If you have a difficult mother in law?

[ClarityClankrantt]

If you have a difficult mother in law, how do you deal with her?

Luckily, mine lives abroad. I've been pretty much NC with mine for over 7 years due to a bust up she caused while visiting us.

I'm just wondering how others deal with theirs that are not NC and live with close proximity.

Ah, been a little while since we had a MIL bashing thread

I just have to cope with her. It’s very hard. She visits us often and she interferes in our relationship and has been horrible to me when my husband has left the room. She’s very very old (why do people like her live such long lives?!) so I just cope with it.

Does your husband know she is horrible to you when you leave the room? Deep down my DH knows what his mother is like but I think he just blocks it out because she's so far away and we don't see her.

He doesn't really hear much from her apart from when she's apparently ill or needs his help with something. She has no interest in our DC and never asks after them or asks to speak to them.

I’m actually quite fond of her, despite her being objectively, quite awful — tactless, unimaginative, huffy, with zero theory of mind or ability to put herself in someone else’s shoes. I’ve known her since I was an undergraduate in the early 90s and she’s now in her 80s. I suppose I don’t ‘deal with her at all’, really. She’s DH’s mother. I’m pleasant. I don’t give her a lot of headspace.

I cope by: Low contact. Communication through DH. Cordial to her in person. Don't slag her off to anyone. Very diplomatic when talking about her.

Good boundaries and I shut any nonsense down right away. We were NC with MIL for a couple years due to some safeguarding issues related to our dc (basically she put them in significant danger, to the point the police advised us to have no contact with her and her partner). She has sorted herself out to a degree and our dc are older now and she doesn’t have unsupervised contact. But I am very boundaried. I say no when I’m not comfortable with something and she generally respects that.

Any nonsense, like suggesting we have a relationship with her partner (we continue to be NC with him), has largely stopped because I set her straight right away as soon as she gets started on it. She knows if she messes up again, I don’t hesitate to pull the plug and I did it before. We otherwise get along in a surface, pleasant sort of way and we see her maybe every 6-8 weeks.

I think there's "difficult" which my MIL can be sometimes and then there's "batshit crazy" or toxic which is a completely different thing.

With my MIL, she can be quite high maintenance and weirdly irrational at times. I largely just ignore what I can, or put boundaries in place when I can't. I think our long term relationship was massively improved when DS was born because both DH and I were calm but firm with boundaries.

So some of her stuff I just leave DH to deal with. Some I work around in the interests of being kind. And sometimes I put my foot down. Like the year, on the 23rd of December, she hadn't bought DS a present yet and when I mentioned I was off to fetch the bicycle I'd ordered for him she announced THAT would be her present for him! I wasn't rude, or shouty, but when she tried to insist ("I bought all my grandchildren their first bike") I said firmly, "Well, if you'd told me that in advance I'd have been happy to let you buy this. But this is his main present for us and I'm not changing that." then I walked out the door.

Haven’t seen or spoken to her in a decade.

I told my husband at the beginning, and he didn’t stick up for me as much as he could have done. She verbally abused me in front of him once, and he was furious and did talk to her about that. She sent me a letter of apology. She’s a bit more subtle about doing it now.
My husband also knows deep down what she’s like (a bit…) but he also blocks it out. I think really he can’t get his head around the kind of person she is. He’s always been the favourite child, so he doesn’t often see her mean side, and she’s very crafty about it. Horrible. I never want to be like her.

You’re lucky that you’re NC.