To ask about your MILs?

[HuckleberryBlackcurrant]

As a Mum of 2 boys, I've been giving a lot of thought to the fact that one day I will likely be a MIL to a younger woman.

Those of you with positive relationships with your MILs, would you please share? Or MILs with positive relationships with your children, in laws, grandchildren?

What can I do to make sure I maintain happy and healthy relationships with my children and their prospective partners/children as time goes on?

She’s great. Got her quirks of course and she annoys me once in a while, but who doesn’t do that sometimes? We see her (and FIL) a couple of times a week, and she’s very close to my son. She’s got three sons, DH being one of course, and is very close to all three, in their own ways, and involved with all her grandchildren, albeit not all to the degree she is with our son, but a lot of that is living very nearby.

My ex-MIL was the best ever. She treated me like one of her other children (I was 19 when the relationship sharted)

I was vegetarian so she'd cook me nut roasts, buy me loads of Christmas presents (I had no family of my own so stayed with theirs).

Aww man, I hope she's well. Completely brilliant woman

My mum’s mil (my paternal grandmother) was disliked equally by my parents, so no relationship there. But talking badly about your son’s wife will not help matters.
my DH dislikes his parents, so we don’t see them much, but I do get on with them - but it is DH who needs to be in the driving seat for the relationship.
My parents get on really well with my brother’s wive though… they don’t make demands, they don’t get upset when other grandmother had grandchild, but most of all, they get on well with my brother, who wants to spend time with them, have always been welcoming to friends and partners, and are just nice people. I plan to do the same with my boys.

I love the bones of my MIL, she has 3 boys and all 3 DIL’s say the same. Similarly all 3 DILs get along really well too.

She dotes on her grandchildren and she’s always happy to help. She understands the hard parts of raising kids and gently offers advice but never passes judgement. I also think a big part is she knows the positives and negatives around her sons personalities and she doesn’t make excuses for them, she knows what they can be like and when they need a kick up the bum, she’s always team wife or girlfriend.

I’ve always been treated like a bonus daughter, her sons all take her out for brunch or the cinema really regularly (like once a week) which I think is lovely.

I love my MIL and we get on well. It took time to reach this point as we had a slightly rocky start to our relationship. Don't get me wrong - we've always been nice to each other but it wasn't easy at first. Partly due to the fact that they are Indians and they always wanted their son to settle down with a good Hindu girl. It was also the fact that we are so different in terms of personality - we are almost complete opposites! So for a long time I felt like we just couldn't understand each other. There was miscommunication and misunderstandings. I'm not talking about language barriers here (they speak good English) but personality differences.
However, we slowly started to understand each other better. It was a very gradual process but we got there in the end!
I'd say after a couple of years we truly understood each other and learnt how to rub along nicely, despite the fact we do things very differently. More than that we just really like each other. There's genuine love and affection between us and she's like a second mum to me.
It took effort on both our parts to really understand each other rather than just dismissing each other. We both learnt to be sensitive to each other but not to take offence when the other one behaved in a way we didn't like. I'd say it's really important not to be oversensitive and to try and avoid conflict. If your future DIL does or says something you don't like, stay calm. Try to understand where she's coming from and why she's being like that.
My MIL and I could easily have offended each other many times over the years. We could easily be no contact now! But we both behaved with calm empathy and understanding every time there were differences between us. This is so important as is mutual respect.

Be nice to them from the beginning. There's many women out there who were dismissive of their son's girlfriends, and often downright hostile to them without even thinking of the long term impact that will have once that girl you cruelly dismissed and were rude to in the early years becomes the wife and mother to your grandkids.

My DM was very hostile to my brother's girlfriend at the time. Her criticism got really awful right through their marriage and early baby years, and then DM was sitting at home crying that she couldn't visit her GC more often as she didn't feel welcome in their home. DB used to bring the kids regularly to visit granny but her earlier behaviour meant that they set boundaries to protect SIL from her venom and all that did was backfire on DM.

A cousin used to sort our her son's house while he worked away. When he moved in his girlfriend there was a massive standoff when the GF didn't really feel comfortable with her boyfriends mother coming in unannounced and moving stuff around or redecorating. My cousin stood her ground, and it ended very badly for her because why would you trust a woman who's told you to your face you are nothing and that she'll get rid of you from her son's life with your kids?

My MIL was lovely. She was welcoming from the very beginning. I was loved by her son and once she saw he was happy, I was treated like one of the family. When I was expecting, she was delighted. When I had the baby she texted and asked when it suited us to meet the baby.

She praised me as a mother, and the things that were new since her day, she was interested and supportive. She respected our family unit and in turn, was welcomed in as a valued and beloved granny. I felt she was proud of me and happy that I was in her son's life. In fact, I was closer to her than I was to my own DM and she was by far the more attentive granny as well.

Even when she didn't get it - for example another SIL was a vegan and it baffled this Irish country mammy, she rallied and provided vegan dishes without comment even though I know she thought it was all "daft shite"

Jesus, I'm welling up now, I miss her so much.

I got on great with my MIL just a lovely woman who had brought up my lovely DH in difficult circumstances with often poor mental health. I think she was pleased he'd settled down with a nice lass to be honest. She loved the grandkids and never offered advice or anything just supported us. She never interfered. She was generous as much as she could with money and gifts, only ever asked for updates on how the kids were in return and regular visits. We had similar interests which helped so she liked to talk gardening and similar. We miss her. I was lucky as well when I first met my DH his Gran was still alive, she absolutely loved me, thought me just the right sort of girl she'd envisioned for DH, and wholeheartedly encouraged DH in our relationship. She sided with me if needed. I started going out with him in the summer, that Christmas she sent me a card that said 'from Mrs W', my birthday I got a card that said 'from Dorothy' by the following Christmas my card said ' love Gran'. I also promised I would do my best to have a girl, after far too many boys in the family and I did, so although she'd died the year before, I felt her approval!

Have the kind of relationship with your son that you want to continue moving forward.

My MIL prefers SIL to him and they do things together and don’t include DH eg Mother’s Day they’d go to lunch and DH was never included etc.

As a consequence DH is pretty distant from MIL and if I don’t bother then she has to ask to visit or how the dc are etc. as I personally do not put myself out for her. I’m nice to her when we meet and happy to have her around, I leave all organisation of DH’s family visits/gifts/catch ups to him. So they don’t tend to happen unless MIL organises them. Or if I ask how MIL is doing.

My daughter had a great relationship with her MIL. Probable reasons:

MIL was friendly from the off.
MIL was and remains interested in DD as a person in her own right. She could tell you what she does for a living, her hobbies and interests.
She doesn’t give unsolicited advice
She has an active life and interests herself and doesn’t look to her adult children to fill gaps in it. In fact both her children and her DIL enjoy spending time with her and do so without the need for guilt tripping.

MIL doesn’t expect her DIL to do what she did at the same life stage.

My MiL is amazing. See her more than my own mother due to location. She’s great with the grandchildren and they are very close, never offers unsolicited advice. She’s close to my husband, but not so much with her daughter (mostly down to her daughter’s awful behaviour).

Mine isn’t nice, but I would say don’t be nasty to your DILs mum. That’s a sure fire way to ruin a relationship. And get to know DIL as an interesting human in her own right. My MIL only talks about her herself and has never asked about me. It’s pretty obvious she is just ‘weathering me’ for her son, which is awful.

My mil is grand. Kind, funny, hands on GP. The best thing she has done so far is come down for two weeks and help when DD was born and DH had to go back to work- they live six hours away and I had an awful birth with lasting injuries and she was handing me baby for feeding and letting me catch up on sleep so I could recover.
Devoted grandparents and they just kind of pre empt stuff like when we are skint they offer to take us out for a meal/take DD out for the day when they come down.
The main advise I would give to you is don't expect your daughter in laws (if they marry women) to mother your sons, raise them to be capable of housework and childcare themselves.
We are working on this as they are of a different generation and I'm the main earner,/more highly qualified than DH, but sometimes I still think she expects me to do his washing, make his packed lunches etc and do our life admin, which doesn't fly with me at all. And I expect there will be more of a shift as our kids grow up, hopefully.