To ask if you have a successful MIL/DIL relationship…how did you do?

[laraitopbanana]

Just that really. MIL seems to be the hardest job after Mother…

I am not even close to be a MIL but would love to hear your nice stories!

I have a DIL. She is my daughter’s wife so maybe that makes a difference? I don’t know. I just treat her like I do my daughter, we’re good friends, we have a laugh together, I never ever interfere with anything they’re doing and we get along really well.

However, she is a lovely person, easy to be with, good fun. It would be so much harder if my daughter had married a difficult woman.

My DD was married to a man before she “came out” ; their divorce was very amicable and we are still all friends and spend a lot of time together, I even worked for him for a while when he was running a bar.

Basically I think a lot of it is down to luck, your offspring marrying someone easy to get along with. I’m very lucky my daughter made good choices!

I have a reasonable relationship with mine and now 18 years later love her dearly. Initially at the start I had strict and clear firm boundaries between her home and mine. This was because initially she tended to get overly involved in our lives. Things have warmed up a lot as we are both careful to limit any opportunity for undue interference that may lead to misunderstandings. She also respects my relationship with DH and I also respect her relationship with her son.

I had a great relationship with mine but she didn't interfere at all. She was always really friendly and easy to talk to but didn't pry. She treated her son as an adult. They always had a relaxed relationship and laughed a lot so ours was an extension of that.

I think my MIL has played her role very carefully and tactfully. She is a very family orientated, conservative, organised, middle class woman. We are not very similar but we are both family orientated and this seems to help us get along and prioritise family connection above all else.

Her main key to success is that she never judges or offers her opinion on my parenting. I know that she likely doesn't agree with baby-led weaning or co-sleeping for instance because she didn't approach parenting that way. She doesn't say a word. We focus on what we have in common.

In return for her tactful approach, I work to ensure that they regularly see their GC. I know this means a lot to my MIL. I want my DC to have a strong connection with their GPs. We all win.

My MIL is a gem. She never interferes but will offer help. She always used to offer to do the ironing when she came round. I don't let her now she's getting a bit older, I feel she's done her bit now. She looked after me when I was really ill years ago too. She's good company. We get on really well.

This is what I came to write. My MIL is fantastic and I am very lucky to have her. She did things differently but she respects what I have chosen to do (also BLW and letting our children sleep with us if they wake up). I like to think she is also lucky as I, in turn, make an effort to include her in our lives. My children’s relationship with their grandparents is very important to me and she makes it much easier.

My MIL is lovely and we get along very well. She saved my sanity when I had my first baby. She is generally very good at offering help without judgement and I made a point of including her through my pregnancy and making space for her to be mega excited and letting the little things go. She does have a tendency to slip into thinking she knows best from time to time, but she means well and she backs off when I ask and I'm sure I get on her tits sometimes too.

I love my MIL. She has her quirks and can be difficult (can’t we all?!) but she welcomed me into the family with such affection that it’s impossible not to love her back. We get along well, enjoy a chat over a glass of wine. We tend to spend a couple of weeks a year on holiday with her as a family.

My own family are a bit crap so I have relatively low standards I think - I don’t expect perfection from family members and I’m often quite shocked at the various threads complaining about the MIL who wants to be more involved, outrageously bought baby’s first shoes or wants to help out with childcare or so other apparently terrible thing!

I have a good relationship with all my in-laws, the secret? Keep communication to a minimum 😆

My Mil was wonderful. Wish she was still alive

I live next door to my mother in law and she is wondrous. She is genuinely lovely, very non judgemental and supremely helpful.

We have a great relationship.... But I think that is because she is great rather than me!

I liked my MIL, she wasn’t in any way demanding but we were always welcome. I involved her with the children when they were young and she did look after them regularly until she wasn’t really well enough. We’d started to develop a relationship where we would go to things together or I was invited with her and her friends, sometimes I think it was so I would drive them but I liked spending time with them nonetheless. I don’t see her since me and DH separated and I do regret that as I did genuinely like spending time with her.

This basically. I have known her now for 26 years. We has come to respect my parenting choices. I have comitted to including her in our family especially now she is a double widow ( DH has lost both his father and his step father).

Accept that having different personalities, opinions and interests doesn’t make them wrong; accept that none of us are perfect, forgive the irritations, appreciate the positives; calm down and don’t take offence over trivialities.

I have a great relationship with my MIL and at one point we were business partners. It isn't really a relationship we’ve needed to work at. We’re both pretty reasonable people who act in a reasonable way.

My MIL is lovely. She’s kind and warm and just a lovely person. So are the rest of the in laws.

I do have to say though that I fell in love with DH a little bit more when I first met his family. They were good, nice people. so I thought, correctly, that he was likely to be kind and unproblematic himself.

I have 2 DDILs. I’m still working on my relationship with DS1’s DP because their relationship isn’t as long as DS2’s & other DDIL and for reasons that would be too outing to say on here, we don’t get to see her as often. I love her dearly, I’m happy she’s in DS1’s life and love how happy she makes him. They’re a great team and I hope they’re in it for the long term.

I adore my other DDIL, she brings so much joy to all our lives. She genuinely makes DS2 so incredibly happy so I don’t need anymore than that. She is the most amazing mummy to baby DGS. I don’t give her any advice on how to look after him unless she asks, and even then I’m not critical of her. She is so respectful and kind to me that I couldn’t possibly be anything else to her. I’d hate to put DS2 in a position where he has to deal with any conflict between the pair of us, so I don’t. It’s not worth it.

My own MIL is an absolute gem of a woman. She old and poorly at the moment and it hurts my heart to think she won’t be here for much longer. She’s never been mean to me so I guess I trying to emulate that.

It wasn't a good relationship.

It got a lot better when I stopped running about trying to meet her vision of the perfect DIL.

Funnily enough, we immediately got on better as soon as it was clear that I'd had enough. I wish I hadn't wasted all that time and just behaved like me from the very beginning.

Also her primary relationship is with DH, he organizes everything and he doesn't tell her personal details of our relationship.

My MIL now lives back home in France, and I miss her dearly. When she was a 10 min drive from us I saw her a lot, especially when DS1 was a baby and DH was working shifts.

She is always respectful of me as my children's mother, my decision (or DH's) is final. We had a couple of moments when DS1 was tiny but she took heed of the boundaries I set, and also understood when I needed support. I guess it's always been give and take? I give her support when she needs it too.

Part of it is that she sees DH and I are a good match. I think that helps, she can see we bring out the best in each other and she has never tried to get involved or interfere.

She's also very good at anticipating when something can be pushed, or when it can't. When I was in hospital having DS1 I was there for a while, and my mum had died only a couple of months before so I was really fragile and had left the place in a mess. As a surprise she deep cleaned the whole flat. Sounds like an invasion of privacy doesn't it? She didn't actually change anything in the flat, just cleaned it, with our products and our things. Everything was where we left it but cleaner and with a full fridge. She's a genius at getting the balance right.

I adored my MIL she sadly died during Covid. She was always very clear that she had loved every minute of her role in my husbands life but she expected him to put me and her children ahead of her. She was kind and loving and adored all her family.

My relationship with MIL was rocky at the start but great now 20 years later. I bit my tongue a lot when she was going through menopause and lashing out and I'm sure she's done the same over me.
What has supported this good relationship is a DH that gets off his arse and makes the time to have a relationship with his mother so she doesn't see me as the evil DIL that took her son away or is pushing her out.

My MIL has a MIL from hell and she said she never wanted to be that MIL so she basically tried to do the opposite of what her MIL did to her!

Like PP, there are some topics we don’t agree on so we don’t bring them up. It’s an unspoken rule that the greater peace is worth more than disagreeing about topics. We both approach the relationship with the view that neither one is trying to cause offence so if one of us says something that touches a nerve, the other brushes past it and knows it wasn’t done with malice.

She respects our boundaries and doesn’t try to force us to accommodate her. If anything she’s overly accommodating. She also knows her son is just a man rather than the best thing since sliced bread. He makes mistakes, he sometimes says the wrong things, he’s sometimes an idiot and that generally in a long term relationship you might have little grievances. If we’re having a mild disagreement she doesn’t get involved, she’s doesn’t think her son can do no wrong. Well, for DH anyway! Her other son she thinks can do no wrong - I’m not sure I’d like to be her DIL if I married the other brother!

I’m lucky, my MIL is a very easy person. She makes no demands of me and is always ready to help out on a crisis. She does her best to respect the choices me and DH have made in the upbringing of our children.
We are quite different people in some ways but many of our core beliefs line up. Especially when it comes to family. Not politics, that’s another story! 😆 I’ve come to really respect her and am very fond of her indeed.
She always back me up, even in an argument with her own son!
I do my best not to take her for granted and to facilitate her relationships with our children. I’m prepared to do my bit to help out when she needs it.

My MIL and I get on well. Much better than I get on with my own mother.

There is no secret. She is a good, kind person and I hope/think I am a good, kind person in return. She is always the first to offer help with the DC, but never in a pushy way. She respects DH and my choices. She is really flipping funny and I’d happily hang out with her even if we weren’t related by marriage. In return I try really hard to take my DC to see her often and I am relaxed in her house. She can crack on with parenting my kids and I don’t hover over her or question her.

I have boys so I will endeavour to emulate her in the future.

She asked me about plans one day and I said i hadnt a clue what she was talking about. She huffed and said she had come to the realisation that it was absolutely pointless making plans with my dh. So, finally, she realised that it was dh that was the problem.