Oh my @eyemamom !
I’m sorry, but some of your in-laws are awful. I would never nod and smile while anyone raged at my child for their very being. Nope, I wouldn’t accept that, nor would I ask my child to put up with it. Quirks and eccentricities are one thing. Cruelty, narcissism, and other toxic behavior is not something I feel I should have to tolerate, nor would I feel obligated to expose my children to that.
My grandmother missed the ages between 2 & 26 of my life because she was toxic. I’ve just started to get to know her at age 27.
I have no regrets. I have no problem kicking her back out of my life if she gets toxic again.
I don’t understand putting up with toxicity just because you’re family. But to each his/her own.
I don’t understand it either. The idea that you should tolerate it because someday they’ll be gone and you’ll wish you still had someone? Uh, no. When my alcoholic father died, my main feeling was relief.
My parents were not as welcoming as they should have been to my wife. A big part of the problem was that my sisters never married, so my wife was the only “outsider” they had to deal with, and they needed more practice. Both of my parents felt threatened by her. My father never felt comfortable with aggressive, career-focused, high-achieving women. He never said anything like that explicitly, but over time I could tell it was true. My mother, who was highly intelligent, always worked as a teacher, and even got a PhD, but she basically subordinated her career to his. She was as proud of the (many) things she did to enhance his career as she was of her own professional accomplishments, and until very late in life she always kept the focus of her work very local and very personal. She taught people one by one. My wife, by contrast, was very managerial – she took on big jobs in big bureaucracies, or sometimes quixotic policy campaigns – and she didn’t do anything to support my career. Acknowledging and valuing any of my wife’s successes meant calling into question everything my mother had done with her life, and implied that I had repudiated my mother for someone who looked like her opposite.
So even though they honestly wanted to like her and to welcome her, they never quite succeeded at doing that. Plus, my youngest sister, who lived with them for years and then lived a few blocks away and spent all her free time with them (whether they wanted her there or not) really felt threatened by my wife (and me), and was sometimes openly nasty to her. All of those relationships got slowly better with time and therapy, but they never got to true warmth before my parents died. (My sister continues to work hard at improving her relationship with both of us. I am grateful for that, and we try to reciprocate.)
I, by contrast, I can’t complain too much about my in-laws. They appreciated me – I was a high-prestige, good-provider “catch” for their difficult-to-match youngest daughter, and they were aware that our courtship required a certain amount of perseverance on my part in the face of apparent indifference. My wife also turned out to be the only one of their four daughters who didn’t go through a divorce within a few years of getting married. So I accumulated a bunch of points early on.
Shortly after our wedding, my father-in-law wrote us a really mean letter complaining about how we had treated his new trophy wife at the wedding, and he closed by saying neither of them would ever speak with us again. That, of course, was pretty bad. We left it alone for several years, then I – it was my plan and my effort, my wife was still furious – slowly re-built the relationship. To the point that, five years after he died, we remain close with his widow, And we were always close with my mother-in-law.
Wow. That’s quite a story, @JHS. I’m glad you were able to somewhat improve the relationship with your in-laws.
It’s really a shame that our parents and in-laws can’t simply be happy for our happiness. That’s what I’m trying to do for my sons. One DIL I adore, the other one I’m trying really hard to warm up to. But she makes my son happy, and I love her for that.
I’ve posted about my beastly MIL in the past. As my FIL has gotten older and is a little more reflective, he has shared some of the mental health diagnoses MIL had. It has shed some light on things. There was never any chance for any kind of a decent relationship with my ILs – she couldn’t even manage to be a parent and my FIL was a total enabler.
My ILs certainly have informed how my spouse came to be the way he is, and why I’ve had to work so hard to help my sons break several generations of genetic and ingrained tendencies.
We have no serious partners for either of our kids yet. We will do all we can to love snyobe they love. To date, we have enjoyed all of their friends and we expect they will choose great partners.
My sibs seem to have good to great relationships with their in laws. They’re spouses seem to get along with all of us and my folks. I’m happy for that as it’s easier for everyone.
@JHS said:
I’m hoping you are talking about your mother, not you. My first read was that you wouldn’t acknowledge/value your wife’s successes because of the fear of making your mom feel bad, but then I realized you were stating the reason why SHE wouldn’t do it.
In any case, that’s sad-all too often there seems to be some kind of feeling of competition between mothers and their DILs.
@veruca That sounds frustrating and exasperating! I imagine it has more to do with their generation than you personally, but I can see how it would feel pretty invalidating.
I got pretty lucky with my in-laws. My FIL doesn’t ask much about me but then again he doesn’t ask much about anybody. He’s a little self-centered in a clueless kind of forgivable way. My MIL is probably the least meddling person I know.
But your post was interesting to me because I feel that many men of my own generation don’t ask women about themselves. I’m talking about when my husband and I go to some sort of social event and meet new people, or if even if we spend time with another couple. The newly-met men will ask my husband what he does, or if we know them already they will ask him how his job is going. They don’t ask me anything even though I have a career. Our rabbi, who is young and progressive and whose wife is a rabbi as well, even does this! There are exceptions of course and I’m glad to say my husband is one of them, meaning he does ask other women about their careers!
“was sometimes openly nasty to her”
@JHS Curious as to how you responded to your sister when she treated your wife that way? Or any other posters whose families are mean to their spouses? Do you address it when it happens?
I agree - toxic people, regardless of relation, do not need to remain in our lives. My father has never met my kids, by my choice.
On the other hand, MIL is great - but… She is in her 80’s, college educated, always held a job outside the home in a professional capacity. D is getting married to a great guy who fully supported her continuing educational goals. For many reasons D recently decided to stop at a Master’s rather than apply to PhD programs. MIL’s response - good, you’ll be a married lady and won’t want to be studying.
Bear in mind, I married her son while he was in the middle of earning his PhD.
I’m guessing it’s all about wanting great-grandkids, but still?
@doschicos To be honest, different ways at different times. That sister has had a touchy relationship with everyone in the family at times, going back to when she was a little girl. There were periods when I fought with her a lot, including over stuff like being nasty to my wife, and periods when I tried not to let her get my goat at all. A certain amount of the hostility towards my wife was doubtless hostility towards me. My sister would probably say, with justification, that all her life she’s constantly been compared to me and found wanting. During a lot of the period when she was the worst about my wife, my wife had a full, very successful life and career, and my sister didn’t have much of either.
For a number of years, my wife pretty carefully limited her exposure to my sister. The kids and I would visit my parents without my wife, or the kids would visit alone without either of us. Their relationship now isn’t exactly warm, but they are diplomatic with one another and get along well enough to handle family events without drama.
I should add that this sister (a) Is wonderful to my kids, and loves them a lot. (b) Has been in fairly intensive therapy continuously for the past 20+ years, with noticeable good results over time. In this area, especially. © In many ways just took a long time to grow up. She fought with my parents all the time, but never emotionally left home. She was in her mid-40s before she became economically independent.
@JHS Thanks for the explanation and the reminder that sometimes these types of things shouldn’t be taken personally because they are due to the issues and problems of the other person, not a reflection on oneself.
Like your wife has done in the past, I’ve chosen to just remove myself from the situations completely after realizing I would catch flak regardless of how I or my spouse chose to respond. Indifference in that manner was very freeing. 
Yes. My wife felt great when she gave herself a vacation from dealing with my family on their home turf for a few years. I felt a little less great, but it all worked.
My wife does say now that if she had it all to do over again, she would be more tolerant of my parents’ shortcomings. By the time they died, she had been working for several years to engage with them more, with a fair amount of success. They both died unexpectedly and more or less suddenly, about 15 months apart, and both of her parents also died (after long, long illnesses) around the same time. We learned the hard way that you don’t have all the time in the world to fix what’s broken. We were glad to have made some progress – it would have been awful to lose them in a bad period of our relationship with them.
We are also seeing things from a different perspective, now that we have a daughter-in-law of our own. Of course, we are completely committed to being open to her, and respectful, and supportive . . . . Do we always succeed? Ummmm . . .
^^^I hope that you always succeed at being respectful.
This has all been very interesting. It is also making me wonder about myself and how I talk to people I meet. Also how I talk to my MIL and FIL. It was helpful to vent and it has also been helpful for me to consider them and what else is going on past and current that might influence behavior. So thank you all.
I don’t have a good relationship with my H’s family, mostly because they have made no secret over the past 39 years of how they feel about me. It was nothing I ever did, according to my H, just who I am. Can’t do much about that. He seems to be happy with who I am, and the family we raised together, and that’s all I care about.
My S is married now, and I do my best to be a good MIL. I deferred to my S and DIL re: all things wedding-related and I try to be in their lives to the extent, and only to the extent, they want me to be. I love her and she, so far, seems to be fully engaged as a member of our family.
MIL had no use for me as I was not Catholic.
My MIL is now 93 and although she has all of her wits about her, she can no longer clean her own house and it really upsets her. She took pride in her balabustiness, even though she is as Irish Catholic/German as they come.
OTOH, I was raised sort of like Kate Simon in that my mother used to tell me: “You are not being raised to be a domestic. YOU will be a professional.” I was never taught to cook, clean, sew, iron, etc. My mother was a neat freak and took immense pride in her own cleaning and cooking skills, which were legendary, but never passed them along.
When I was single and a professional, I used to have a cleaning lady in twice a month.
When MIL realized that I wasn’t going to iron H’s shirts or his pants or even his underwear (he had a prior gf who actually did that), she asked me if I cared whether or not H looked nice when he went to work. I said it’s his job, he can care.
I must pause to say that I really do love my MIL and prefer her to my own parents. FIL died before our kids were born. However, my MIL is very complex. On one hand, she shamed my father into attending oldest boy’s bris when he asked why he should bother since H is Catholic and she told him that this was her first grandchild, too, and she was even allowing the bris to be done in her house. OTOH, my son said that she recently told him that when he was a baby, she took him to a church and had him baptized. When H confronted her about it, she denied it. Ironically, I was less upset than H about this because my belief is that my children’s religion stems from me and can’t be changed except by them. H was upset about his mom (and sister) violating his boundaries. When I was pregnant with my D, MIL asked if her side could have this one! She also asked if I planned to stay home. I asked if she planned to support my family.
She used to criticize my cleaning (or lack thereof, I honestly admit). I finally once asked her if my children were happy and if she loved them and she said yes. I said isn’t that enough?
It does bother me that her own D can do no wrong and I never get credit for anything. I mean, I realize that my D got her beautiful singing voice from H’s side of the family, but does she have to tell everyone who comes along that I’m tone deaf and D could never have gotten her voice from me. Or that oldest boy’s gorgeous hair comes from her side (that I disagree with but) or that middle boy is so smart because he got his intelligence from her D, etc., etc.
Over the years, MIL and I have made our peace. Honestly, our relationship was at its best when my kids were young and SIL was married and not living with her mom. MIL and I spoke often and spent time together. She would pick the 2 oldest kids up and take them to Hebrew school for me during the week while I worked and I would take her shopping and to Mass on Sunday. I would take her to doctor appointments and the like. Now, SIL lives there and she has too many issues for me to deal with, so I rarely go there and never alone. I have taken on managing MIL’s money, which has enraged SIL, who viewed her mom as her personal ATM, but I have finally gotten her back on track.
I will say that MIL has accepted my financial advice and suggestions over the years, which has enabled her to remain in her home as she ages, which is her preference.
Overall, though, my MIL is not awful like some of the MIL’s described here and I consider myself fairly lucky to have one like her. I would be heartbroken to have a relative who berated my child for their sexuality or who ignored me when I visited. I feel for those of you who suffer with relatives like that.