AIBU to go no contact after in-laws booked holiday during dad’s illness?

[OneAquaHare]

Hi, I’d like some advice please as I have repeatedly been told for the past year that I am wrong and am being completely unreasonable about this and that nobody will think like me about this.

One important piece of background info about me: my mum died in an accident when I was 22. I was already in a relationship with my now husband when this happened, and I lived at his parents’ house in the aftermath, so all 3 of them witnessed the trauma I endured.

To the present issue. Last summer, my dad had a failed open heart surgery. He was in intensive care, in and out of a coma, for 3 months. He had to be resuscitated more than once. He had multiple procedures, developed sepsis and was put on dialysis because of organ failure. All of this happened at the opposite end of the country from me, so for the majority of it I was just waiting for updates to arrive on my phone from my sister or stepmum. He died in September 2025.

During August 2025, my parents-in-law approached my husband and told him they wanted to take us and and our children on a safari holiday in 2026. My husband told them he would have to talk to me about it, but because of my dad’s condition they would have to wait because I was in no fit state to have that conversation at that time. A couple of days later my in-laws booked the holiday for us anyway, without me or my husband consenting to it or even discussing anything further with them like possible dates/time off work/etc.

I said me and the kids wouldn’t be going because I believe it was a massive violation of boundaries and extremely manipulative and controlling to book a holiday for someone else’s minor children without even discussing it with them and obtaining their consent, and then try to guilt trip them into agreeing to it when you know they are in a situation that is already actively hurting them and traumatising them. My husband disagreed because it’s a holiday we could never afford ourselves and he wanted to keep his parents happy and go on it.

So the final days of my dad’s life were taken up by butting heads with my husband about a situation that I believe his parents were completely wrong to ever put us in, and that he should be putting a stop to and protecting me from so I could have space to grieve my dad, whilst he focused solely on how generous his parents were being and how it was an amazing opportunity for our kids. And it continued after my dad died. His parents refused to cancel the booking for 2 months after my dad died. My husband continued to try to persuade me to change my mind - I was even told I needed to give his parents a final answer about it (when I had already repeatedly said no for weeks) whilst I was still away from home for my dad’s funeral.

I have never felt so abandoned, let down and alone. I have repeatedly told my husband this but I get told that he was put in a difficult position and I have repeatedly been blamed for putting him in the middle. He hasn’t had any kind of confrontation or showdown with his parents about their behaviour - all 3 of them have repeatedly blamed me in various ways and made me saying no about something being wrong with me. He still denies, defends and minimises what he and his parents did. His parents haven’t apologised to me, and he has repeatedly told me not to expect an apology from them, that he won’t ask for one for me (I haven’t told him I expect that from him), and last night I was told that he doesn’t think his therapist even thinks I deserve an apology from his parents.

I have been no contact with his parents since last year, because the entire situation is so traumatising I have felt like I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown at times. However I haven’t given him an ultimatum about his parents, or stopped him or the children from seeing them. For my own mental wellbeing I just can’t be around them when neither they nor my husband will acknowledge the harm their behaviour has caused, and my husband will continue to completely fail to protect me from his parents’ behaviour. However last night, he gave me the ultimatum that me being no contact with his parents was unacceptable to him and that it will cost me our marriage if it continues. And I was again told that I was wrong if I thought other people would think like me about the situation, and that my therapist only agrees with me because it’s their job to make me feel better.

So, am I really wrong about this and being completely unreasonable?

Never understand why people come on here to comment this pathetic line.

Having boundaries and being upset and disrespect is not being “hard work”.

Just seems like total misogynistic bullshit. A way to tell women we’re “too much” when we react to being treated poorly.

You have a lot of hurt and pain. I think you are directing it in the wrong direction.
I understand that your heart is broken by grief.
It might have nice to go away. They didn’t go about it the right way. I think they had good intentions, they also should have cancelled once they knew how you were feeling.

Has reading comprehension disappeared?? Jeez. OP, I am so sorry you’ve gone through all that, I hope you find some peace for yourself soon.
Have a long hard think about spending any more time with your utter pathetic weasel of a husband.

As someone else said, this is about so much more than the holiday, but this is only apparent if you read all the OP's replies.

I am so sorry for your losses.

YANBU.

Until and unless your dh can acknowledge that, I think there is a real problem.

OP how important is it that you are “right”.l?

is it so important that you will blow up your extended family and now immediate family over it?

please try to soften your heart to your ILs and husband - the festering anger has only harmed you & you are stuck in a very miserable place and in danger of losing more.

You have too much to lose and you are not making rational decisions.

I can understand the grief (having had strangely similar experiences and bumbling insensitive, selfish , self absorbed but ultimately loving ILs). Some of their behaviours are so typical of ageing parents which sadly like myself you’ll not get to experience with your own parents,

You can’t change them but you can change your own responses and mature how you handle confronting discomfort a bit and not impulsively react to everything.

Frankly your Dad was not their family so YABU about them contacting him over logistics - even if it was your darkest hour - the way you have viewed this is self absorbed too which is forgivable given the circs- DH could have protected you better but I can also see how the tension is unbearable for him with the massive over reaction & an ultimatum maybe is what you needed to course correct.

Ball is in your court - people advising you that it’s purely a DH problem are not doing you any favours. NC over your hurt feelings was wildly excessive and harmed the people around you which you don’t seem to have much insight about.
Good luck with it - wishing you courage to put this conflict behind you and move on in peace.

Op I've read a few of other people's posts (who are being massively judgemental) and all of yours. Your husband's parents are clearly narcissistic and entitled and have been enabled to carry on this way by their enormous wealth. The fact that they choose to dump all this on you at the time of your father's death clearly shows that they must be the centre of attention at all times. You say you're in therapy, good! Make sure you are completely and unflinchingly honest with your therapist and pay more attention to your therapist than any of us here or your husband (who will have his own reasons for trying to placate a manipulative mother and may not be telling his therapist the full story).

I agree with you, OP. Talking about a holiday the following year when your dad was in ICU was unbelievably insensitive and they were very much focusing on the wrong things at that time. Them looking forward to holidays and trying to rope your family in while you were going through hell is so ignorant. And they just went ahead and booked it, as if that was of any interest to you in the aftermath of your Dad passing away. They (them and your husband) are now trying to steamroller you into accepting and pretending that didnt happen.

Sad to say, I don't think this issue is fixable with DH. His priority should be you. He is more of a son than a husband. You can hardly make up with them all because otherwise he is dictating the marriage is over.

Sorry for you, OP.

YANBU. I’m so sorry for the loss of your dad OP.

What do you want to tell your husband? Can you talk this through in joint counselling?

This is wrong on so many levels. She asked for time - people with a 20 year relationship with her couldn’t postpone booking a holiday when she told them she couldn’t make a decision right then. Her husband has long standing history of not supporting her against his parents - a recipe for disaster in a relationship. OP doesn’t need to soften. The other people here need to acknowledge the hurt it’s caused. Yes it’s drastic it’s led to Nc. But solely blaming OP for that is a horrible thing to do.

OP I'm really surprised so many people are not seeing the insane and bizarre boundary violation that your husband, and his parents, have perpetrated here and why so many people are saying this is some kind of projected grief response. People probably just want to save your marriage. If anything, their timing might be a displaced emotional response on their part to seeing you in pain and orphaned - a strange and vastly inappropriate attempt to connect with you in a surface/fun way since they are emotionally immature (as seems undeniable) and therefore unable to connect with you in a real way in your grief. Certainly the timing is too significant to completely ignore.

As for the rest of it - it's all completely inappropriate from your husband and his parents.

1. inappropriate to make the final days of your Dad's life about them not you
2. inappropriate not to simply accept your first no but to continue to harass
3. inappropriate to continue to push on your boundaries by saying you're not allowed to distance yourself from them

You are not being treated as a person here, a person with the right to dignity, privacy and autonomy. They are so incensed because you are asserting your personhood, and your role in the family system is to be non-person.

It sounds like your relationship might have been imbalanced from the very beginning, when you lived with them (instead for example with members of your own family) when your mother died. Ultimately they see you as a kind of unresourced foundling, even a charity case, who is just supposed to accept whatever terms are on offer.

I am sure this is not the only example of this attitude from them. I'm really sorry you've been going through this.

The issue of course is your husband, not them. It's worth noting that his first, instinctive reaction was good - don't book the holiday until we've had a chance to look at it, and I'm not going to bother her with that off topic admin now. But then his own conditioning and patterning won over and he has taken up his parents' part wholesale. This obviously is the issue.

The solution to your boundaries being infringed is not further infringement of your boundaries.

Honestly it sounds like you need couples counselling immediately, and unless your husband can get to the bottom of why he is pushing you around like this, the prognosis may not be great.

Divorce is terrible for children, so you might decide to stick it out until they're older.

You are in a real bind here. It's not of your making, except that you must have been turning a blindish eye to it, probably for the sake of harmony, for decades. I'm really sorry and sending you solidarity.

Jesus, they did something nice, it wasn’t booked for the following month after dad died. Sorry you sound hard work

I went to Africa last year with my DH and young adult kids. It was absolutely amazing and the kids loved it.

BUT - I had wanted to take them for years, and hadn’t done previously because I wasn’t sure if it was right for DD - she was concerned about the jabs, about the possibility of spiders, about the long drives. We had to have a really good discussion with her and go through all the detail before we decided it was the right trip for us.

I simply cannot imagine doing that at the same time my dad was dying, and I also can’t imagine my DH allowing me to be put under pressure to make a decision. It’s not like a holiday in the Canaries, it’s an actual expedition.

You obviously have an IL problem, but worse than that you have a DH problem. He does not have your back, and he should do.

YANBU.

And you sound like you are just here to say something nasty.

A ridiculous response in light of OP’s posts.

Huh?
Would you like it if someone booked you on a holiday with no regard about your feelings, personal situation (a dying parent!) or even consideration for your A/L??!!!
You must be bonkers.
OP, I would find this intrusive if they booked without waiting for my answer and details, let alone if I were going through something as traumatic as you describe.
They are all disrespecting you MASSIVELY and very selfish! I'd take your husband's ultimatum as a Blessong in disguise and part ways to be honest, if you are in a position to do so. What awful people.

Something doesn't need to be "harming your mental health" for you to have a boundary about it. Also people are very sensitive to the concept of "no contact" and the vote could be in part because you characterised your boundary this way in how you phrased the question. I think you simply are putting up boundary commensurate with how impolite, self-centred and immature they have chosen to be. Try not to use therapy language for it all 🌷as it's unnecessary, can rankle people ("hard work") and takes the heat off your husband and his PIL and puts it onto you.

This clearly isn't a case of 'do you want to be right or do you want a relationship with your relatives?' It's a case of a woman facing one of the hardest trials of her life - one of the times even women should feel entitled to prioritize themselves and their families of origin - and being constantly harangued about probably the furthest thing on her mind when facing a loss of this magnitude. It tells her something about their relationship with her, and about the fact that the world is all about them when someone else temporarily needed and deserved just a little consideration and space. OP wasn't asking much, after all. To suggest that is 'self absoption' is shockingly cold and myopic.

It shows how little they actually care for her or what she is going through. It actually shows a marked degree of callousness. No, her father is 'not their family' but OP is their DiL and she deserved better treatment than continual pressure at the time she least needed it.

This new understanding has naturally affected her and the way she thinks about that relationship. Now she's received an ultimatum from her husband that she continue seeing them or risk her marriage as well. No wonder the poor woman feels so let down. The least she is entitled to expect is some space as she comes to terms with this, yet all she's receiving is pressure from all sides. Issuing ultimata is low in any circumstances, but no more so than in a situation like this.

Women don't have to just suck it up and get on with it when they are treated badly, and are as entitled to draw boundaries as others. Lest we forget, we are full humans. As to the protestations that she's sacrificing her marriage: OP is not blowing up the marriage: the one doing that is the one issuing the ultimatum. You never, ever do that unless you are prepared to accept a result you don't want. The way this is being framed sounds suspiciously like a variation on the theme of 'look at what she made him do'.

And you suggest this is a 'her' problem?

I dunno. As much as it's weird to go ahead and book a holiday without checking dates, it isn’t exactly the behaviour of monsters.

I also think refusing to even discuss a holiday to take place in the year after a bereavement is quite extreme.

If my husband went no contact with my parents over this I think it'd create huge issues in our marriage.

If I book tickets/trips for other adults I make sure it’s somewhere they all want to go to.
If they are interested I suggest dates.
Only after that would I book anything.

I don’t book tickets, trips and certainly not holidays for other adults and assume they want it - do you?

look up narcissistic families. Those who dont know what its like cant spot it, but this all sounded familiar to me, before you posted your latest up date. This won’t ever change and you will never get an apology. You’re expected to take the blows to the heart silently and keep quiet.

I’m so sorry about your DF, it sounds like there was a pretty traumatic period when he was seriously ill and I can’t imagine how anyone could think there was any urgency to book a holiday during that time. Anyone with any decency would be able to wait and allow you space to deal with that. In addition, it was simply rude to book without proper discussion, most people would be pretty fed up if other people decided what holidays they would take, even if it’s an amazing opportunity! You just don’t do that in my world.

To then continue moaning about the OP turning it down, for months, is ridiculous. Not only ridiculous, but unkind given Op was grieving.

I think you have your DH’s motivations sussed, I don’t know whether he is likely to go through with his ultimatum but I think he has damaged your marriage irreparably. I don’t know how you can come back from this.

For yourself, I would think you might need a period of separation from your DH. It sounds like you’re teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown due to a combination of grief and stress from this episode. It has presumably been around a year (?) since this started and to still be talking about it is awful. What does your therapist advise?

Your grief for your DF will lessen over time but without any apology or even the decency to let it go and let you get on with your life in your own way, I’m not sure your relationship can improve. Do you really want to stay married to your DH?

It does sound like a smaller thing has been blown up out of all proportion but I feel that it’s your DH and in-laws who have done this. Why couldn’t they just let it go? What was the big deal?

I lost both parents as a young adult and had people who said or did odd things, but always with good intentions or at least not bad ones. Sometimes you do have to move on mentally and forgive without any apologies, just because it takes too much energy to do anything else. But none of those people repeatedly nagged about something like this. I think this is the most damaging thing.

I would honestly be seriously considering leaving the marriage.

Your own mental health is the most important thing right now. Look after yourself 💐

@Granville82 has summed it up perfectly:

You are not being treated as a person here, a person with the right to dignity, privacy and autonomy. They are so incensed because you are asserting your personhood, and your role in the family system is to be non-person.
It sounds like your relationship might have been imbalanced from the very beginning, when you lived with them (instead for example with members of your own family) when your mother died. Ultimately they see you as a kind of unresourced foundling, even a charity case, who is just supposed to accept whatever terms are on offer.

It's not a question of 'being right' per se, it's a question of being able to have any relationship with the PILs at all. If they don't apologize, then the family narrative will be set that the OP was unreasonable, overreacted in her grief and was the 'black sheep' who has now realised her error in challenging the supremacy of MIL and has returned to the fold. That's not a narrative I could stomach tbh.

My brain is fried after wrangling stroppy teens all so I'm grateful for articulate people like @SerafinasGoose who can put into words what I just can't this evening.

The gaslighting on here is maddening.

Edited for spag. Brain really is fried.

I agree. I also think that she and her DH need to separate and go to couple's counselling. Living apart will give both of them time to think and feel without being crowded by the other.