To confront SIL's about exclusion of DD?

[CorkNight]

DD is 14. She has 2 aunties on her dad’s side and 3 uncle’s. Today she came up to me and asked if me or DH had fallen out with either of the SIL’s. I said no and asked why and she showed me a Facebook post of one SIL’s. Both SIL’s, SIL1’s DD16, SIL2’s step DD’s 12 and 14 and one of my BIL’s DD15 were all on the Eurostar. They are going to Paris and come back Wednesday. SIL described it as a “girly holiday”. There are a couple of other nieces via BIL’s but they either are at uni or have young DC so they are irrelevant. DD was confused as to why she wasn’t invited. If it was just SIL1 and SIL2 with their DD’s I could put it down to a sister trip but they have invited BIL’s daughter and SIL1 posted about how she can’t wait to spend time with her nieces.

DD has been invited to trips with her aunties in the past and I’ve always paid for everything and DD has always had a nice time. But things have been strange with DH’s family for a while now. We moved in June and I made a groupchat of all the siblings (DH doesn’t bother with Facebook) and said “Who would be up for a house warming on X weekend?”. Only of the SIL’s replied and said “If we have nothing else on we’ll come x.” Needless to say housewarming never happened. On weekend me and DD were shopping in the city and DH rang to say a BIL had popped round. I said “Oh we’ll come home then and say hi.” and then DH said “Oh well he’s going in a minute.”. Soon after that some of DH’s siblings went to a festival and we weren’t invited.

DD’s exclusion from the Paris trip though has really twisted the knife in. She loves her aunties and cousins. She’s had an awful time with bullying and exlusion from friends at school (her aunties know this) and so her mental health is already in tatters and so to be excluded by her family as well has destroyed her. I confided in my sister about it damn near tears and my sister has been lovely and has arranged to treat DD on Friday. The thing is, DH doesn’t seem arsed about any of it. He just says “Well we couldn’t afford to pay for DD’s Paris anyway.” Which is completely besides the point and as she’s had such a shit time lately I’d have scraped together the money for her to go and have a nice time with her cousin’s. DH denies it but I think we have done something to upset his family (honestly can’t think what) and they have spoken to him about it but he doesn’t want to tell me. He hates conflict and is a bit spineless so rather than go “Okay I’ll speak to my wife about it and see if we can sort this.” he’d just avoid it and keep us seperate.

I want to get to the bottom of this for DD’s sake more than anything, she keeps saying “Well I must just be bad company so why should they invite me?”. This has really damaged her. Would I be unreasonable to contact a SIL? “DD has seen you have gone away without her and is very upset, she’s already having a hard time as you all know and is devastated that she’s been excluded by her aunts who she adores. I suspect me or DH have done something which has upset you all and you have spoken to DH about it but you know what he’s like and he won’t tell me. Could you please tell me what the issue is so we can sort it and I can tell your heartbroken niece that it’s not her?”.

To be honest I would be pissed off if my brother kept having to borrow money for totally normal things like moving, never paid it back when he said he would AND pledged poverty, while his partner didnt work

Yep, absolutely.

@SaraNade your perspective on this is seriously warped. I suspect that is because of your own history but given that history you should know better.

Trouble is, if you had scraped together the money to let DD go (i'd have done the same) your family would have thought your family were taking the piss.

Your poor DD has been through the ringer because your DH wasn't being honest. I'd be giving him a bit of an earful, and expecting him to make it up to her and apologise. He knew she was upset and he could have set her mind at rest.

Sorry BusyEvenForBee but that is absolute rubbish. It is NOT normal behaviour for a 14 year old. Not at all, and there really are not many people who would say it was. And yes, I used the term entitled. So? That is because at 14 she does seem entitled if she expects an invite everywhere. Luckily, others above are seeing my point of view.

Yes, the money situation is irrelevant in the girl's eyes, because clearly she is so used to all these overseas trips and she doesn't about where the money comes from. In fact, the point that the money is irrelevant to a 14 year old is a worry and was one of my points.

No one needs to make assumptions, it is all there in black and white. I'm going by the same information you are. The girl's reaction is completely way out of proportion and not normal for a 14 year old.

WishIhad

You did know. You just didnt ask so you could say you didnt know.

Oh stop being so ghastly. If the OP says they didn't know, who the hell are you to start second guessing and creating a whole scenario just so you can be nasty to the OP. Go away and feed your nasty somewhere else.

@PegasusReturns The irony is that those who think it is normal for a 14 year old to carry on like this just because she wasn't invited somewhere, they are the ones who are seriously warped.

Glad some people with common sense are now coming on the thread.

If BIL's daughter was only invited last week maybe they had a drop out so only had one place to fill, they may not have asked you either because they think that luxury expenses should go toward repaying your MIL or because they thought you couldn't afford it

This sounds likely.

To me, it sounds like the family are pissed off with your DH borrowing money under these circumstances. You are pretending you didn’t know about any of this which is bizarre as well. You know you have money troubles, you haven’t got a job and a trip to Paris would have been expensive. I don’t blame them for not asking you, knowing that you needed money so badly-they probably didn’t want their mum’s money spent on a European jolly.

You admit you aren’t close to these family members and don’t invite their kids anywhere.

It's awful that the OP is saying that she would have found the money for paris, while she knew he had borrowed money and that needed paying back.

She may not have been told it was mil
But she had a good idea dn knew money had been borrowed. Buried her head so she couldnt be blamed.

But thinks she could have produced about money for Paris, nit even thinking of paying whoever they borrowed back.

The dd is old enough to know the truth about finances. They cant currently afford to be paying out for a few days in Paris.

I would imagine if she knew that, she wouldnt have jumped to conclusions she did.

Quite teeling that she assumed it was one if her parents that had fallen out with them. She didnt assume she had been left out because of anything she did, she knew it was down to one of her parents.

Could it be that she knows the OP and dh arent really that well thought of?

@SaraNade I think you're behaving like a very damaged individual and you should think about why you feel the need to vilify a 14 year old.

@SaraNade it's cruel to exclude her out of the girls exclusively. The same way it is not kind to invite all the girls in one class to a party but one single girl or all friends to organise an event and deliberately exclude one. It's unkind and it is rude. If they can't afford it they should still invite her which OP can then turn down due to finances and she would not have felt left out

I think SaraNade is coming in for a lot of unwarranted stick for what is just sensible plain-speaking.

None of us on MN knows the daughter: we only have the OP's posts to go on.

BUT the OP's ILs do know the DD and her parents. By the OP's own admission, the SILs have been kind and generous towards the DD in the past so there's nothing to suggest they are nasty people. On the contrary.

So, on the balance of probabilities, I reckon SaraNade is nearer the mark than those of us who are seeing the situation in general and the DD in particular through the prism of the OP's posts. Sorry to say, I think the DD was probably a nice wee girl, but due to her upbringing is now emerging as a troubled young woman with attitudes and issues that will be long-reaching.

@SaraNade Different scenario. How many trends we had on this site regarding colleagues organising some social event and not inviting one person. Read those trends, posters there were getting full support and their behaviour seemed normal. They were adults. Not 14 year old girls with hormones, bullying experience, experience of being excluded by their friends, girls who are learning to cope and finding self esteem. You, as an adult seems you are fit to judge and make some serious accusations bordering on development problems. You are being extremely unkind.
And again, it is not the question about affording, it is a question of being asked in her eyes. It does not make the girl spoilt and entitled.

I agree with the others, you are behaving like some damaged individual with troubles rooted in the past. Feel sorry for you.

@Wishihad

It's awful that the OP is saying that she would have found the money for paris, while she knew he had borrowed money and that needed paying back.

That’s not true. OP said she would have found money for Paris before she found out DH had borrowed money from MIL.

I think you and your husband are taking advantage of his Mum, which is pretty despicable IMO. Factor in her dementia and it's unforgivable.

100% agree. The OP's daughter is not the only vulnerable person in this unfortunate story, albeit her best interests have been dissected piecemeal on this thread.

The MiL is the other vulnerable party, but her interests have been almost entirely overlooked. And to take financial advantage of someone with dementia is morally dubious at best.

Incidentally, @SaraNade I agree with the broad gist of your posts. What I read was not a vilification of a 14-year-old child but some quite justifiable criticism of the parenting of that child. In the long-run, I agree, this kind of response will do neither her nor her anxiety any favours.

It's not okay if the aunts are deliberately excluding their supposed loved niece because they happen to be angry with the child's parents. From their perspective, however, their mother is also vulnerable. What happened to consideration for her circumstances?

I can see the situation from both sides, but don't think anyone comes out of this story covered in glory.

How is OP taking advantage of her MIL? She made DH promise he wouldn’t borrow money off her again but he did it without her knowledge! Why do people make women responsible for their husband’s actions?

I fail to understand why is it such a big issue about borrowing the money from family member. He didn't steal, didn't go behind the siblings back, it is BIL who is managing the money, so he did authorise the loan and they are paying back in instalments. I believe OP wasn't told about the exact source of the loan as they agreed not to go it again and he didn't want to upset her. Also, if it comes to that, people do get bank loans for various reasons and at the same time manage to scrape money for social events/holidays/ etc at the same time as repaying it.

I think when you put it all together it's quite easy to see why they as a group would be avoiding your side of the family.

Firstly, yes the probably think it was low of your husband to borrow money from an elderly woman with dementia. If you don't see each other often but they see each other often, they probably talk amongst themselves about how you don't seem to live within your means, so to them if you HAD chosen to fork out for your DD to go on the trip, then this would have been another example of this. They probably didn't invite your daughter out of the principle, as they probably think that any spare money you have should be going to repaying his mum.

Secondly, and I know this will sound very harsh but others have hinted at it so I'll go out and say it - your daughter going through problems might have been part of the reason she was not invited. They will have just wanted a fun trip, and especially for the other kids who have less tolerance for mental health issues than adults, inviting her would have felt like a drag. When I was a teenager, I had a friend much like this, and my other friends would frequently wish we could go out without her because she was whiny and attention seeking when we went out, as well as being emotionally immature so might, for instance, ruin a trip to the fun fair by bursting into tears because she was too scared to go on the rides and needing everyone to focus on calming her down. As adults we might be understanding of that kind of behaviour, but amongst other kids.... if you are the kind of kid that makes a habit of doing things like that frequently, you become the person that makes every outing about them and ruins everyone else's fun. The cousins might have been saying to the parents "do we HAVE to take X, she ruins everything", and given the situation with the money, the adults thought to themselves, "you know what, let's not bother."

Thirdly, the thing that's most guaranteed to make including a troubled child a chore to others is a mother that keeps pushing it. It sounds like they are also avoiding you from your OP and I would say this is probably why, because they know you will try and organise ways to get all the kids together, and their own kids might be resistant to that.

I think you honestly need to focus on repaying the loan rather than feeling excluded, and maybe afterwards, if you're desperate to push a close relationship that doesn't seem to come naturally, just have a bit of reflection on whether you are making that a chore for them.

@Cassilis Because the OP says in one of her posts upthread that she suspected her DH had borrowed money. For the move I think it was. She didn't say what prompted her suspicions, or who she thought he might have borrowed from, or why she didn't have or express concerns to her DH, or have a conversation with him about it.

Altogether a distinct lack of curiosity or interest on the OP's part. Or, as some posters suggested, the OP was being disingenuous with us.

@InkyToesies she suspected but she didn’t know

This is between her DH and her MIL. MN always is saying that the DH needs to sort it with his family so why are we blaming the OP here? Especially as ALL her in-laws were complicit in keeping OP out of it by not telling her DH had borrowed money.

How is OP taking advantage of her MIL?

I wasn't saying she is taking advantage... just that it might be perceived by the rest of the family that their household is taking advantage, and are sucking up to the MIL to get loans. Like I say, I might be doing 2+2=5 but it seems like they are less than happy to have "she seems in good spirits" type updates from the OP anymore.

Hi @Cassilis. Agreed, the OP told us she didn't know about money being borrowed. Then later told us she'd suspected some time ago that the DH had borrowed money, though she didn't elaborate on the matter or explain her IMO astonishing lack of curiosity. Then later told us that DH had fessed up about borrowing from his Mum.

I think the OP could probably truthfully say she didn't know her DH had borrowed from his Mum for the second time.

However, given all the info the OP has posted, i.e. her ILs' coolness, their distancing of themselves from the OP and her DH, her DH 's history of borrowing money from his increasingly unwell Mum, the OP's stated suspicions that the DH had borrowed further money...I think the OP had every reason to believe that her DH had borrowed money from his Mum.

But I agree that the OP can successfully argue that she didn't know. I just don't believe her for the reasons given above.

DH has been very stressed about money so I think borrowed the £2000 as a last resort and was embarrased about it. So he doesn't think it's anything to do with DD but they just don't want to take her away knowing he's still paying back MIL and we are skint. I was genuinely unaware but suspected he'd borrowed off someone

You know your DH has been stressed about money, you know you’ve borrowed money off your MIL before and you suspected he’d borrowed money again-that is reason enough to explain why your DD wouldn’t have been able to go on holiday to Paris.

If they can't afford it they should still invite her which OP can then turn down due to finances and she would not have felt left out

But she wouldnt have. OP said she woild have found the money. Then they would have looked awful.

@Cassilis Op knew he had borrowed money and would have known it needed paying back. She just didnt ask, but she didnt want to know the details.

She says she did suspect he borrowed money. Who wouldn't question their dp if they produced 2k from nowhere and has a habit of borrowing money off their mother and struggling to pay it back.

The OP would have looked awful, producing money to paris.