MIL learned helplessness, FIL enables

[Givemeabreak974]

My in-laws aren't even 70 yet. I have known them since they were 40 years old and they acted the same even then.
My mil has some mobility, balance problems that she has had since birth. These did not hold her back in any way as a child and she was able to get a job in an office.
As soon as she met fil, they got married and she got pregnant with my husband and she finished work age 24. Has never worked since. They went on to have 3 children altogether.
My FIL does everything, for her and for the home. I mean everything. She doesn't lift a finger. She also feigns multiple illnesses. When the children were small she also made a massive deal of their illnesses , being over dramatic and saying they are allergic to things that they werent. Still does this now.
All of the family ignore this behaviour, but FIL completely enables it. We thought he just did it for an easy life but he wont have a word said against her. And he makes a lot of excuses for her and makes such a fuss of her when she is "ill".
As always happens in these situations, his health has started to fail and she is absolutely fine. He is currently in hospital having a serious operation. Will be in for a month.
This means that not only are we visiting him but are having to look after her. Shopping, cooking, cleaning , lifts to hospital (she never learned to drive). The thing is she can 100% do these things herself if she had to!!! I think we should encourage her to do so but my husband wont. She isn't even paying him for the shopping as doesn't deal with the money!!
They dont have bank cards or mobile phones , they still go to the post office to withdraw money and pay bills. It concerns me greatly of what will happen to her if FIL passes away first. The way she acts she would need to go into supported accommodation or a residential care home but there is nothing wrong with her!!! She has so much life to live but chooses not to!! Its so frustrating

What @Wetoldyousaurusis good advice. As your DH seems willing to continue FILs approach to her I would suggest that you and him sit with an impartial third party and make up some rules and boundaries. It will help going forward.
It sounds really challenging - and I say this with someone with a really difficult FIL who is controlling, manipulative. To the extent that DH has had therapy.
Try to emotionally detach as much as you can. It really helps.

Ah yes, I see your point. My mother and MIL were born in the mid 40s, so just after the second world war. Women still gave up their jobs upon marriage even into the mid 70s, maybe later - I remember my aunt doing so. By the mid 80s, things had changed though.

My ex-MIL was like this - married at 21, 'couldn't manage a job' so only ever had occasional part-time jobs, 'couldn't deal with money', etc. When I first met her she was mid-50s but would tell you she was 'retired'. The whole family colluded in saying how useless she was with money, how she couldn't be trusted with a bank account ... well, of course not, she'd never really learned how to use one!

I agree with the poster who says it might be an abusive dynamic. My ex-FIL was not a particularly 'lovely' man, so it was more obvious than if he'd been sweet and charming - but actually, looking after someone to the extent that they can't function as an adult isn't a kind thing to do.

I wonder if her excessive focus on illness was almost to do with needing to find an excuse for not being able to do things?

It may be genuinely very hard for her to change, and if your DH is willing to keep helping her a bit, that is good. But there should definitely be boundaries in place and some sense of how money is going to be spent (ie., it can't just be your money).

Word of warning - whenever my MIL gets a bit of money (which occasionally did happen as FIL got more incapacitated) she absolutely blew it. It was almost as if she wanted to show how bad she could be with it. I would want to be very careful that she wasn't going to do that and/or assume you and DH will always be there to bail her out (I mean, maybe you can afford to and don't care, but if money is at all tight, I'd be really careful about how much a financially not-capable adult might be expecting).

My MIL would have been born in 1960 and had her first child in 1981 when she was 21.

Times don't change for everyone (or, probably more accurately, there are always men who infantalise their wives).

Sounds more like a Dependent Personality Disorder than ND/social anxiety to me.

if we’re bandying differential diagnoses around!

Life was simpler in his 20s - he was living in a shared house and they had a cleaner and he was working from home in a friend’s start up.

Lots of ND people can hold it together (mask) long enough for a whirlwind romance (which becomes their special interest / hyperfocus) and they push quite quickly for marriage / family, after which point their focus abruptly shifts to some new obsessive hobby and you spend the next several years wondering what on earth changed and why they’ve checked out and what can be done to fix the relationship.

And everyone (particularly on MN!) keeps insisting it’s somehow your fault or his mother’s fault for not training him properly / having a low bar / making excuses for him / enabling him because there’s on the face of it no reason he shouldn’t be able to do the things he’s not doing, and you feel stupid and incompetent and ashamed, and no amount of nagging or explaining or teaching or couples therapy gets through to him, and you can’t leave because you know he won’t be able to look after your DC safely during his contact time.

And then your DC is diagnosed with ASD and you suddenly realise that it is completely possible to be very intellectually gifted and enormously functionally impaired at the same time, and to be sociable on the surface with huge chunks of understanding missing underneath.

And all along everyone’s been telling you it’s your fault for not managing him properly.

What an incredibly insightful post.

MIL was exactly like this. Exactly! FIL died and despite SIL living next door and being called on to help her several times a day, she went into a care home in weeks. The sorting of the estate, house, bills, funeral etc etc was left completely to SIL and DH. MIL never asks about any of it! Cruelly, DH says his mum ‘has never brought much to the party’ but I know exactly what he means. The whole situation is leaving a very poor legacy.

Yes - honestly if you’re stewing about this now, it’s going to be a lot worse months down the line when you realise that you’re hundreds if not thousands of pounds out of pocket.
See if you can get power of attorney forms for them to complete, you can frame it as taking money worries away from your DM.If you have access to their bank account then you can order online deliveries and pay for your travel costs. I mean you can do this without POA but it’s easier if you don’t have to ask for your own money to be reimbursed every time. Also means you can set up their bills to be paid by DD - mine weren’t as bad as your DM but going out to the bank etc. gave them something to do so they deliberately designed their lives to be as inefficient as possible and will try and make you follow that if you let them.

I was born in 63. No one gave up work or had children early that l knew. Including those born in 1960. We were trying to build careers. I had my first dc at 30. And l was the first to do so.

Things had changed dramatically and affected everyone l knew.

Yep.

Ds was born in 57. Full on feminist. Refused to ever get married.

I have friends born in late 50’s. All independent pioneering women. None of them ‘rely’ on a man. Some have DH’s, but they can all handle money and livingit’s not a generational thing! It’s a mindset thing.

Maybe you suggest to her that with Fil now being in not the best health she needs to pay for carers to come in as she’s so 🤒,a cleaner and apply for bank accounts and cards and to learn herself how to start doing these things.

don’t enable it op

my parents are similar but my dad does get frustrated. My mum just wants to live in her own bubble and be looked after but I frequently tell her that’s not happening forever so the sooner she starts learning how to adult the better.

your dh needs to make it clear aswell or this will be an issue

My Mum isn’t as bad as this but we didn’t realise how dependant she was on my Dad until he died. She has no desire to learn new things and wants everyone else to do things for her. It’s intensely frustrating as she has obviously suffered with anxiety her whole life but has used other people to manage it rather than deal with the problem itself.

That's all fine if you can find a way to look after yourself within the boundaries you've set. Not so fine if you instead expect other people to give their time and energy to make your unusual approach to life work.

it might be worth reading the “Let Them” theory by Mel Robbins. I doubt you will get your MIL to change, particularly when your DH sounds like he isn’t particularly behind it. People generally don’t change and their way of life sounds very old fashioned for people in their 70s. She isn’t going to embrace online banking and uber regardless of what you say, so it’s wasted time and energy trying to get her to do so.

Boundaries that I think are reasonable to say to your DH is that your family shouldn’t be out of pocket for this and - barring emergencies ( which is a whole other thread about what constitutes one) there is a time limit on the help given.

I would focus very much on getting the POA and moving everything on line, this could be pushed as taking the burden off them so that MIL and FIL don’t need to worry themselves about their finances. It might be worth checking with Age Concern if there is a volunteer driving service in operation as this could be offered to MIL to get to the hospital.

Try to reduce the impact on your DH and yourself but working more or less within their boundaries.

That sounds really hard OP.

My friend's mother is like this. He and his wife are currently living in a static in mother's garden looking after her every need. She does not tolerate any outside help/carers/motivation to be self sufficient. They have given in to her 'needs' gradually over time (through guilt and habit) and now find themselves in an awful position.

Mother does nothing and is unwilling/incapable of doing the smallest thing for herself despite the fact that she is not ill or very elderly. She has just allowed herself to return entirely to babyhood. It has always been somewhat like this but has become extreme.

All I can say is that you will never change her. All you can do is put in systems and boundaries that protect you, your family, your time and your finances. Otherwise you might end up living in a static in icy November. (Being silly there, but you know what I mean).

If DH is on board, I'd suggest he tackles it when (if it's a 'when') FIL comes out of hospital. Sit both parents down together and say that he won't be able to take over his father's role should he die first. So their choices are either to start teaching MIL how to cope now, whilst FIL is still here, or to accept that she goes into a care home if she is widowed. It's their choice.

If DH is not on board with this, then OP will have to issue a similar 'choice' to DH. "Your responsibilities to your own wife and children are xyz. If you continue to do these, you can spend all your hobby time looking after your mother if you want to. If you are considering abandoning some of your responsibilities to pander to your selfish mother, I will struggle to see you as fully invested in our marriage."

I understand some posters are saying that MIL may be ND and therefore completely blameless. I think that can be the case, but in this particular scenario isn't, because MIL previously held down a job. She obviously can function, if she wants to.

I entirely understand the frustration, but hoping to change people is always a long shot!
Best concentrate on how you can arrange for MiL to stay alive and safe without your family paying for it all.
What goes on inside your head is your business though - if you daydream about chloroforming her and sending her to the Canaries with a new bank card and passport to make her own way back, if that helps you stay sane, it's all good. We certainly won't judge here!!

I agree with all of this. Of course it’s any passing females “fault”, whether it’s mum, wife, girlfriend, sister etc

One of the things you learn as a SEN parent is that people don’t become capable of things just because you need them to be.

My being unable to sustain looking after all the daily life needs of 3 other people doesn’t mean that they will be able to ‘just learn’ or ‘step up’, much as I’d like them to.

A huge part of the problem with mental illness / neurodevelopmental disorders is that the person who needs support often has no understanding of how much help & work they are requiring from people, and will only accept it from family rather than ‘outsiders’.

And there’s still no real framework for understanding / assessing the daily life care needs of someone who is neither physically nor intellectually disabled, but has a profound nervous system disability that essentially makes them a shut in who can’t manage basic life tasks.

This.

This person sound neurodivergent to me.

Speaking as the parent of DC with ND

The elderly need care. Just treat her like that as she will be one day.

DH can arrange a day a week to taje her to the post office for cash and then to the shops where she can pay for it and then home.

once a month to the hairdressers or whatever. If she needs carers contact social work to arrange.

dont expect her to shop on the internet as she will go on a scam site and cannot be trusted to not lose all her cash!! Do it for her.

I have read all of your comments. I still stand by my opinion. As I said she was in her 40s when we first met. She was completely able to do anything she wanted to but chose not to and to rely entirely on FIL. so much so that he has now run himself into the ground and is at deaths door.
She fully expects us to step in to his place when she has never done a single thing for us. Never baby sat, has no relationship with grandchildren, never offers support or even asks how we are etc. Yes that makes me resentful and I dont want to help.
Her other children have exactly the same opinion , they are angry with FIL for allowing this to develop and are frustrated with her for acting so helpless all the time

But nd can appear capable but aren’t. They struggle with executive function, social norms and overwhelm. They often choose to retreat because their anxiety ( which they may not recognise) stops them doing stuff.

Both are to blame. You can’t change any of it. FIL is the puppeteer and probably enjoyed having this power. MIL the puppet who should have cut the strings but wouldn’t or couldn’t. It’s a very bog standard dynamic that develops all too often, especially between men and women in marriage. You have to step back from it and let your husband do his thing as the son in this performance. How much can he stand to see his mother suffer? To what extent will her children help her, despite everything? That’s for them to decide. All you can do is protect yourself and give what you feel able to the situation, without expecting to change her or get anything in return. She is not your mother. But she is a human being who needs access to food and basic care. If she can’t or won’t provide that for herself, someone has to do it, or watch her starve to death in her own filth. This is the stark reality of life. This is the choice we all have to make. This is the adult stuff they warn us about. What can you, your husband and everyone else around her live with?