MIL's behaviour, new baby

[MrsPickwick]

Hi. I'm not sure what to do about this or whether I'm overreacting and would appreciate some objective viewpoints.

DH and I have just returned from visiting his family. I'm six months pregnant with our first (and what will be his parents' sixth grandchild). It was quite a fraught / tense trip, because of MIL's controlling behaviour, but one thing in particular she did really disturbed me and upset us both.

We were briefly looking around an old church with DH's parents. MIL is quite religious, the rest of us are not. She knows our views on religion and is very aware that we don't want it being pushed on our child.

In the church, she suddenly grabbed me from behind, and held me while drawing the sign of the cross in holy water over my bump and saying 'god bless this baby'. I was completely caught off guard and couldn't stop her. I'm shocked that she would think it acceptable to do that to me against my will, and we now fear that if she's given unsupervised access to our baby a secret baptism will be performed.

There's background here - controlling, unpredictable behaviour that makes her stressful to be around, but DH and I now feel that we should think about how we can protect our kid from this sort of thing.

It's not even about the religion: it's the complete disregard for our feelings and for my bodily autonomy. I actually feel violated (it's so much worse than your average bump bothering). She attacked me from behind! DH and I both asked wtf she thought she was doing. At first she laughed it off and grabbed my belly again, then she said she 'thought we were Christian'. (Our dinner table discussions with her about our atheism and beliefs go back ten years: she was lying).

We already have some problems with how she and FIL relate to / talk about some of their other grandchildren, as an aside. They bitch about them openly, in front of them, and call them names, and make unfair comparisons with their other grandchildren). We're now considering what to do. We don't want her to come when the baby is born - I can imagine her grabbing him out of my arms whenever she feels like it, dousing him in holy water, shouting if we do something 'wrong', etc etc. FIL is afraid of her and no help at all here. What to do?

(She is capable of behaving well and can be very nice, as well, and is extremely emotionally invested in her family and grandchildren, obviously).

We're not entirely off the hook of course - we have the melodrama over the lack of immediate invitation to see the new baby to look forward to, and the massive fall out we can expect from that. Yay! But for now, deep breaths.

She doesn't need to know when you go into labour, and therefore doesn't need to be told immediately when the baby is born, so you should be able to get a few days' grace there. Just don't post anything on social media.

As is often remarked, over on Gransnet there are interminable threads ("cut out of their lives pt 49324") in which women you would cross the M6 to avoid complain that their evil children won't let them see their angelic grandchildren, when even a moment's reading shows you that the people complaining are raging narcissists. Endlessly, tediously, they don't just want to see their grandchildren, they want their evil children to admit that they were wrong in every way and come crawling back begging forgiveness. They deny that problems are problems because they don't think they are problems, so they won't listen to their children until their children say "I was wrong about everything". Meanwhile, in the child's house, they're happily getting on with their lives without the crazy madpeople demanding 24x7 pandering.

www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html

Just taking the baptism thing in isolation - I'd be tempted to let her get on with it if it's true that anyone who believes can do it.

I've got no time for religion or any other type of woo so to me it would be the same as her saying a prayer to the Chief Unicorn and dabbing a bit of Fairy Water on the baby; ie batshit but harmless.

Mrs P,

re your comment:-
"And yes, Neckguard, the absence of insight is baffling, isn't it. I often wonder how it's possible to reach late adulthood and remain so un-self-aware".

Its because your MIL is dysfunctional and a narcissist. This is what such disordered people are like.

Would second the suggestion to keep off all social media. You do not need that anyway.

I would not have personally replied to her poisonous missive; to such people like his mother the response is the reward. The response is what they want and your H has given her that.

You can bet your bottom dollar that she will now bother you even more because her son's response (and no matter how nicely its been written she will see it as an attack on her and will respond in kind) as an "in". Not replying is a powerful response in its own right.

Ultimately you as a family unit will need to be in no contact with his parents. They were not good parents to your H and they will not be ideal as grandparents figures either. Such disordered people tend to over value or under value the relationship with the grandchild. Her H is really her hatchet man as well as enabler here and cannot be at all relied upon either. Such weak men as well often need someone like MIL to also idolise.

Neckguard your post completely resonates with me. I'm over 3 years NC with a parent who continues to do the poor me I don't see my grandchildren act while minimising their violence and abuse towards me. They only make half hearted attempts to see the GC by emailing all family members usually around an occasion (in order to make it about them).

Sorry for hijack.

OP what your MIL did was batshit. When your baby arrives I suggest your ILs see him/her at your place. Obv you won't be leaving your child with them. I tend to agree with PP that religious batshittery is on the whole harmless to a teeny child who won't understand anyway.

Thank you all. At this of sounding like I'm the crazy one here after all, I just had the first panic attack of my pregnancy, and am starting to worry about what all this is doing to my baby.

Long story short, my mother is staying with us this week - she cat sat for us while we were away visiting PILs. As I said my family is dysfunctional too, but I have grown a carapace that allows me to be around her for fixed periods of time. She has Paranoid Personality Disorder among other things, which made my childhood and teens (and twenties for that matter) difficult. I have been NC with her before but don't feel that is the right thing for me atm.

She just said something very minor, but from the paranoid place, and I slammed doors and started hyperventilating. It's because any reminder of her disorder, however small, brings a lifetime's worth of bad shit flooding back to me. In the context of the current situation with MIL, I just snapped. All my coping mechanisms - both healthy and unhealthy - are unavailable to me during pregnancy, so I really badly need to be alone. It's funny how I was incredibly happy, calm and relaxed throughout the pregnancy, then I see family and whoops, the baby gets his first experience of panic attacks, stress and crying The poor mite must wonder what's hit him.

*at the risk of sounding like I'm the crazy one, that should say

Religion does funny things to some people as demonstrated by the number of rude 'what's the problem?' Type replies here. mrspickwick you have my sympathy. I worried about this during my first pregnancy (if I had to guess I'd wonder if you've got an Irish Catholic on your hands 😉). My MIL did baptise 2 of her grandchildren in her garden with some of her store cupboard of holy water. I had only just met my dh at the time and it seemed a funny story then but once I was pregnant it really started to weigh on me. Not because I worry about the significance of chucking a bit of water at them but the implication of lack of respect for the parents in making big decisions. Thankfully she is in other ways nice, and normal. Unfortunately the Catholic church here in Ireland have a massive hold on its congregation such that they believe literally in purgatory. We put our feet down and were quite clear our children weren't being baptised but still she has never had them alone. She only sounds about a quarter as batshit as yours though.