Just looking for advice on how to manage potentially overbearing, respectless, rude grandparents. I am nearly 10 weeks pregnant, not planning to announce anything until after the 20-week scan at the earliest. I can see trouble brewing ahead with unwanted visits (parents and PIL live overseas, and are unlikely to ask us if a visit is convenient before booking - sometimes even before arriving), aggressive behaviour, etc.
Firstly - my DH is supportive, he understands that my parents are completely messed up emotionally, that they are aggressive and overbearing and that they have little respect for me (they think I'm subnormal and can't manage my own life, my mother has told me it would be better for everyone if I were dead, etc), and that they rarely relate to me other than to criticise viciously. He also understands that his parents (who were initially very enthusiastic about me when I had the sort of career they approved of) now (that my career has stopped) see me as a feckless, stupid, lazy waste of space with my feet firmly under their son's table - so they are very unlikely to listen to me if they decide they want to do something with "their" gc. DH's approach to all this is "we'll discuss it and we'll work through it together".
However, I am slightly sceptical as to how that would work if his or my parents arrive on the doorstep, demand to be let in, snatch the baby, tell me I'm an idiot and shouldn't be looking after a child, etc etc. I suspect DH wouldn't do much, particularly if it were his parents.
Secondly - I am probably a bit wet and passive in all this, in that i just don't know how to manage these people. We have as little contact as possible. I visit once a year and spend the time basically zoned out and disengaged. Skype calls once every few weeks involve my parents talking about themselves, me saying "mm hmm" a lot, then me brightly "needing to get off so I can go and do some work". I give them as little informaion/ammunition as possible.
But aged nearly 40, I still feel criticised when my father tells me I'm a f*ing idiot, when my mother tells me I'm subnormal and blames me for being an embarrassment to her. When they crow about how my career clearly collapsed and I clearly have relatively few friends because I'm too stupid, I say nothing to contradict them, and a bit of me agrees with them.
If my FIL bites my head off in conversation over something where I'm trying to engage intellectually with him, I shrug and think "oh well, he does it to everyone, I'm too thick to provide enough mental stimulation for him" and say nothing at all for the rest of the visit. If my MIL makes nasty little digs about "flaring nostrils" (i.e. mine, apparently, on the grounds that all her friends' sons married lovely sensible stable girls with good jobs and good relationships with their lovely parents, whereas I'm clearly oversensitive, volatile, a loser), I politely take it on the chin and agree a bit, because to do otherwise would just confirm that I'm oversensitive and unstable and can't cope.
My PIL's friends sometimes sympathise with my MIL, in front of me, that not everyone has children who make the right choices, clearly meaning DH's choice of me. What can one say in those situations wothout making it all more awkward. Other than that kind of thing I am usually totally ignored at their parties - indeed at the last party most of the guests thought i was a caterer because I made most of the food and handed it around all evening - it was preferable to repeatedly attempting to start conversations and being rebuffed.
Thirdly - the outside world seems to think both our sets of parents are absolutely wonderful. I have on occasion been excoriated by friends of my mother's for my uselessness toward such a wonderful, vibrant, loving woman - or by ex-colleagues of my father's, for being such a failure after all my father did to set me up in my career - on the first time I've met these people.
How do we set boundaries so as to shield ourselves and our child appropriately from these people? I don't want to be wet but I don't really know what to say that will work. Most of the things i can think of will just convince PIL that I'm oversensitive and unstable, and my parents that I'm subnormal and incompetent.
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Relationships
Advice on setting boundaries with grandparents, around birth of gc - from pregnancy announcement onwards
magnificatAnimaMea · 25/04/2016 22:59
The only way to 'let them win' is if you let them keep doing this to you. Cut them off, no Skype, nothing. And breathe, all on your own, without the need for their approval. 
It's interesting that being pregnant is causing you to rethink how these relationships are. I've seen quite a few posts from people who grew up in really strange and sometimes terrible relationships with their parents who find they look at their own child and it comes home with a bang just how bad their parents really were at being parents.
I also think it's interesting that you are so aware of how you are internalising these messages from your family.
I can agree that it is horrible to get confirmation from your parents' friends that they have discussed you in unpleasant ways behind your back. This happened to me in a small way - I saw written evidence that a member of my family regards me as a complete failure and a bit of a joke, and we are not in touch very often but they are close to a member of my immediate family - so I wonder where they got those ideas from... It's not a good feeling.
If you are going to stay in contact (and it's a big time of upheaval to make a decision to stop contact), then perhaps you can just start making a few boundaries of your own? 'How incredibly rude' 'I've heard enough on this subject, let's talk about something else' 'What an unpleasant thing to say, let's move on' stuff like that? And I have to say I have only once been to a party given by my PILs, is it essential that you go to these things? (Babies make a terrific excuse to get out of shit parties you don't want to go to 
)
thanks annie, and annandale. (Do you live there? I know it well )
Most of my understanding of how relationships work comes from the MN relationship boards, or NHS counselling. It took until I found MN to be able to decode much at all about my enmeshed, suffocating relationship with my parents.
The boundaries you describe may well be what i need. They will probably be interpreted as me being oversensitive, but I'm beginning to see that it doesn't really matter how the parents or PILs interpret what I do.
Oversensitive... interesting. In fact you have coped with this by making yourself 'undersensitive' and trying to absent yourself mentally and emotionally from the situation.
I think they would find if they said these things to their lovely friends (still can't get over the flaring nostrils) their friends might be a bit sensitive too.
Re grabbing the baby - again, so far you have tried to protect yourself by making yourself passive and invisible in these situations. Don't underestimate what a parent will do when they feel their child is threatened. In fact, practising not being passive would be the best way of protecting your future child.
(No, never been there, it's from a song I like )
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