has died, and even though you might still have contact, the relationship is not what you had hoped it would be. That is a loss, and can take time to come to terms with. :hug1::crossrc:
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Thank you and your right it is like a death of someone. The sad thing is that my husband a woman in his life that he loved more than his own mother. He called her his spiritual mother. He could talk openly with her and most important, he could talk to her about his Catholic Faith which he could not do with his mother. She hated the Church. She was almost abnormal about it all too. So this woman died recently, just about two weeks ago and when he told his mother he was visiting her in the hospital as she was dying and we went to her funeral, she wrote us two emails on how we ignore her and he is running around for her, his spiritual mother. She was jealous of a dead woman. I thought it was just sick, personally and it showed me how insecure she was as a person.
 
TheRealJuliane said:
Dear Nana3,

What a mess. What an awful, awful mess. I will include you in my prayers.

If it were me, I’d unfriend and block your MIL from your DD’s account, period. End of story. No one does that to my kid and gets away with it. Your MIL is worse than sick. That’s evil. The woman cared more about getting sympathy comments from her friends than she did for the emotional state of her own granddaughter. That’s not someone you can trust to have your daughter’s best interests in mind at any time. Yeah, it will cause another storm throughout the family. So what.

🤷

You can’t win with them in any case, so do what you need to do to draw a firm boundary around your family, and protect your DD from these nasty individuals. Let them have their drama, and be consumed by it. Your husband probably needs therapy, and he also needs to cut them all out of his life. What good does it do to try and placate his mother, aunt, cousins, etc.? Does your MIL have money or something? Many times you see these types of dynamics when there’s an estate to be divided up upon their death. People can’t let go for fear they won’t get any of the old lady’s fortune. And then not infrequently, the old lady up and dies and come to find out, she left everything to the local Cat Society or something. :eek:

Life is too short. Say a rosary for her once a day, but keep her away from your daughter.
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No, my MIL does not have money. She is the opposite, she is always in need of money. She has never known how to manage her finances. We have helped her so much after her second husband left her and gave her many grocery food credit cards because we didn’t want to give her money for she would waste it. We knew she needed money. My husband has tried to help his mother so much. He called Catholic Social Services and made a phone appt. for her with a counselor so she would get some months of grocery for free, but she called her after talking to them crying and wailing saying that they were yelling at her and were rude. My husband knows his mother and just called the woman he knew personally and talked to her. She told us that all she did was tell his mom that she would need proof of her financial records before she could get help and his mother got all angry and asked why and started to cry. This is what she did in this whole mess with my email. My email was not bad or worded badly or unChristian like. I was very careful in my words. I simply asked her not to post things on facebook about our daughter’s dad where she could read it and she got so upset and started to cry and called her sister, my dh’s aunt, and she got all upset and called her daughter that lived her in state and she was the first to write a nasty remark to me. I replied with another email to her alone and again it was not mean, than I got the email from the uncle attack our family, my dh and myself and even the pope. It was all just unnecessary. The only cousin, one of the daughters that was talking to my dh, stopped talking to him on Sunday. She said her mom called her crying and was all upset. She got angry at me for the email and told my dh is out of the family permanently and is dead to them all. They called me a name he won’t tell me and he said he was disappointed in her for she was a supposed Christian. I thought about it and I have come to this conclusion. No one in his family is responsing to what I wrote. If they would read what I wrote, there was no need for getting all angry and bitter. They are all responding on the emotions, the emotions first by my MIL who called her sister and than she called her daughters and so it was made worse than it had to be.

I don’t think my dh should have contact with his mother, but his cousin made him feel so guilty that he just calls her to please them both. I do think his mother is evil for I have seen what she can do. She took away he other son’s child and adopted her when she was the guardian. She promised her son that she would just look after her until he could take care of her and now that he is married to a good Christian woman, he can’t take his dd because he felt forced to sign the papers giving away his parental rights. He already got an apology from my MIL’s ex-husband at the time of the adoption and he said it was the most un-Christian than he has ever done in his life. So he was and is sorry for doing it, but not my MIL and in fact she calls that son “white trash” what mother calls her son that. I was shocked. I could only wonder what she really thinks of my dh. She doesn’t care about him. She only wants contact to stay open with him in the hopes that I will change my mind and she can have contact with our dd. I know her too well now. I feel bad for her new boyfriend too. He is good man and doesn’t know what he is getting into with her,but I hope he figures her out before he marries her. I am staying out of that one.

Thanks for your prayers and all those who are praying for us. We need them.
 
Qwestions said:
Dear Nana3,

I’m so sorry that the whole family is suffering the mental anguish a fracas like this causes. As others have said, you can’t reason with unreasonable people. You just can’t. Since you can’t change them, you need to change yourselves, whether that means cutting them off or learning different methods with which to respond to their tirades.

Watch the newspaper and ask at the library to learn about meetings or help sessions in learning to let go in situations like you’re experiencing. Maybe the “Y” or even other churches have sessions involving getting along with difficult people. Perhaps your priest could get a professional to conduct classes in your adult education ministry that would help parishioners deal with this sort of family turmoil. Such classes would help you learn new responses, heal your hurt, and verify that you’re not the only ones trying to keep this boat afloat. Your librarian may know of books that would be helpful.

You’ve not mentioned the age of your daughter. She should still love her grandmother: love the sinner, not the sin. She, too, needs to learn how to deal with this type of behavior, so that she doesn’t have guilt at not being able to make the hurt go away for the people she loves, and to deal with her disappointment and confusion.

I do think you and your husband need to discuss his seeming inability to defend you, but it sounds that his learned behavior is that of someone who has been browbeaten by his mother, so that’s understandable. Even so, he needs to learn to stand up for his immediate family and his personal beliefs, especially in dealing with her. Help him with his hurt at his mother’s unkind words, for that’s a brutal undercut that is most difficult to bear and almost impossible to heal.

Remember to pray. Prayer confounds tremendous odds. Let your daughter see that you and your husband are being reasonable, respectful, and prayerful, all good examples for her.

I pray that all of you are able to move forward, and that you’ll receive the strength to do whatever you need to do. Special blessings to you during these difficult days.
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Thank you for your kind words and advice. We are in family counseling and see the counselor on Friday. I think we will have to discuss this. My dh has his own psychologist as well. Time will heal this wound, but as long as my dh keeps his relationship with his mother open, his wounds may never heal.

He did call his cousin the next day after I got upset with him for not defending me and told her that I was not to be blamed. He put all the blame on him, which I disagree as well, but that is how these people make him feel like dirt under their shoes. His cousin, at that time, told him he was out of the family. He said goodbye to her and hung up when she wanted to talk about me and started to criticize me. He just said to her, “Don’t go there, you won’t like my reply.” So I was happy he tried to defend me before she hung up. He is hurting. He is not sleeping well.
 
I’d say this is more in tune with Borderline Personality Disorder than bipolar. Pretty classic BPD too. Look it up online, there are books about people like your MIL. Best advice is to get as far away from their drama as possible. Children of people with BPD end up with post-traumatic stress disorder because the level of mental illness is off the charts. NOTHING can improve this from your side. I hope and pray your husband has the strength to draw boundaries around his relatives and keep them in place.

:gopray2:
 
Nana,

It is just part of life. My prayers for your family. Please read the passage below. I suggest not to talk about your husband’s family anymmore. The more you talk about them, the more your husband will get hurt because no matter how evil they are, they are still his family. Let him communicate with them. Let him do what he wants. Just be there for him and lend him a listening ear.

**Ephesians 5:31 **

“For this reason **a man **will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

Take note : God advises MEN not women but MEN to leave his father and mother.
 
It’s a sad reality that trying to explain by letter or email often works out badly. Done with the best of intentions, it often only raises more problems. There is usually hurt pride on the receiving end and it isn’t explanations that the person wants. Phone calls can result in heated words rising out of frustration and hurt even if begun with the best intentions, so reconciliations are very difficult.
The most reasonable defense can inflame issues further.
Once the written or spoken word is out there it becomes very complicated.
But the broken or damaged relationship is hard to recover from.
You want to fix things and you try, and it preys on the mind when you can’t…
my prayers for your daughter, husband, and you, and for all the family
 
nana3 said:
Thank you for your kind words and advice. We are in family counseling and see the counselor on Friday. I think we will have to discuss this. My dh has his own psychologist as well. Time will heal this wound, but as long as my dh keeps his relationship with his mother open, his wounds may never heal.

He did call his cousin the next day after I got upset with him for not defending me and told her that I was not to be blamed. He put all the blame on him, which I disagree as well, but that is how these people make him feel like dirt under their shoes. His cousin, at that time, told him he was out of the family. He said goodbye to her and hung up when she wanted to talk about me and started to criticize me. He just said to her, “Don’t go there, you won’t like my reply.” So I was happy he tried to defend me before she hung up. He is hurting. He is not sleeping well.
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Perhaps it is better to look at this not as burning a bridge, but as pulling up a toxic plant and leaving the soil fallow, with the hopes that something healthy might someday grow into its place. If you leave the plant there, it could poison the soil (you), and ruin the prospect that amendment elsewhere could heal the rift. That might feel a bit less like a death, and more like a transition to a path the might lead to an eventual cure.

If your relatives ever get healthy, that is the time that it will dawn on them that by drawing boundaries you were merely being healthy. (In all but the extremely best of cases, this would be a selection of your relatives, one at a time, not all and certainly not all at once.) Until then, they won’t appreciate what you’re doing, but if you don’t do it, the damage might be far past mending by the time they come around.

Maintain your household as a healthy one, pray for the day when true reconcilation might be possible, and in the meantime (meaning, until they willingly abide by healthy boundaries), commend them to God.

Hang in there. This is not easy, but you are doing the right thing.
 
Hi everyone,

It is me again. I have another issue. I did not unfriend my MIL from my dd account on fb. I did stop her post from being seen on my dd news feed but today my MIL wrote to my dd in a private message on her fb page. She said she losted her cell phone number which is good and wanted to know what she wanted for Christmas.

I knew that when my dh kept his relationship open with her, she would think that things were open with myself and my daughter. I told her very clearly and so did my dh, that we are out of her life and she did not have to worry anymore of sending birthday cards or gifts and Christmas cards or gifts. So here she goes and ignores what I said. My dh is talking to her because he feels if he doesn’t he is breaking the commandment to Honor his mother. He has yet to visit her since July. His talks with her are very brief in nature. She just doesn’t get it. She invited us over for Thanksgiving and I asked my dh what did he tell her and he just said we were going to my parent’s house. I asked him why did he not tell her the truth that there will be no more getting together, but he seems to not want to hurt her feelings.

What do I do now about the private message she sent my dd? I do have access to her acct for that was the agreement when she turned 13 and has a fb acct. I could have my dh talk to her, but I know she will ignore him.
 
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