I’ve posted before about my tricky relationship with my DM... she can be ridiculously insensitive and thoughtless, but recently I can’t help feeling that she’s really taking the piss.
I’m currently 34 weeks pregnant and at the end of August DH and I were forced to pull out of a property purchase and move in with his parents (whole woe-is-me thread about that sorry episode here, if anyone’s interested).
When I told my Mother that we’d lost the flat we’d been planning to start our family in, she actually cheered. As in literally went “hooraaaaaaay!!” down the phone. Because she didn’t like the place we were buying. I told her that we were still selling our flat and were going to move in with my PILs and she asked why we weren’t going to move in with her. It just made a lot more sense for us to come to PILs- they have a lot more space and lived a mile and a half away from us, so we were able to put most of our stuff in storage round the corner and DHs commute is only about 20 minutes longer and costs the same. My Mum lives in a tiny 2 bed flat 35 miles away and DHs commute would have been more than twice as long and about 3 times as expensive. I explained all this to her and she just said “Oh... I’m always missing out aren’t I?” I wasn’t even surprised that that was her response, in fact I’d put off having the conversation with her for several days because I knew that she would say something like that.
It’s come up several times since... her saying how hard it is for her knowing someone else is looking after her pregnant daughter, asking if we’d ever really considered going to hers, etc etc...
So we come to Sunday. I’ve been doing a fair bit of baby shopping recently and was telling her about the stuff we’ve got, the stuff we still need to get and so on, and mentioned that we're planning on getting two nappy bins, one for downstairs and one for our bedroom, and that I’m giving serious thought to getting a mini fridge so we can keep expressed milk in our bedroom as well. She asked why, and said a bit of lazyitis is costing a lot of money... I said it was less about lazyitis and more about not wanting to go tramping down two flights of stairs and disturbing PILs every time we need to throw out nappies or retrieve expressed milk in the middle of the night. Her response was “Oh... I didn’t think you were planning to still be there and catering for it.” I replied that obviously we are hoping to be out by the time baby gets here (have had an offer accepted on another property) but it’s 99% likely we’ll still be here.
Spoke to her yesterday on the phone, and she was talking about how her depression has been so much worse after what I told her on Sunday... that she’s missing out again, how MIL will be so involved with the baby while she’s so far away, how hard it is going to be for her to get to us when we move, how she’d been hoping to be at the hospital within an hour of the baby being born (even though I’ve already told her I won’t want visitors so soon- that was the topic of another thread) and she thinks she’ll struggle with the journey so PILs will probably see the baby before her (we’re still planning on delivering in the town we’re moving to which is about an hour away), and so on and so on. Today she sent me a message telling me she’d met up with two of her friends “and they completely understood why I was upset. It’s just that you’re my baby and I want to look after you when you have your baby. My sister has said she’ll pay for a taxi for me to visit you so I can stop worrying”.
I haven’t answered. I feel bad for thinking it, but I just don’t have the capacity to give a shit about how hard this is for her right now. I’m having enough trouble keeping my own mental health in check (I’ve also struggled a lot with depression in the past). What’s upsetting me is stuff like how I’ll be getting to grips with breastfeeding and dealing with the physical aftermath of childbirth whilst living in my PILs house... how it’s making me feel that DH and I are sleeping in what was formerly BILs bedroom with pictures of him all over the walls and his stuff everywhere (I’ve no problem with BIL at all, it just reinforces the fact that this is not our home) in bedsheets that don’t belong to us and my laundry smells all wrong because it’s washed in detergent I don’t usually use... how I’m washing all my baby’s clothes because I want them to smell like me, but my own clothes don’t even smell like me anymore.^ How upset I got when our pram arrived today and I was so excited for DH to get home so we could put it together and give it a push round the kitchen... he asked if it could wait til after dinner, in the meantime MIL gets home and says we should just open the box, check all the bits are there and then put the box in the garage, so it’s now sitting under a dust sheet in the garage. How I’m not getting to choose my baby’s Moses basket or bouncer chair because my MIL has already bought them, along with way more clothes than we’ve bought ourselves... I know all these things are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things and I should just be grateful and I am, but it’s really starting to take its toll. But of course I can’t talk to my own bloody Mother about all this, because she so preoccupied with how much of a struggle it is for her^.
I don’t really know what I’m hoping to achieve by starting a thread about it... just having a rant I suppose.