Posted before about difficult relationship with PILs over many years, which has resulted in my going NC with them.
This means that they have not seen our DS in almost five years, since he was 21 months old.
And DH sees them very rarely. He would like a better relationship with them but he knows from past experience that it's never going to happen. He's spent all his life being told that he cannot upset his mother or she will have a mental breakdown.
They've had more 'second' chances than they have ever deserved. They are too set in their ways, can't see that they've done anything wrong, and take no responsibility for their actions.
In order not to drip feed, just some of the incidents that led to my cutting contact were:
Years of manipulation, tears and tantrums if they were not getting their own way, DH being treated like a naughty child, events being re-written to suit their own warped version of events.
Too much to really list here, I haven't even covered the half of it, but the worst of it is as follows.
Finally came to a head after we lost two babies in the space of eleven months. Three days after we lost our first child, MIL was asking me if it still hurts to give birth if your baby is dead. When we lost our premature daughter, who was perfect in every way, just very small, MIL asked if she was born with all of her face. She threw her photographs in a box of rubbish, they have tampered with our children's grave. She was vile and cruel at every opportunity and I ended up ill and depressed because of her. She made the worst time of our lives even worse, mainly whenever she could get me alone to say and do the worst of it.
When DS was about nine months old MIL was sitting in a chair and as he crawled passed her she leaned forward and picked him up by his neck to lift him onto her knee, then told DH I was lying about that.
They finally disowned DH at Christmas in 2010 when we went to visit his sister for two hours, because they thought we should have gone to visit them instead. This visit provoked a whole evening of abusive phone calls, during which they complained about the Christmas presents we gave to them, called me names, told DH he was a tiny part of their lives that was over now, and generally just ranted and raved about what terrible, selfish people we are.
That was the last time I saw them. That Christmas was meant to be trying to rebuild our relationship, we'd been to them for Christmas dinner as a peacemaking effort, but FIL didn't speak to me for the entire time we were in their house. Then a couple of days later when we visited his sister, all hell broke lose.
After they disowned DH, they didn't contact him for over ten weeks, then they sent a letter blaming me for everything, there were a number of abusive telephone calls, a blackmail attempt that I had to contact the police about, and a final last ditch attempt to lie to DH about me turning up at their house with a strange man to verbally abuse them. Obviously that was not true.
They also spent several months stalking me, following me when I went out, sitting outside the house in the car just watching us, telephoning up to twenty times in an hour, lots of crying and complaining to the rest of the family if we left our house and didn't visit theirs, even if we were only going to the local shop or something. If that trip to the shop didn't include at least an hour long visit to them they were offended and angry.
We moved house to escape all this, but as recently as this summer they were parking outside the new house watching for us, under the guise of bringing presents to try and 'encourage' us to talk to them.
Anyway, that was it for me. I cut contact and refused to allow them to see DS, because I couldn't trust them to see him without me after the picking him up by his neck.
DH still saw them occasionally, which was his choice. It was more than I would have liked, and less than they would have liked, and he said they were miserable when he did visit, so nobody was really happy with this.
In December 2011 they told DH his brother had a hereditary blood disorder which might kill him, or mean he spent his life on medication.
They wouldn't tell us what that hereditary disorder was called, and although we were worried for BIL, we were also worried that DH and his other siblings might have the disease, that DS might have it, and that the disease was the reason we lost one of our children. Our first son was an unexplained stillbirth, something which also happened to DH's cousin's first child, so the hereditary disorder could have explained both losses.
It was a lie. PIL's made it up, partly to explain why BIL was in hospital (accidental overdose of amphetamines and alcohol) and partly because they wanted to do something spiteful to us at Christmas because we hadn't been to see them.
By the time we found that out, we'd got DS booked in for blood tests because we were scared that after losing our first two children, we might have to face losing him as well.
We were terrified, it ruined Christmas and New Year, which is what PILs wanted, and DS could have been subjected to unnecessary tests for no reason. The relief we felt when we found out it was all a lie didn't make up for the stress of having worried about it for weeks. That one lie was a bigger cruelty than anything else that went on before.
Anyway, the point of this post is that now DH has stopped visiting them. He doesn't want to go, he says they are never happy to see him. All they do is complain about me and cry, and it upsets him, and they argue because he sticks up for me, and it's not worth it.
MIL seems to have realised DH isn't calling much or visiting at all, and as usual she's decided that this is my fault.
She's started to send him messages begging him to call her, usually managing to have a dig at me, and this week has told DH that he can call her in secret and it will be just between the two of them. Nobody needs to know and that way he won't have any trouble caused for him. I'm assuming she means by me.
The worst of it is, he works away and she contacts him when she knows he's at least 200 miles away from home. I don't know how she thinks I could know about him calling her or stop him from that far away. Or why she think's I'd want to.
I've always left his contact with them up to him, and have only asked that he doesn't talk about me or pass on any pictures of DS (because they use them to cause trouble for us when they get them).
They are not fit to be his grandparents, they've put him at risk of harm on more than one occasion by their behaviour and their lies. I don't want them getting hold of photographs they can use to pretend they give a damn about DS. If they could make us think he might have a hereditary disease that could kill him, knowing the hell we went through grieving for his brother and sister, they are capable of anything and not fit to be near him or have his photograph.
But I've never stopped DH from replying to their calls or messages if he wants to, just asked that he keeps me and DS out of it.
I'm not sure why I'm posting really, except that I am unhappy she wants DH to lie to me, or at least keep a secret from me, for her benefit. Things like this are like a poison to a relationship and I don't like it. They've tried to split us up so many times now, that anything like this sets me on edge. They don't think how DS might feel if we split up, what his life might be like, and they don't care.
I also find it a bit creepy. She's behaving like a mistress, not a mother, wanting secret texts and messages behind my back.
I don't expect him to tell me every time he sends her a message, but that fact that she's made a point of asking him not to tell me sets me on edge. That's what bothers me. If I found out he'd sent a message and not told me, I wouldn't mind, but because she's actually asking him to keep them secret from me is weird and that's the bit bothering me.
She even finished the last message by telling him to delete it so I wouldn't find it and cause trouble for them.
He did tell me, and I love him for being so supportive of me in the face of all the problems they have caused for us, but I think she just keeps finding new lines to cross.
I suppose I'm asking if this would bother anybody else, the "it can be between us, our secret" bit.
As I said, if he sent a message because he wanted to, and didn't think to mention it to me, I wouldn't care if I found out.
But I do care that he's been specifically asked to keep their messages secret and the implication that it's because I am somehow preventing him from replying and that I would cause trouble for him if I found out.
It's not true, it's another made up nonsense from her, but I know she's telling everyone all about how he has to call her in secret because of his awful wife, and it's bothering me because it's not true.