to wish MIL would stop going on about DH’s August birthday

[horchatatresleches]

Sounds petty but it’s literally every time we see each other. DH was due in September but ended up arriving at the end of August. MIL is clearly bothered by this and somehow it comes up in conversation every time we see her. It will be that her great-niece won star of the week and do you know she was born in September, or I ran into your school friend Will who was born in September and that’s a year older than you when you started school, or most recently now our godson who has just turned four is starting school and how young he’ll be in the year just like DH, or any number of other ways of shoehorning in DH’s birthday. He’s now almost 40 years old. He did well at school, enjoyed it, played on the first teams for cricket and rugby and is doing well as an adult. He has a great group of school friends. I get that at the time it must have been disappointing to go from a child who would be Autumn born to a child who is late Summer born, but not to the point where almost forty years on.

The cut off has to come somewhere, I have a mid July kid who has been DESPERATE to start school since she was a small baby. She would have started as soon as she could toddle if she had gotten her own way.

She use to cry every time we dropped her brother off and she wasn't allowed to go in with him So being one of the youngest in the year won't bother her at all.

Her friend is just shy of 2 weeks younger so shes not even the youngest in the class (although lets be honest theres virtually no difference between 2 weeks or 4 weeks to be an August or July baby at that age and having a birthday in the hotter months is nice, my other two have winter birthdays which limits everything).

I agree!

Isn't it more that once you have picked up on something/anything, you just hear it more @horchatatresleches

It isn't particularly linked to being a MiL or even having an August birthday.

ChatGP says…
Yes — there are a few psychological terms and related concepts that could fit what is happening, depending on the nuance:

• Sensitization – In psychology, this is when repeated exposure to a stimulus makes you more sensitive to it over time, rather than becoming desensitized. So if something annoys you once and you keep noticing it, you might become more reactive each time.
• Irritation trigger or triggering – While “trigger” is often used for trauma, in everyday use it can mean any stimulus that reliably provokes a strong reaction, like annoyance.
• Negative attentional bias – This is the tendency to notice and focus more on unpleasant or irritating stimuli, making them seem more frequent or prominent.
• Hypervigilance – Usually used in anxiety contexts, it means being unusually alert to possible threats or irritants.

If you mean the self-reinforcing cycle where noticing something annoying makes you more likely to notice it again, “sensitization” is probably the most precise technical term.

This would drive me absolutely crazy OP.

My MIL does the same talking about how her daughter was such a tomboy. The daughter is a 45 year old professional women with three kids - I have no idea why she’s still so fixated on the fact she liked wearing trousers and sports when she was 5. I don’t even respond now, just ignore it.

Could she have some sort of trauma or cptsd around the birth or something connected with it… if she’s on a loop about it so many years down the line maybe it’s attached to something she went through at the time… obviously I know no idea, just a thought.

But imagine what he could have been if he had just been born later? Maybe MIL os dossappinted that is is "fine" and not exceptional like he could have been if he wa born september 😀

I think we all can see that. The problem arises when she finds a way to shoehorn his birth month into conversation after conversation, ad infinitum.

Maybe ask her this next time she starts!

Maybe!! We generally get on well enough. Not best friends but I don’t think she wishes she has another DIL.

Game of MIL bingo? Next time she mentions it, look at your watch & shout “who had 12.15?”
& explain when she looks puzzled. With a tinkly laugh “just our little joke”

Has she always been like this, and/or has she got more repetitive recently?

I know that a lot of us fall back on the same (boring) family anecdotes, especially as we get older, but with my MIL this kind of fixation and repetition was the first sign of dementia (she was only mid 60s).

If you met in school and DH is 40, that makes MIL 60-80ish, right? Has she done this every month for 25-30 years? Or, is it relatively new?

Obsessing about something so irrelevant on repeat at an older age could be a sign of something else.

August's birthstone is peridot. Maybe MIL doesn't like green.

fucking hell that would do my nut in. I'm a late August birthday-er. Literally no-one has ever mentioned it. Apart from me to my best-friend-from-school. Because she's a week shy of being a year older than me therefore the oldest in the year when i was the youngest, and it was amusing at the time. And its an in-joke now. Which is frankly, rarely mentioned as it wasn't all that funny 40 years ago...
I'd probably have snapped by now

I was an August baby. I’ve done just fine through life. Not sure why you’re having a drama about this. 🙄

This made me laugh. My nephew was born on 28th August and my mum still goes on about how if only he'd be born a few days later.....
His best friend was born 2nd of September so was a whole year older. Nephew is 18 now and it's made absolutely no difference to his life. The fact I can still recite all this is testament to how many times I've heard it!

My MIL used to tell the same stories about when her boys were young every time we saw her, I just used to nod along even though I'd heard them a million times. My mum does it too - I think it's just something that happens when people get older!

😂

This will be me in 20 years with my 28th August baby

Why on earth would she be "very excited"?

Yeah, that's pretty bloody weird to be bringing up every time you see her when your DH is a 40-year-old man.

Yeah, me too. It was probably relevant when I had school friends practically an entire year older as a child, but several decades later? Not so much.

My mother would occasionally bang on about how they couldn’t afford to send us to private school and it was a huge regret for her. I kept asking her why? My sister went on to become a psychiatrist and I went to one of the best art schools and had a good career in design. What more could a private school given us that we didn’t get from our excellent state school? I still don’t know why she had such a bee in her bonnet about it, yet she did.
There must be some slight or disadvantage for her son that, despite his current success, your MIL felt was due to his age. I also have late July and August born children. They were fine and I don’t see their successes or failures are because if their relative youth in their classes. The September/October born kids haven’t all succeeded.

Some MILs are like that.

Mine would often go into a monologue on how early DH and his siblings were to crawl and etc. And other achievements.

Having now lived through some of the achievements I know that they can be embellished..

Or 'who managed to give birth to him in August then?'.

Reminds me of when the leaving age was going up to sixteen, back whenever, my form would be the first ones affected and were not happy, arguing with me. Couple of days later one lad said 'You were right Miss, 'bout leaving age going up, I checked with the Citizens Advice shop'. However he then went on to tell me he's been born at 5 minutes after midnight on 1st September, the crucial date and he'd 'had a right go' at his mum for not pushing harder!