As some background, we are a couple in our 30s with one young daughter. We don’t have a great deal of financial stability at this point in our lives with how expensive everything is and the unpredictable profits of my husband’s business. I have a reasonable salary but it’s not that high. We don’t yet own a home. Now let’s move on to my MIL… she and her husband are very successful scientists who live in one of the nicest apartments in their town in france. She has very expensive tastes in terms of clothes and restaurants and I can tell she has spent a lot on plastic surgery. They both drive BMWs. No judgment there, they have the right to spend their money exactly as they want, it’s just relevant to what I am about to tell you. She has always pleaded poverty to my husband and talked about how little money they have and until I pointed out how much money they spend he sort of blindly believed it, and felt a duty to ultimately give them a lot of money. He now admits she had been conditioning him to believe this from a young age (he is an only child btw). A year ago, when we had a five month old baby, she took my husband aside while we were staying with them and asked him to contribute 70 thousand euros to their remaining unpaid mortgage, again pleading poverty. My husband wanted to do it. I almost had an emotional breakdown. I also was working in a job I hated at the time, so essentially I would have been funding this. But he didn’t see it this way - it was the first profitable year in his business’s history, and he considered it his right to give them the vast majority of the profit. Fast forward a year, he didn’t do it, he is now on the same page as me and he thinks it was very morally wrong of her to do this and also to condition him in this way, and he has promised me multiple times he would never go behind my back and give them money out of his business - this became my fear after this event. We are now going through a lull and struggling more financially so there is no risk of that now, but despite his reassurances part of me does still fear he might try and do it in the future should we come into more affluent times. I have to live with this trust issue and am trying to work through it, but I just can’t believe he wanted to put her ahead of his baby in this way. We were so far from wealthy when this happened. Is this normal for a mother to behave this way? What do you think about the whole situation? The other side of this which is less important is my relationship with my MIL. She’s been trying to be really nice since this happened and she was rebuffed, but I can’t help but think no matter how nice she is she is a snake who is quite happy to take away from her own grandchild just to have a more lavish lifestyle. I don’t think I'll ever be able to stand the sight of her again.