MIL dying, husband angry at me for not being closer to her

[alicedbr]

MIL has a terminal illness and it's looking like she won't be with us for much longer. Understandably DH is beside himself, he is very close to his mum and an only child.

I've never got on with my MIL as I feel like she's always given unsolicited advice, tried to get over involved in my parenting and in our relationship with DH (examples: got very offended that I didn't want to have a C section as she advised, said things like "mummy isn't being very nice" to my DS when I was attempting to put him down for a nap that he was resisting, given cake to DD "because it's what grannies do" when I specifically asked her not to). Because of that I limited the time I spent around her, although I never stopped DH spending time with her and encouraged him to visit solo, but DCs are very clingy to me so never went without me to see MIL.

Now that she's ill my husband keeps getting VERY angry at me that I didn't just tolerate her treatment of me, always saying "she didn't mean it like that", "she just wanted to be a hands on granny", annoyed at me that DC are much closer to my parents than MIL because we saw them more often, blames me for 'time wasted' that she could have spent more time with our DC. In my view I have never been rude to her or restricted her contact with DH or DC, just protected myself from stress and comments that I didn't like.

Unsure how to deal with this. Is he BU? Is this a natural reaction? How should I be responding? I don't feel like my mental health was or is worth sacrificing just because one day she would die earlier than me, but equally I see why he's upset.

As other PP said, it is quite hurtful for children to see their parent being humiliated, shouted at, or insulted ("mummy is mean" IS an insult). It's not a great model for healthy relationship either. In time, the children may resent, or even dislike the person putting down their mum, even if it is a GM. My own GM was slightly bitchy to my mum, not to the extend described, but enough to strain my own relationship with her. So putting up with the criticism is not in the children's best interest.
Of course it would have been better to let the children at home rather than taking away when she visited, but in OP's shoes I would only be comfortable doing that if I could trust that the MIL would not talk say bad things about me in front of the children, something that the MIL did not give any indication she could be trusted with.

Your posts were coming across like it's one or the other, like if you're really strong and the words really just bounce off you because you're immune then there's no need at all to distance yourself and if you do it's because you're not actually immune.

When you initially mentioned about people being robust, I said that some others who are robust choose to distance themselves........and you kept saying it doesn't have to involve distance...even though I never said it did.

So if I misrepresented your posts, it certainly wasn't intentional, I went by how your posts came across.

But I'm glad we are on the same page that the OP was right to distance herself, I just hope she logs on and sees that she has a lot more support now than she did at the start of the thread.

He needs to see a therapist to work through these feelings of anger he has towards you. If he doesn't, and I don't necessarily mean immediately, I think you should reconsider staying in the marriage (obviously after she dies, and not immediately either). You've done nothing wrong, he's being unreasonable, I can understand him going through these phases of grief but he's being unreasonable to be taking such anger out on you. It's not your fault.

This is just getting boring now. I was simply responding to the claims that posters who wouldn’t need to distance themselves weren’t meek, but genuinely wouldn’t care. That there’s more than one way of being strong.

@Mirabai I haven’t seen anyone, arguing either way, claim that there’s only one way of being strong. You introduced this idea, having seemingly misunderstood several posts. It is indeed very boring.

Thank you.
I was so proud of her ❤
That whole concept of people who are deeply committed to misunderstanding you is such an important one and one which I think it takes most of us a long time to understand!
And also as you said that people can be incredibly resistant to compromise and change even though they're the one promising to change 🙄

Life is too short for putting up with any of that crap from people.

I didn’t say they had. <head desk>

I’m not the one who has misunderstood posts.

You literally posted this:

I simply pointed out there’s more than one way of being strong to the posters who believed the only way was to distance.

Despite NOBODY saying the only way was distance. You introduced this idea and then started arguing against it, despite nobody saying it in the first place, and now seem to have forgotten your own post! Incredibly bizarre.

Did your parents attack your husband the way your MIL attacked you? Did she make nasty comments to her son too? If not then YANBU and there is no reason you should put up with someone who was critical of your parenting.

If your children are clingy that indicates your husband was not a hands on dad. So not only was he a disloyal husband in not defending you to his mum but he was a lazy father. He may be grief stricken but that does not give him the excuse to abuse you over a situation partly caused by him. He could have encouraged a closer relationship between you by asking his mum not to make nasty or unwarranted parenting advice which he knew upset you and he could have encouraged a better grand parenting relationship by taking his children to visit more often.

Laying the lack of decent relationships between you all as being your fault is just one more example of someone who will not accept responsibility for their own actions. I would shut the conversation down next time by saying you won't accept full responsibility for your MIL not spending as much time with your kids as she wanted. He has to accept his part too.

That is totally different from saying there’s “only one way of being strong”. Which is what you claimed.

And you’ve misunderstood the context anyway. There were multiple posters who claimed that anyone who tolerated MIL must be weak, I simply pointed out they may genuinely not care.

I didn’t claim that anywhere. I already pointed this out to you so presumably you can’t find anywhere that I did claim any such thing. My sympathies for your abysmal comprehension skills.

”Damaged people lacking boundaries” is what you called them.

Reading a lot of these posts from clearly very damaged people lacking boundaries and wondering whether they’re also nasty MILs, or had to put up with nasty MILs so resent anyone who doesn’t stand for it, or are just horrible people with no excuse.

So…still not saying ‘there’s only one way to be strong’ here, am I, which is what you keep saying I claimed? I’m sorry but I think you must be on the wind up at this point, because I simply don’t believe anyone could be so outright stupid as to keep on claiming someone said something they didn’t and then quote something different entirely as evidence for the first claim! Bonkers

She was literally talking about the people who were being extremely horrible to the OP trying to make out that abusive MIL's were normal and ok.

Because emotionally healthy, decent people don't actually expect others to put up with abuse, and they wouldn't berate people so harshly for not putting up with it and distancing themselves and they wouldn't then try to make out she deserved all the shit from her husband now and that it is all her own doing.

So either they're not decent people, or else they are decent people but they're not emotionally healthy...or maybe they're decent people and they're extremely strong and 'robust' as you put it but even despite being decent they're lacking empathy but there is something not right....because no one should have to put up with emotional abuse and no one should be made to feel that they've done something wrong by trying to protect themselves from it.

Nope I never said that, repeatedly claiming it doesn’t make it true.

The word “weak” was a general characterisation of multiple posters’ perspective rather than yours in particular. You used the words: “damaged people lacking boundaries”; others used “matyrs”, “doormats”, “handmaidens”.
I think ”weak” is a fair summary but I’m happy to consider an alternative.

Not everyone who expressed an alternative perspective were “horrible” although I don’t deny some were impatient with her.

There’s essentially two perspectives: one that this is abuse, the other that it is the inconsequential witterings of a silly woman. I can see it from both sides. If it’s abuse to you that’s fine; but others may not experience her follies as abusive. Not because they’re “damaged” or “matyrs” or “doormats” but because they’re strong personalities, MIL witterings wouldn’t bother them, and they’d find it relatively easy to get her under control.

@Panaa "people who are deeply committed to misunderstanding you" I have never thought in those terms before but that is so interesting and insightful. I think understanding that is enough to give you the clarity and calm to step away from that person.

@Mirabai I suppose my main question for you is whether you think that the OP getting the MIL 'under control' is what the DH wants, would translate as the MIL and DIL being 'closer' (as that is what the thread was initially about), and whether that would improve the marriage of OP and her DH?

No one said that everyone who expressed an alternative perspective was horrible. Some were absolutely awful though. Not 'impatient'. They were truly horrible.

You need to start reading posts properly and see that when people express an opinion on how some people are acting then that does not mean that they are speaking about everyone, just how like when people described one way of being strong you keep going on and on about how there's other ways even though no one said that there wasn't.

Personally I feel like people need to be extremely cautious when expressing their opinion on internet forums about abuse, maybe they don't think it's abusive and they know they could handle it, but it sounds exactly like abuse so no one should be minimising it. Perhaps people should ask themselves what they would think if it was being done to their daughters and not just a random on the internet.

If your daughter had a toddler and baby and her MIL was saying things to her such as they're waking in the night because they don't feel loved because you don't give them enough attention, and that not everyone is a natural at being a mother, and shouting at her about not having a C-section then would the posters who think the OP should have sucked it up think that their daughter should have? I highly doubt it, but when it's a random on the internet people are so careless with what they're saying. They forget about the thread in a day but that's that persons life and they're the one dealing with the situation.