I am NC with my PILs, and DH sees them occasionally.
DS has not seen them since he was about 20 months old.
I didn't go NC overnight. They have always been difficult and as with your PILs, the entire family used to make the same excuses. You know what they are like. They speak before they think. They can't help it. They are too old to change.
Fuck off with that one, MIL was only 47 when I met her for the first time and she was already well established in her ways. FIL was 49 and facilitating MIL's bad behaviour. They are both in their early to mid sixties now.
SIL tells me she can just about remember a time when MIL was happy and nice to people but by the time I met them they had long since started to be unpleasant, manipulative and controlling.
DH, as the youngest of four, can't remember them being any other way and says he grew up being told that if he upset his mother he would be responsible for her mental breakdown. He's normalised this and it's taken a long time for him to realise and admit there's something not right about it.
So, as I say, they had been difficult since long before I met them. DH and I met and married very quickly and the first six years of our marriage were made difficult by PILs and their demands, their behaviour, their up and down treatment of us.
In January 2007 we had a stillborn baby, and later on the same year we lost another baby to prematurity, and this was my relationship with PILs really started to disintegrate.
They were cruel. They said awful things about me and the babies we had lost, blamed me, discussed my health with strangers, said vile things about the babies, things that gave me nightmares. I have posted on here before about the things they said and did during that time.
However it was after DS was born two years later that our relationship really fell part, they went too far one time too many.
DH spoke to them. MIL cried and within a week the entire family were blaming me for upsetting her. They actually walked out of our house and said they were never coming back until I learned how to make them more welcome in it.
I still kept trying to maintain a relationship with them but it didn't work. They wouldn't stop doing and saying the hurtful things, in fact they got worse. They were telling lies about me but they were also following me, effectively stalking me, they were trying to split DH and I up while at the same time telling everybody that they were trying to heal the rift but I was being cruel to them.
I did still go with DH to visit them, and DH also used to take DS to see them without me, but that stopped the day they called our house and lied to me about their reason for calling, to trick me into telling them when I would be at work. They then told DH they would be visiting while I was out because they preferred it that way.
We had a last ditch effort to see them again at Christmas that year and it seemed to go well, except that FIL didn't speak one word to me the entire visit. But then they rang DH to disown him because and call us both names, for no reason other than that we had visited his sister the day before and they thought we should have visited them instead.
They had some of our things at their house and they tried to hold them over us and say we would only get them back if I did as I was told, that I had to do as they said, that they were in charge now and they were going to make me do what they wanted. They called me names, put the phone down on me more than once, and basically just shouted at me until they drove me to a panic attack.
Then they rang DH and lied about the entire conversation before I was able to speak to him.
That was the last time I spoke to them. I refused to see or speak to them again, and I said DS wasn't going near them either. They are toxic. DH still goes sometimes but I feel I need to protect myself, my DS and even the two babies we lost from PILs bile.
And all of a sudden, the same family members who started to defend them by saying they were too old to change are saying they deserve a second chance.
If they can't change, why give them a second chance (more like millionth chance) to do the same thing?
And if they can change, why have they behaved so cruelly for so long? Why have people allowed it and made excuses for it?
Because they are cruel. I've said before I don't know if they are casually cruel or deliberately cruel, I think actually they are both, but I've given them many years of chances and I've come to realise that this is it. I've seen MILs face before she says things and she's got this sharp look on it, she knows what she's doing even if she doesn't know why she's doing it.
You can possibly fix a relationship that is broken but I feel like they broke our relationship and then ground the bits to dust.
I can't change how they are or what they do, and I don't believe they will ever change it themselves.
All I can do is change my reaction to it and to that end, I've cut contact with them.
People might find that harsh but they looked at the photo of our beautiful daughter, who was tiny but completely perfect in every way, and MIL asked me if she had been born with all of her face or with missing bits. She also asked me, three days after our son was stillborn, if it still hurts to give birth if the baby is dead.
And still, after those two comments, made over two years apart and with a whole load of equally cruel comments about both children and me being made in-between, I tried to find a way to keep seeing them for DH's sake most of all. Until the final straw, but event that took from January 2007 with the first awful comment about our stillborn son to March 2010 when they made me so ill I had a panic attack and felt like I was having a stroke it was so bad and so frightening.
It's not worth it. I'm not having my children insulted or used against me. I'm not having my DS grow up hearing things like that about his brother and sister. I'm not putting myself through panic attacks and pain and stress and fear and anger at every visit and family occasion just because it's easier for the wider family to give in to them than support me. I'm not going to let them drive me to illness just because they are cruel and spiteful.
I deserve better. DS deserves better. My babies deserve better. DH deserves better but he is a grown man and makes his own decisions about seeing them or not.
But they do not have the right to best bits of a relationship with any of us if they cannot behave like decent people. And they have proved time and again that they can't. I'm not having DS grow up like DH, tiptoeing around an adult who ought to know better just because she likes to have her own way. Or made to feel physically ill at the thought of seeing them, like I was.
You deserve better as well OP, and so do your children. But your DH needs to support you. My DH found that hard at first but he's come to accept that I'm not going to see them again.