Please don't flame me/give me a kicking for this. I want to say before I start that I'm enormously appreciative of everything that both sets of parents do for us and I don't want to seem an ungrateful cow.
DH and I live abroad with DS, 1st grandchild on both sides, 1st great-grandchild for one of DHs grandmothers. Our families are quite comfortably off and have given us a lot of support with education, paid for our wedding and a second celebration, flew out to see us, often send money to help towards to the cost of things for DS, coming home etc. We are hugely grateful for this because the cost of living here is very high and it's costing us upwards of £3k to go home for Christmas, which we're happy to pay because we WANT to - it's DS's first Christmas, we haven't seen our families since April and we've not been back since last summer.
But it seems more and more that this money is a) coming with strings attached and b) our parents are in some bizarre kind of 'keeping up with the Joneses' competition. We don't deliberately play them off against one another but it'll come up that my parents offered to pay for the pram or his parents are paying for something else and then the other set has to do one better. We felt this a little when we got married - my parents were paying for our wedding (central London, 100 guests) so his parents paid for a blessing and party, mostly for the French family and friends who couldn't come to the first (South of France, 300 guests), but now it's all coming to a head really.
Let me just reiterate at this point that we are very grateful and we don't ask them to constantly be paying for stuff.
DS is being christened when we go back. DH's mother volunteered to do a lot of the preparation for the christening as she said she had a lot of time and it would be fun for her. We agreed and gave her a budget because WE want to pay for this. It's our first baby, it's our choice and responsibility etc and it was quite important to us (or I thought us) that we paid. Plus it guaranteed at least some control because a lot of decisions went the way our parents wanted for the weddings.
So MIL called up over the weekend very excited because there's been a cancellation at her preferred venue, which is lovely and very convenient for the church, and she's nabbed the spot. DH gave the go ahead and all seemed fine until we looked at how many people we have coming to the reception afterwards and it's over budget. DH called MIL back and said it was a really nice idea but no can do. MIL offers to pay because it's hergrandchild and she wants it like that.
I'm not denying that it's a really gorgeous venue and it would be great but this is DS christening that we wanted to pay for and have things how we wanted them. Now she's paying I feel like we're going to have to defer to her again.
I need to call my own DM this evening and I don't want this to become a case of 'we can't let ILs pay for everything and have control so we'll go halves'.
So how to I kindly say thanks but no thanks? Or do I accept that they're doing this with the best of intentions?
And if I accept that how do I stop them running the show?
And how do I stop this constant flow of money which leaves me feeling beholden? If they want to put stuff aside for DS then that's one thing, for schooling/university, but a few hundred landing in our bank account at random intervals makes me feel horribly dependant, like pocket money almost.
Sorry it's so long and complicated and please don't go at me too much.