Hi. I'm not sure what to do about this or whether I'm overreacting and would appreciate some objective viewpoints.
DH and I have just returned from visiting his family. I'm six months pregnant with our first (and what will be his parents' sixth grandchild). It was quite a fraught / tense trip, because of MIL's controlling behaviour, but one thing in particular she did really disturbed me and upset us both.
We were briefly looking around an old church with DH's parents. MIL is quite religious, the rest of us are not. She knows our views on religion and is very aware that we don't want it being pushed on our child.
In the church, she suddenly grabbed me from behind, and held me while drawing the sign of the cross in holy water over my bump and saying 'god bless this baby'. I was completely caught off guard and couldn't stop her. I'm shocked that she would think it acceptable to do that to me against my will, and we now fear that if she's given unsupervised access to our baby a secret baptism will be performed.
There's background here - controlling, unpredictable behaviour that makes her stressful to be around, but DH and I now feel that we should think about how we can protect our kid from this sort of thing.
It's not even about the religion: it's the complete disregard for our feelings and for my bodily autonomy. I actually feel violated (it's so much worse than your average bump bothering). She attacked me from behind! DH and I both asked wtf she thought she was doing. At first she laughed it off and grabbed my belly again, then she said she 'thought we were Christian'. (Our dinner table discussions with her about our atheism and beliefs go back ten years: she was lying).
We already have some problems with how she and FIL relate to / talk about some of their other grandchildren, as an aside. They bitch about them openly, in front of them, and call them names, and make unfair comparisons with their other grandchildren). We're now considering what to do. We don't want her to come when the baby is born - I can imagine her grabbing him out of my arms whenever she feels like it, dousing him in holy water, shouting if we do something 'wrong', etc etc. FIL is afraid of her and no help at all here. What to do?
(She is capable of behaving well and can be very nice, as well, and is extremely emotionally invested in her family and grandchildren, obviously).
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Relationships
MIL's behaviour, new baby
MrsPickwick · 01/07/2016 07:33
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