AIBU to keep some distance from my elderly uncle (by marriage) and not encourage contact with my adult daughter?
My uncle is very elderly and was widowed recently. After my aunt’s funeral, where I gave the eulogy, I hoped we might have a more normal family relationship. My husband has always been kind and helpful to him, including doing some odd jobs for him, and the three of us have since had some perfectly pleasant Sunday lunches.
However, there have been a number of things over time that have made me uncomfortable.
When I’ve visited him alone, he has once sat very close to me on the sofa, taken my hand when I said I needed to go home and said, “Do you have to? Really?” He has also made slightly ambiguous comments about my appearance, for example “Oh, your face, I could just…” and then avoided explaining what he meant when I laughingly asked. He joked that I should ‘stay over’ but that my husband was not invited.
After one lunch, he rang me and joked that he “must have changed his aftershave” because he had noticed that I chose to sit beside him in the front of the car while my husband sat in the back.
He has also sometimes seemed to prefer seeing me without my husband, which I’m not comfortable with, and specifically said on one occasion that I was invited to lunch with him and a relative and their husband but not that my husband was not invited.
More recently, he gave me a semi valuable (not very) watch that belonged to my late aunt, saying it should eventually pass to my 19-year-old daughter. Since then he has repeatedly raised the watch and seemed oddly concerned that I might not appreciate it, despite me reassuring him several times that I regard it as a privilege to have it and will of course keep it in the family.
He then started leaving messages saying he wanted to speak directly to my daughter about the watch. She eventually called him, after I made it clear that it was totally her choice.
The first thing he apparently asked her was, “Is your mother in earshot?” When she said no, he replied along the lines of “Good, good, good, because I don’t want to cause World War III.”
He then talked about the watch, asked about university, asked for her mobile number, and told her he could come and collect her whenever she needed. He also suggested that he could drive past our house and take her on to his house in another village instead.
She found the conversation odd enough that she has now blocked his number. My adult son has done the same.
I’m not suggesting my uncle is necessarily dangerous. He is extremely old, bereaved, perhaps lonely, and may simply have poor boundaries or be socially inappropriate. But the accumulation of things has made me uneasy, and I no longer want to visit him without my husband. I also don’t want my daughter to feel any obligation to maintain direct contact with him.
AIBU to think this is a sensible boundary, rather than cruel or paranoid given his age