My in-laws are difficult, to say the least. They were bizarre and controlling throughout my pregnancy, and MIL frequently cried and called us shouting that we were spoiling her enjoyment of her baby by not doing things the way that she would, not finding out the gender, we mortally offended her by not throwing her a baby shower…
They were no better when I went into labour. It turns out they’d been showing up at the hospital every couple of days prior to me giving birth “incase I was in labour”. My labour went wrong, I ended up with a category 1 C-Section and was prepped for airlift, and through the whole thing, they were constantly calling the hospital and my husband, getting family members to do the same, and turned up at the hospital refusing to leave. My husband was asked to go and get them to go home before the police were called, which meant I was on my own for 25 minutes when they struggled to find a steady heartbeat for our baby.
Despite a strong feeling that I didn’t want to, we took baby to meet them as soon as we were released from hospital… they spent the whole time complaining that they’d been left out of the labour. When baby cried for food, MIL refused to give him back until DH basically snatched him off her.
They then kept just showing up at our house randomly. MIL kept calling and saying they were “missing out” on everything. They complained about the baby’s gender, the ‘selfishness’ of me breastfeeding, that seeing us weekly wasn’t enough.... they hated his name and asked us often for the first few weeks if we'd consider changing it.
They then sent me a gift signed from “Mum and Dad”, not an expression they use. My parents died when I was a child. I found it really creepy and sinister…we’d just moved house. To be honest, my mental health collapsed. DH talked to them and MIL cried a lot about not being the “matriarch” anymore, but they said they understood, and we’ve seen them monthly since then. Against every feeling in my body, I have encouraged them to interact with our baby, he goes for long cuddles, etc. They generally find him quite boring, I think. They refuse to “deal with crying” or change nappies, not that we’ve ever asked, and they feel strongly that we should raise him the way they raised DH, which included some weird local babysitting token scheme…
Anyway, they don’t have unsupervised access to him. It is all I can give to spend a day a month with them. They impact on my mental health incredibly, and I have to be functioning for our family to work. I dread seeing them before we do it, it takes me hours to recover afterwards. They feel the very opposite of safe, to me.
DH is looking after baby at the moment while I work. Typically this is the case, but I’m usually in the house too, and right now I’m working on my first out-of-house project since baby came along. It’s only for a few weeks, and it’s intense.
MIL has asked that while I am away, they can have baby unsupervised to “get to know him”. They have suggested that I’m not told.
DH hasn’t mentioned it to me yet, but there’s a high chance that this is because he knows it’d upset me, and I’ve got to focus on work. He also tends to deal with anything he considers unreasonable by just ignoring the request, I think it’s weird but it’s how they’ve always worked, and as far as I can tell, that’s what he’s done.
AIBU to be majorly uncomfortable with this? I’m hoping that as baby gets older, and I heal more, it’ll be easier. DH has no interest in taking baby by himself at the moment; but that’s an option when he’s older, too.
I really thought I’d picked something that was “fair” to everyone, except me. My ideal would be them entirely backing off for a decent amount of time, if I’m honest. There’s SO much that they’ve done that’s been insane. There’s threads about them on here before with pages and pages of people telling us to go NC… This really isn’t random in-law bashing.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I also have PTSD (from the birth) and bipolar disorder. Both are generally well managed, but I have to monitor my mental wellbeing.