Please help me. I genuinely want to know if this can be fixed, I'd love advice perhaps you've been the MIL or the DIL and things got better how?
I've been dating my partner for 1 year and 3 months
During this time, his mum has asked me one question, and that was what I did for a living. Excluding this, she has never attempted to start a conversation with me
The first 3 months I tried incredibly hard, I bought a crochet kit and I thought we could bond over it as she loves crotchet, unfortunately when I tried to ask her questions and get involved she began responding to my BF and ignoring me
I tried a few times, and I found it very rejecting, and I stopped.
I tried once more with gardening, but again, I got the same response.
After this, I was pretty upset. I felt she didn't like me and was potentially jealous. I was with her son [he is an only child], so I gave up. I would instead visit and simply watch TV. She made 0 effort with me, so I did the same.
It's been 1 year, and it's bothering me, we are geting married next summer and we want kids in 2 years time - and right now she would have very limited access to her grand child if her behaviour continued - I'm certainly not the type of person that would simply accept a poor relationship with her and then throw my kids at her, that's never going to happen and BF has agreed with it
I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with this women, if she has social anxiety, perhaps autism [long stretch] or if she's just a bitch.
I find it difficult as I'm 34, I was married for 9 years and my ex MIL was a reasonable women, we got along, she was welcoming from the first moment I met her, my mum and step mum have always been welcoming to my partner
My BF solution is to reduced contact with his mother [he already went weekly to fortnight and now wants to do once a month] as he's embarrassed which I don't think is the right thing to do yet - I'd certainly drop contact to once a month in 12 months time to prepare to have kids and get her use to the fact she won't have access to them bar that once a month - but I'm hoping it won't come to this
She does sometimes avoid eye contact with me. Sometimes, I feel she completely ignores my existence in the room, she doesn't do this with anyone else so I feel she's playing a game or she's nervous
How do we deal with this? My BF already spoke to her about it and she was nice to me for one day [personality transplant] and the following visit she went back to normal