Dear Anyone - family Advice  
 
 

 

OUR ADVICE FOR UH OH:
  A:  Wait until she's in a good mood to tell her.        51%
  B:  Wait until the letter comes in the mail.        49%
Total Votes: 959

Dear Anyone,

I have a difficult situation that is greatly troubling me.

I recently had a baby - my first child. He's five months old and both my husband and I absolutely adore him. He's also the apple of the whole family's eye - both mine and my husband's. He's the third grandchild for both sets of grandparents.

However, my problem is this - since he was born, his grandmother, my mother-in-law, has become obsessed. I don't use the word lightly. I feel haunted by her.

When she sees my baby, she is suffocating. I am expected to hand him over to her care for the duration of our visit. Of course, I won't do this. However, she won't stop kissing him, won't give him to me when he cries and gives me black looks when I take him from her to comfort him. When he's finally asleep, she has to touch and stroke him and wake him up.

I find her behaviour cloying, clingy, revolting and, to be frank, abnormal. I am starting to snap at her to leave him alone. She is obsessed with photos of him. She has dozens already and continually asks for more all the time, getting quite irritated when I say I will give her only one a month. I simply do not want to fuel her obsession further.

As she lives 200 miles away, she's now decided she wants to come and visit every month even though we visit her and other relatives at least once every six weeks. Not once has she asked me if it would be alright with me for her to come down and I simply do not want her to visit. My husband will be at work and it will be just me and her. She invariably overstays her welcome. We have said no to her but now she is now contacting other relatives in London with whom she can stay and then she'll just pop over to our house. She doesn't seem to grasp the fact that it is my husband and I who decide when we have visitors and when his grandparents can see the baby.

Now you may ask why I am being so lily-livered when it comes to putting my foot down. My husband has asked me to let him deal with all of this although he's not awfully sympathetic to my position. You see, his mother has never worked and she considers her children and now her grandchildren to be the sum of her life's interests. She had a nervous breakdown when her son, my husband, left home to go to university, another breakdown when her daughter refused to let her see her grandchildren as often as she wanted to (i.e. every other day) and she cries every time we leave her house to come back to our home. She has also had breast and skin cancer.

My husband sees her as fragile and loving - "She's just a doting grandma who is mad about babies," he says. I see her as suffocating, manipulative, needy, obsessive and delusional in the sense that she seems to think we are having children in order to fill a gap in her life. She has no other interests or hobbies.

I feel her behaviour is starting to cause problems in my marriage because she always seems to get what she wants due to my husband's concern about her delicate feelings. My feelings however seem to be over-ridden unless I kick up an absolute stink which I have now been doing on a regular basis. I find constant battles very tiring but am refusing to budge from what I see as a very reasonable position.

I'm starting to loathe her and I fear that I too am becoming obsessional about finding ways to thwart her every move when it comes to her visiting, seeing and touching her grandson. I have become incredibly possessive over my son when she is around simply because I find her behaviour disturbing. I have an instinctive reaction of wanting to whisk my son away from her because I sense that she wants him to be with her all the time.

Ultimately, I think I fear that I am losing control of my life and that she is contributing to this sense with her intrusive insistence on seeing him more often, the photo obsession etc.

I would cherish any advice you could give me on handling this situation. I feel like I'm going mad and I'm wishing away my son's babyhood so that he can run away from her smothering. I have even considered moving to Australia, but then she would entitled to come and suffocate us for weeks at a time.

Yours sincerely,

Annoyed

WHAT'S YOUR ADVICE?

Vote for Option A   
A:  Have a sincere and frank discussion wth your mother-in-law face to face. A passive-aggressive war won't solve things.
Vote for Option B   
B:  Refuse to stay at her house anymore and maintain minimal contact. Even if you're the hated daughter-in-law, at least you'll keep your sanity.
Vote for Option C   
C:  Grin and bear it. This poor mother-in-law of yours sounds like she can't handle the truth.
Vote for Option D   
D:  Divorce and get rid of her that way. Then find a husband who actually cares about your feelings. Hey, you've killed two birds!

Skip this question