DIL said I’m a pathetic excuse of a mother

[LonelyMIL]

DIL called me a pathetic excuse of a mother and said I should be ashamed of myself.

Son wont talk to me in months now

AIBU thinking there’s no reason ever to be this horrible to your mother in law who is just trying to have a relationship

It sounds to me like what your son and DIL need from you is a huge helping of space.

So a big period of time when you don’t contact them and they’re allowed to just be themselves and not think about you. I’m talking multiple months not days or weeks.

Use the time to build your own life - friends, hobbies, whatever, that doesn’t centre around your children.

If you then reach out, make sure you do so without expectation of becoming a central or enmeshed part of their lives. Carry on holding the boundaries and not contacting them frequently. Realise they are a separate household. In time you may be able to build a healthy, albeit never close, relationship with them.

I don’t know exactly what happened as you’re not able to say, but from what your son is saying to you, it sounds like this is what they need. If your son was forced by circumstances to become your carer when he wasn’t yet an adult, it’s understandable that he feels resentment. It may not have been your fault but you did become something that tied him down and made him less free to live his own life.

The way you speak about “providing him with a roof” etc in exchange for care suggests you don’t really get how imprisoning this must have felt for a young person.

If he even feels like you are trying to pull him back into that - even if you’re not - or as though you want him to go back to being the person you lean on, he is going to react strongly. He has found freedom and doesn’t want to be pulled back in.

I don’t from your posts why DIL has chosen to phrase this as “not safe” - it’s probably not helpful to dwell on these words (or any individual wording) but perhaps she means not emotionally safe.

@LonelyMIL
Why are you so fixated on your DIL? She does something nice for her own mum and you kick off because she didn’t do something do you… when she isn’t your kid. Why don’t you focus that on your children. What is your obsession with this woman?

Even this thread. Two of your kids don’t talk to you. But this thread is about your DIL? Your own kids don’t talk to you. Why are you obsessed with your DIL and why do you aim all your anger at her?

No wonder your son wants nothing to do with you. He needs to protect his wife from his obsessed mum.

It's now clear from reading your Mother's Day thread what the issue is. You rang your DS asking that he treat you the same as your DIL treated her mum, with presents and a meal out etc. You wrote that he lost his temper and said "he's sick of it all being on him all the time and I have other children. I’m devastated, I did everything for him when he lived here and as soon as he moved out I am treated like I’m nothing."

You have five DC but put your DS in the position of pseudo-spouse just because he came to live with you and then made the relationship transactional. He feels used and put upon and your response is to tell him he's being ungrateful for the fact you gave him a roof over his head and cooked his meals. This is not your DIL laying down boundaries – it's your son. He's had enough.

I think you should sign up for therapy to help you accept that you will never have the relationship you want with your son and to be honest, you will be lucky to have any relationship at all.

This is textbook missing missing reasons and I encourage you to read that site and try to take it in.

I have sympathy for you because it sounds like you’re depressed/sad…but it is so blatantly obvious that you are what they say you are.
You do lack boundaries. You are manipulative. The faux “I’ve no idea what I did” but then the drip feed of listing out all of the things you’ve been told, and all of your previous threads - this is another form of manipulation. The sad thing is, at your age, it may not even be a conscious choice but just so ingrained in your personality that it’s going to take a lot of work/effort for you to break out of this pattern.

If I remember correctly the other adult children either don’t talk to op or are far too busy having their own families/too far away so op basically decided this one child was it.

You know precisely why you’ve been cut off.

Do you do what I long to do when my children move out? Knock down all rhe pictures on the walls walking past, put my dirty clothes on the floor, leave my dirty plates and takeaway cartons underneath the sofa, make dirty marks on the ceiling by jumping up and touching it, never flush, use all the toilet roll and not replace it, throw my shoes all over the floor, ask to borrow money and never pay it back, urinate in bottles and leave it around the room as you are too lazy to go to the bathroom at night, dirty the house as soon as it is cleaned, never lift a hand to help, complain about the food constantly?

well good on you.

She said in the other thread they live far away and have their own DC so she never expects anything from them. Instead, she expects everything from her DS and he's pulled back. In the meantime, those DC she left off the hook think so little of her that they allow her to spend Christmas alone.

I think she genuinely does not have the capacity/ emotional intelligence to understand to be honest. She can’t share what she did as she can’t work it out. All she knows is that it cannot be her fault , again capacity to understand/ locus of control.

I think this is an excellent post except for the bit about using AI for therapy or counselling.

So your son and daughter don't talk to you. You don't know why. I don't believe that.

Anytime someone starts an attention-seeking thread like this, which is a single line portraying themselves as the victim without any context or backstory, then I immediately 100% believe the other side.

Especially if all their answers are terse and whiny, hoping to gain sympathy from strangers instead of fixing what is actually wrong with those closest to them.

How do I find OPs other threads?

We cut off my MIL two years ago. It was completely my DH’s idea, not mine at all but I supported his reasons. She hates me as a result. It’s much easier for her to hate me than her own son I guess?

But yes, as someone else said, sometimes it takes becoming a parent yourself to see your own parents failures and that was certainly the case for my DH.

Sorry but there is absolutely another side to this.

Your ds wants nothing to do with you, neither does your dd and your dil thinks you were a crap mum. But allegedly you haven't done anything...absolute bs and first class narcissist behaviour to deny any knowledge of wrong doing.

This is my interpretation too, based on the op's style of writing. It is quite a distinctive style and, even without context or content, very reminiscent of her other threads. As soon as I read the opening post, I had some recollection that there was some history relating to a wedding, or money for a wedding. And that other posters found her communication style to be... difficult... whether intentional or not.

They're linked on P8 of this one.

No context here. You don't just come out with this for nothing, have you been interfering, turning up uninvited or have you told your son this?

I've just read all your posts and there's definitely more to this, sorry.
Would love to hear their side!
You say you don't respect boundaries.
Are you undermining,/guilt tripping/emotional blackmailing type to try and get your own way?
So much more to this I feel.

She didn't say she'd "let" him keep in touch with his mum, she said she wouldn't stop him, which is quite different.

Sorry OP but if everything you have said is true Im not sure I would want a relationship with either of them. Do you think it would be worth asking the son who treats you well to have a talk with him to see if he could act as a mediator in this debacle. Perhaps the three people concerned recognise you may eventually require more support & are backing away for that reason. If this is the situation then shame on them all. If there is a genuine reason on your part for them behaving like this towards you then only you know the truth.

But what was he asking you to say sorry for? Bad childhood, leaving their father, being alcoholic… what? There must have been a specific thing or scenario that they were asking you to say sorry for, surely?

If you look at the linked posts on pg 8 it might give you some more insight to why they are backing off. She seems to have several children, she's allowing the others to have lives become they live further away and have children. But this child moved back in with her at 16 and sounds like he had many years providing support while she expected him to be grateful that she was paying the bills to keep a roof over his head (he was 16, that's just part of the deal of having kids) she has complained that her Dil treated her mother more on mother's day than he treated her, that Dil had the audacity to thank her own mother for her help with the wedding, ds had already acknowledged her in his speech. It sounds like she puts a lot of pressure on him coming to see her, calling him and expecting him to come over, not accepting when they say they are busy. Blaming Dil and relying on him for everything. She can't seem to see how she is pushing her son away from her by manipulating and guilt tripping him.

@LonelyMIL you can put up a hundred threads on here. The answers won't change. Back off!! Leave them be.

So what was the drama you were all involved in? It sounds all very Eastenders.