Mother in law relationships

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AIBU to wonder why this relationship is so often difficult and strained for so many?

Well I think it’s a self-selecting sample - people who adore their MiLs (of which I know many in RL) are unlikely to start threads about it on Mumsnet!

In my case it’s simply because my MiL is an extremely judgmental person and also isn’t very nice to me. She happens to be my MIL so there’s a lot of potential for conflict but I don’t think I’d like her if I knew her in any other capacity - eg if she were my colleague or my neighbour.

@Breeblebree what lovely, lovely words, your mil sounds like she was a wonderful person, sorry for your loss

I wish I could have a similar relationship, it doesn’t matter how much I’ve tried, it’ll never happen.

I think it's just that we have an incompatibility with our way of lives and expectations. She comes from a very large and close knit family who all live close to each other and are always talking/phoning/visiting. SIL could sneeze and her aunts cousins boyfriend would phone to say bless you.

My family is tiny (I have 2 living blood relatives and three steps/half) and we all live miles away from each other and we can go months without catching up if everything is ticking over nicely.

I've always struggled with MILs desire to live in my pocket and have me in hers so I have been branded as stuck up unfortunately. It's probably half a dozen or one and six of the other with regards to fault to be honest.

I love my MIL. Looks after our little boy every week, does many lovely things for me and my family.

I often think the wives are to precious. Yes she gives him treats when he shouldn't have them. Yes she sometimes does stuff I'm not massively keen on but it's that part of life. My own mum does these things and I'm very forgiving of her so I treat my MIL the same.

I see it all the time where mums mum can do the same as dads mum but they have very different outcomes.

My mother in law relationship was awful because she would only have been happy if i was a carbon copy of her. She just isn’t a nice person generally. Blames everyone else for problems in her life, is materialistic, right wing and has this idea that women are there to look after the men. Everything is about appearances.
I was very proudly working class, work in the public sector, socialist and feminist. Ideology wasnt the problem so much as the practice. A working mother, who didn’t take her son’s name and who was handy with a drill. She hated me, and would call me up drunk to tell me and try to get me to argue with her (I just listened). I can’t be bothered being horrible to people as it’s a waste of energy, it was completely one sided and im so glad I’m divorced and don’t have to bother with her now.

I do think it can be generational

Not MIL but I remember my own mum saying when I was planning my wedding
"It's so unfair - when we grew up our parents made all the decisions, now children get a lot more say"
She explained it was frustrating that her mum made all the decisions for her wedding, then I made all the decisions for mine, so she missed out on ever having a say

As a DIL in her generation they tended to toe the line, she took advice from her MIL (who luckily was lovely) called her Mum, lived nearby and looked after her when ill/elderly

Things have changed a lot in the past few decades and women have so much more choice and opportunity compared to her peers

@Breeblebree

My mother in law was my best friend, my mentor and a second mum. She died suddenly this summer and I miss her so much. My own mother is great, and we love each other dearly, but we are very different people. My mother in law was probably the person who understood my soul most in the world. We spoke every day, sometimes for hours. We worked in the same field and she cheerleaded and supported me without question. She was who I turned to first when I needed advice, and who I told first when I had good news. She taught me what it feels like to be loved absolutely unconditionally and to be valued just for being for who I was by another woman. She saved me, and I owe a huge part of everything I have and am today to her. She was loved by so many people, she worked so tirelessly to make the world a better place, and now she is gone and I don’t really know how to face the rest of my life without her.

So sorry for your loss, she sounds a truly wonderful woman .

Mil are not family by blood, so often the DIL bends over sideways to accolade them as they don’t want to be seen as a crazy bitch and resentment builds until they grow up a little more and ask themselves why the fuck they are putting up with their MIL when they wouldn’t take this shit from their own mothers

My mother in law was great - both to me and to my husband's wife, who she was still in regular contact with 40 years after their divorce. I don't have sons, and don't ever expect to have a daughter in law, but if I did, she would be my model.

In contrast, my stepmother had three sons and had a poor relationship with all her daughters in law (my sisters and I all had a much better relationship with her). There was definitely fault on all sides in our view.

@Breeblebree what a beautiful thing to feel about another person. She sounds wonderful and your love for her really comes across. I’m sorry for your loss.

I don’t think as a rule it is particularly strained. I’ve never experienced it in real life. Seems to be a mumsnet thing to be honest.

I loved mine, miss her terribly. She was like a mum to me for most of my adult life.

I trusted her implicitly as I did my mum. We always had them both for high days and holidays. Luckily both got on well.

My mil is not a bad person, she can be very generous and thoughtful, but she has also made some really tactless comments on occasions and upset me. We are very different and she is very different to my late mum who I miss desperately. She can come across as cold and lacking in affection and has a critical comment about everything. My mum was the opposite. She also found small children difficult so catching up (for a whole 10 hour day each month) used to be really stressful. I make an effort though as she is my DHs mum and my kids nan. My sil hates her and has been vile to her which is really sad for her DH and her DD (who hardly has a relationship with her as a result). I do think unless someone is particularly abusive you should make an effort. I would have hated it if DH had caused issues with my family.

My mum actually helped me navigate mil - mil is kind, caring, drop everything to help, happy to babysit but she does have her downsides which I wont list. It was my mum who sat me down and said mil is just a person, with different personality and perspective. Mum said I didnt have to agree with mil but she was family now and I should learn love her warts and all. That's what i did. We had disagreements but treated with respect. I do not agree with her politics, religion etc bit we both learned to avoid these or skim over them.

Mine was and still is nice. I split from her son over two years ago and she contacts me from time to time, I had dinner with her the other night with my daughter. I like her.

I loved my own MIL to bits. I get on amazingly with my DIL. We are good friends and I spend loads of time with them as a family. Also look after the DGC regularly so love that she trusts me with that too.

@jackstini. I don't think it is generational because you only have to look at novelists like Jane Austen to see the conflict between women in her books. Think about Sense and Sensibility and the way Fanny Dashwood treated her in laws. It is like the poor reputation that stepmothers have in literature ( wicked step mothers in fairy stories). Very unfair but portray a traditionally difficult relationship.

@Breeblebree I'm so sorry for you loss, and for others. Your post is lovely.

I lost my wonderful MIL suddenly a few months ago too. She was also the mum I never had (mine is crap) and was wonderfully supportive and helpful without ever overstepping. She was an amazing nanny to our DD and I miss her terribly.

My MIL was lovely, but my own DM must have been the MIL from hell for my DH, as she always felt that he was beneath me (in terms of academic qualifications), and went out of her way to make him appear stupid at first.
Luckily, he is very kind and went out of his way to look after her, taking her out to see places she had been to or lived in her youth when his shift allowed and I was at work as she got older and lonelier.
Unfortunately for her, it was very obvious that the DC preferred my MIL to her, so it was sad that by making herself unpleasant she drove even her family away.

Mil are just people. You will have some you like and some you don't.

@jackstini so much truth in what you say. I know my MIL was very bitter about her MIL bossing her about, I suspect she did was told though. I spoiled her turn at it.
I remember MIL/FIL telling me their parents decided what jobs they would do at 15/16. No suggestion of making your own choice, or moving away. I think seeing younger people just deciding themselves must be a bitter pill to swallow. In fact DHs eldest brother did the same and then DH and other brother just stayed at school and went to uni etc. I don’t think BIL realised it was a choice, sure that’s where a lot of his resentment towards us comes from.

In law's are difficult because they are your family but you haven't grown up with then so you don't have easy familiarity and conflict resolution strategies.

Plus you often have conflicting needs e.g a woman needing to spend the days after the birth of her first child recovering and being looked after by her husband whilst another woman wants to see her son and grandchild.

I think a lot of women on here naturally favour their own parents at the expense of in law's but would be upset by the same treatment by their own children.

I think the point that some women see it as an employment hierarchy is bang on with my MIL. She has a very firm view that she’s the top boss (of the whole world, really, but definitely of her family), with eldest SIL as chief of staff and her eventual successor, but then also a side perception of men being superior to and in charge of their wives. She sees my career focus, and DH’s role as an equal partner and parent, as a usurpation of the hierarchy she’s decided on and thinks should be respected, and it annoys her no end and she blames me for it. Things are never black and white, I think she genuinely does love me and is proud of - and can be quite boastful about - mine and DH’s marriage/lifestyle/children, but is a bit jealous and resentful of them at the same time. Family dynamics are like that though and it’s really difficult when you’re presented with something akin to a familial relationship but without any of the love or tribal loyalty that usually comes with your own family. With that in mind I try to be forgiving as I really want my kids to have a good relationship with their extended family on both sides, but it’s hard to stay nice when I have to put up with constant passive aggressive digs for committing sins such as letting my husband prepare his own child a meal while I’m breastfeeding the other one. The saving grace is I don’t have to tolerate it too often as they live a flight away and it’s only a few times a year. If she lived nearby enough for frequent visits I’d have to change my approach to her entirely and be a lot more assertive, which goes against the grain really - I’ve never quite got over being really deferential to other people’s parents, which I suspect is why we mostly rub along pretty well.

I think like many others, our relationship went downhill after I had my First child (her first Grandchild).

I believe it was a hierarchy thing. She was very much the "Matriarch" of the family. I also think she just had no respect for me once I became a Mum. It was like she knew better.

She constantly told me I should do things differently, she would turn up unannounced every single day for about 3 months. My partner eventually told her to stop and she still didn't listen for another month or so. She would just turn up and say "sorry to turn up unannounced". She would also turn up at the house with her friends. Often we would be eating dinner and she would still stay about ten minutes because her friends "needed to meet the baby". She would do the opposite of what I asked and she would also tell me that she had done the opposite. She would tell me she had bought my child's Xmas day outfit for her. I will always remember when I was going back to work and she would be looking after her a couple of days a week, and she said "you're very good letting me look after her as you don't know the way that I do things". Just so fucking disrespectful.

Weirdly though, she is a very, very nice and caring woman and will do anything for anyone. I have no idea what happened to her once I had a baby. Once I had my 2nd one, she completely calmed down. Did not of the above and completely respected me! Must be something to do with getting used to the new dynamic and realising they are suddenly not in charge any more and that your new family doesn't necessarily directly involve her & she can't make any of the decisions!

Like many, no issues before DS was born (except for occasionally offering me food in damaged packaging because they wouldn’t eat it).

My MIL means well, but she’s anxious around DS in a way that comes across as critical. She’ll gasp dramatically and say things like “watch his head” when he’s about a metre away from anything hard and also well capable of seeing it and crawling in another direction. Then, she’ll gasp some more when he’s eating some toast as though I’ve just taken out some uranium as an afternoon snack. My scandalous breasts and I are also banished from the room at feeding time.

Whenever he grumbles, she makes comments about what he wants (and will usually quote anything but me, even though it’s usually me or my milk he’s looking for). And every time she says goodbye to DS, she instructs him to keep me up all night or play with noisy toys. It was funny once or twice, and I don’t mind noisy toys, but it just comes across as sort of mean-spirited and repetitive now.