Sorry this is a long one!
Our son is 3 and yesterday we were at my husbands parents house yesterday.
my husbands father can be kind, clever and caring but also has an extremely selfish streak. We think he is possibly autistic. He is retired and has become quite obsessed with the news, he also has always been quite into planes. He almost always brings up political news or disasters/wars (of which there are a lot right now!) and he has very different political views to us. He seems to bring things up he knows we will disagree with on purpose and seems to want to provoke us. It always ends up with me shouting and then I feel that I look like the bad one. My husband also will say his view and will tell him not to talk about it because we don’t agree, but I have always been the more fiery one as I just find it so frustrating that he brings it up to cause trouble. As our son is getting older we are trying to minimise these discussions as much as possible (we have always tried to minimise them, but it’s now getting especially important) as our son can hear and understand it all.
this may sound ridiculous but when we MIL has told him to stop bringing up politics etc but he doesn’t listen and still does it. We all try to ignore him but eventually we will snap.
Mostly nowadays MIL will visit us alone, and we don’t go to visit them both much. Our son absolutely adores him and follows him around as he gives him little toy cars often.
yesterday my husband told him to not to mention the recent Air India plane crash as we didn’t want our son to hear and be frightened/worried. There’s just no need for a child of his age to know about all the awful things going on in the world. He agreed not to.
at the end of the day we went home and we were having dinner when our son declared ‘do you know, a plane crashed?!’ And we said oh did it and he said ‘yeah, it went up and down a bit and then crashed on the ground’ we said who told you this and he said grandpa. We asked him when and he said when they were outside together. While we were at their house they did go into the garden together and it was just the two of them for a little while.
I was absolutely furious. After our son had gone to bed I asked my husband to call him and ask him why he had done it. My husband was fuming too and really upset because he’d specifically told him not to, and who says things like this to a three year old anyway?! my husband finds this all quite traumatising, growing up his dad would always do things like this which upset his mum and made her angry, and tjeu would argue a lot. He said it’s made him always want to avoid conflict. He is such a good, kind man and he does stand up to him for us, it’s not like he’s complicit at all, but it is hard for him.
when he called he spoke with his mum first, then his dad came on and made excuses and then sort of apologised half heartedly , but didn't explain why he did it especially when we said not to. I was furious and got involved in the conversation asking why he did it as he wouldn’t explain and was trying to make excuses and minimise it. He then f’d off to bed (it was 8pm) while we were still on the phone and definitely not finished. My husband advised that from now on if we visit we will have to supervise all the time and they can’t be alone together. MIL made excuses for him ‘oh you know what he’s like, he wouldn’t have done it maliciously, I tell him all the time not to say these things but he still does it…’ she then went to speak to him in the bedroom and he said he didn’t say anything about a crash, he just said ‘we’re going up and down like a plane’ when they were on a swing bench in the garden. This is completely untrue, our son told us in great detail how the planet crashed and he was obviously thinking about it enough to bring it up at dinner.
it’s hard to explain but he has a problem I’ve never come across before. He has a compulsion to do the opposite of what people tell him to do like a kind of rebellion. It’s clear to see from our point of view that he purposely told our son because we had told him not to, and made sure he did it when they were alone. He regularly does this kind of thing and tries to get out of it by lying. For example recently my husband messaged MIL to say we were thinking of taking our son to the airport the next day and did there want to meet us there. On the day, MIL messaged and said FIL had already gone out ‘but mustn’t have gone to the airport because he knows I wanted to go’. When we got there he was already there, and when my husband confronted him about leaving MIL at home he said she hadn’t explained herself very well and he thought she didn’t want to come. Which is utterly ridiculous, he knows she would always want to see her grandson and son whenever she can. But somehow the story got Changed and she thought maybe she didn’t explain herself very well and he got away with it. He gaslights and lies to get away with things. He seemed to want to go early to beat the traffic and couldn’t be bothered to wait for her to get ready. He lies like a Child would and even if he gets found out he just continues the lie.
not that it’s an excuse but he had a cruel father who would hit him and his siblings and we think he must’ve had to lie a lot to get out of trouble, but also rebelled against it by being naughty on purpose. It was so bad that his sister actually ran away.
im fuming because I feel like he’s going to get away with this again. MIL seems to believe his version. We don’t trust him, but it’s hard because they are our only family around, our son adores him and we need them for childcare. He has never stayed over at their house and now we don’t think we can ever allow it. Usually MIL comes to us when we need childcare.
this is crazy isn’t it? Does anyone else have this kind of situation? I feel so frustrated and trapped, I don’t think he will ever change and will probably get worse as he gets older.