To let my niece stay when she refuses to see her mum?

[ShadowShapes]

My sister has 2 children, my niece is 20 and my nephew is only 10 months, so a huge age gap. They have different fathers.

My niece is at university and since my sister had the baby, my niece has refused to spend holidays at home, preferring to stay in her uni city with friends. My sister isn’t happy with this but has had to accept it. My niece has told her that she doesn’t want anything to do with her or the baby. She thinks her mum is mad for having another child. My sister and partner have been together for 5 years and he moved in when my niece was 17. My niece got on ok with him but didn’t like him living with them.

My niece planned to stay in her uni city for summer but asked if she can spend the summer with us a couple of weeks ago. I said she could but that she should tell her mum. She did and my sister said we shouldn’t let her stay with us and we will make things worse.

My niece came to us last week and my sister is angry. I said that I am being neutral but that I will speak to my niece about how she’s feeling and try to help them sort out their relationship. My sister thinks I should tell her that she can’t stay with us but I’ve said she will always be welcome here. My niece is such a nice person but she is adamant she wants nothing to do with her mum, her partner or the new baby.

I feel really in the middle but my niece is still really young and I wasn’t going to turn her away. I’ve tried to put myself in my sisters shoes but it’s difficult as I can’t imagine having another child now and how my children would feel about that.

I’m going to let her stay but going forward what would you do? I’ve suggested to my niece that her mum comes for a coffee or to meet for a walk with or without the baby to try to sort things out but my niece isn’t interested. She just seems to be getting on with her life and seems happy without her mum in it. She helps around the house, gets on well with my children who are also home from uni, goes out with friends and is working. It’s like she has just wiped her mum out of her life, They had a good relationship until her mums partner moved in. She says she feels her mum put him first and although her partner is ok, she didn’t like living with another person.

Bringing up difficult topics and giving unsolicited advice wasn’t “listening’ or ‘mediating’. Am sure OP has compassion for both her sister and niece.

Agree with PP. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have a second family or large age gap but there are consequences that have to be weighed up. Sometimes you can't have everything you want, sometimes choosing A means you cut yourself off from having B even if you desperately want both A and B.

As other people have touched on the niece’s reaction is so extreme cutting them off and not wanting to set foot in her old home I’d be suspecting the man may have behaved sexually inappropriately towards her when she was 16/17. There’s a reason some men target women with female children.
I’d be wanting her to know she can tell you anything and you’ll be supportive.

Bringing up difficult topics isn’t some social crime its totally natural within close connections.

It's not really extreme though. Her mother has been consistently and repeatedly absolutely ignoring her daughter's feelings for a least 4 years now. She forced a strange man into her home and life and has been harping on about a new baby for years, spent all her money on getting pregnant and is now hounding and harassing her daughter over her perfectly normal disinterest in her mother's baby.

We know her mother is spiteful, self centred and cares more about winning than her daughter's safety because she's tried to intervene to make her daughter homeless so she (the mother) can have power and force her daughter to hang around with her new squeeze and the baby who is now her mother's main focus.

She's had a whole life time living with this woman and years of being told to shut up and put up with what she finds intolerable.

The only way to escape people like this is to just cut them out of your life entirely. Either her mother will learn her lesson, stop trying to ram a baby and man down her daughter's throat and offer her daughter kindness and love, and they can rekindle their relationship to some extent, or she will not see her mum for years and they will never be close again.

The ball is entirely in her mother's court.

PS, that is not to dismiss the possibility of SA - these men are quite common and it turns out they actually look on dating apps to find women with children, something I only discovered recently which totally horrified me.

The DN has been through therapy then made the choice to make a life away from her DM, that's not a knee jerk reaction, she's faced her feelings and is now acting on them. Her DM knew she was unhappy, even the Op tried to tell her, but she didn't want to hear it and actions have consequences.