Extra Crazy MIL

[Puddings2108]

So long story short i live with my in laws, husband and 8 month old baby. My mil is just on a whole other level of asian mil's! A few examples of her behaviour below:

1. she is obsessed with my husband (1st born) she has to know where he is at all timrs. When we are on out way out, she has to know where we are going.she has to know everything to do with him, period. 😵‍💫

2. she has this weird obsession where you have to eat only what she cooks lol like im not allowed to cook for myself or my husband she will make all the exvuses under the sun to stop me and if i do persevere then she will poo poo it and be very vocal about how it does not taste nice. Now it would have been okay if her cooking was nice, but it isn't, it is bland, and consists of weird concoctions and it is only asian food, she cannot cook anything else. But this cooking is literally inflicted on us and she stands over yoir shoulder when you are eating and you have to say it is really delicious and make yummy noises! 🫣

3. she treats all her children (i say children loosely they are all between 31 and 45 years of age) like babies, she literally plates up their food for them, decides what they eat, when they eat, how they eat. If they try to assert themselves, she will shout them into submission, and she is looooud. She even insists on feeding the 31 year old with her own hands 🤢

4. so obviously she has lots to say about how we parent the baby. When we started weaning him i chose to go down the baby led weaning route and to start with veg, fruit and salads (my mil and the whole family have a really bad diet, no veg, no salads, they pretty much only eat asian food and even then limited dishes) well she has to put her tuppence worth in at every meal the baby has, comments such as:

Oh poor baby, its not nice is it, i will feed you yummy delicious things.
How is he meant to eat that, there is no salt in it, it won't taste nice.
How is he meant to eat just vegetables.

Basically she wants me to feed the baby what she cooks ergo linked to point number 2. 😫

I really could go on and on, but someone please tell me this isn't normal, even for an asian mil!

If you made it to the end of the post, thank you!

@Hidihisew this is terrible but we do have a snack stash in our bedroom!

So the whole clan were invited round again today and they raided the fridge and ate the food that i brought. This is a regular occurence when the siblings come round they just open the fridge and help themselves to whatever they want, i find it utterly disgusting, i wouldn't go to their homes and just help myself to the contents of their fridge! They know its my shopping as before I moved in the fridge would be empty.

@Middleagedspreadisreal my parents live in Yorkshire, so the other end of the country really, i try and visit as much as i can to get away.

MIL currently has a mild cold so is literally coughing open mouthed everywhere, even when cooking 🤢 few months ago she had a mild case of DVT and we had to have the ambulance out and spend a night in A&E to be told its DVT which she then admitted to the doctor that it stopped 2 days prior to when she went to A&E, but she made DH spend the night next to her bed, like it was her last breath!

You should move to Yorkshire x It's cheaper to buy there too x

Could you look at properties slightly outside of London which would obviously be cheaper?

Giving a baby tea sounds like a 70s English mum. (My own) 😄
My grandma even put milky tea in the cat's bowl 😄

Did you not meet the family before you got married? All asian women should do their due diligence.

If you can't move out, try the Grey Rock method till she gets the message.

This isn’t culturally typical at all! I’ve had Indian in-laws for two decades almost and this is the most extreme thing I’ve ever heard, is there any chance of your husband making this madness stop?

Honest opinion, there is literally nothing you can do to change this, she’s bloody trying though. Just try to grey rock as much as you can and squirrel that money away. Get your husband to play defensive as much as he can. You really have my sympathy she sounds absolutely horrendous and batshit tbh.

My in-laws are lovely but it would have been a deal breaker to move in with them for me (DH too, he would have gone mad). I think the multigenerational thing is still often a way for people to save money, I know a few on DH’s side who lived with parents for a bit to save and then left or just stayed there. Tbf all the ones who stayed with their parents as a permanent thing (always the mans parents) are now divorced because the women got fed up and just left. Not surprised if I’m being honest,

She’s definitely on the extreme end but I’ve heard of similar. It’s not that unusual for older asian women from deeply patriarchal communities who were financially dependent on their husbands to basically develop an emotional incest type relationship with their kids and enforcing closeness with sons in particular is a way of staying relevant and in control. They often fear abandonment.

For anyone in this situation look up emotional incest and it may help you organise your thoughts around whats happening.

She does sound unhinged, but it isn't unheard of as @Bringemout says. Only thing I would say though is that you and your DH really do have a choice. You may not have enough to buy, but you could rent. While I have sympathy for your situation ( I had an ex MIL of this nature but less unhinged), whether I was starving in the gutter or not, I wouldn't have lived with her. And, while you may not have know what she was like, your DH did.

If you want to benefit (financially) from the cultural tradition of living with your in-laws, this is the (batshit) prize one has to pay. You say your brothers lived with your parents and it was fine. I suspect your sisters-in-law would have a different take on it.

Like the Outer Hebrides.

Living with the in laws for me isn't about saving money, it is a cultural thing for our society, but eventually you do move out, like i mentioned my brothers did. @toodleoothen yes im sure they would feel differently but they have all moved out now and their own admission when they compare my MIL to my mum is no way, my mum was never like that, living in close proximity has its challenges and it was that not that my mum was batshit lol.

@Bringemout OMG that is exactly it! Its like she lives hee life threw her kids and latches onto them. Funnily enough (or not funnily enough) she treats ny FIL like crap, he is literally Cinderfella, makes him do all the housework, chores etc. When she cooks, he is her sous chef, does all the chopping, washing, cleaning and she just stirs the pot lol. She controls him so much, to the point where she chooses what he eats, i kid you not, she will plate up his dinner and leave it for him and he will just heat and eat!

So i guess its not just the kids she has beaten into submission, it is her husband too. She has major issues with control, my husband recalls being force fed for much of his young life and being sick at every meal time, same with his sisters, they actually told me not to let their mum feed the baby 😯

DH does try his best to defend me and swerve the comments and the behaviour, he is much more confident in answering back and sticking up for himself and me now. He is such a lovely man and as much as i do geg angry with him for the times he doesn't speak up, its years of being beaten into submission, i guess it will take time to change. Since we had the baby, there has been significant improvement in DH as he does not want him to grow up in that environment and pick up these habits.

Todays dinner table conversation centred around how utterly amazing, beautiful and clever all her children are, this is a regular conversation by the way, its her way of putting me down, that i am not good enough for her son and her family.

She regularly also talks about how beautiful she was as a young woman, yep you heard it right, and how she is so kind and giving and just so perfect.

My mum tells me this is actually her covering up her own insecurities, i mean who in the right mind blows their own trumpet like that?!

No, obviously not, but somewhere like Essex is way cheaper than London and many places are commutable in less than an hour.

Why can’t you find a one bedroom to rent? Forget about saving up to buy a house, save your sanity and your marriage.

Absolutely @Puddings2108

You can move with baby to your own place or to your family and he can choose whether to come true. You can explain that you want to be able to cook and eat what you want it’s a basic human right of people who don’t like in prisons. Yes there will be fall out but life is too short for this.

When I was doing my hospital training there was an Indian woman who came in every day to manually evacuate her adult son’s bowels. Said he couldn’t manage it on his own. The guy was also married.

Blimey. Was he disabled?

I’m not sure, it was in 1990. From what I remember he didn’t have any obvious disabilities but i was very young and inexperienced there might have been a disability I didn’t pick up on.