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How to deal with In-laws
Hi All,
I'm a lurker here, but needed to vent/get some prospective on this... Maybe I will phrase like a question.. How do you all deal with your in-laws and trying to get used to a family dynamic that is different from what you are used to?
My fiance's mother and I can get along very well. We are planning our wedding for this November and I am doing my best to include her (She complained to me that her step-son's now wife didn't include her in their plans), so I have made sure to discuss things with her, we are DIY a lot of things and she asked to help with that, so I said yes, of course..
Things are going fairly smoothly on that front, but all in all she can be kind of manipulative. Tries to guilt us (more me than him because he won't put up with it from her) into visiting. We live in a large city and she moved last year from 5 minutes away from us to a different part of the county almost an hour away and we haven't been "hanging out" as much lately. It was easy before to swing by for a few minutes, an hour, etc. but now she wants us to come up for dinner, will give us a time and dinner isn't actually for 4 more hours. We are both very busy and can't be spending the whole day up there every weekend or every other weekend.
This weekend, for example, we are having a "birthday dinner" for her and FI's sister.. the sister's bday was the end of march and I had them over for dinner 2 days before that to celebrate, her birthday was easter weekend. Easter we spent about an hour with my family and then drove the hour to her place to have dinner and give her her present, etc. So flash forward 4 weeks and we are having a birthday dinner. She sends me a message telling me she hopes we don't plan on "dine and dashing (I dont' think she knows the meaning correctly) because she doesn't get to see us enough.
I am fine making the drive to go up there for dinner, but I don't particularly like her trying to guilt me about us not spending enough time. FI was just there last week, and we had dinner with them two weekends in a row three weeks before. This is also not a case of favoring my family, we actually see them less than his family and they are fine with that. I talk to/txt/IM both my mother and his a couple of times a week and he makes it a point to call her at least once a week to chit chat. Oh, and he is definitely with me on this.. He would actually prefer to see his mother even less than we do, her invites and guilt trips just usually get directed towards me and I guess I am having a hard time saying no. I don't want to get on her bad side, you know?
Ok.. Vent over. Sorry its so long... I know I need to just suck it up and ignore her guilt trips and snarky comments, I was just wondering if anyone had any other advise.
Thanks!
Re: How to deal with In-laws
She uses the guilt trips and the manipulation because it works. She is no different than a child throwing a tantrum in the middle of the candy aisle. She too behaves this way because it gets her what she wants. Send her the message that the guilt trips won't work. You can even say that the more she guilt trips, the less you enjoy your time with her.
Listen, there is nothing wrong with declining an invitation and there is nothing wrong with leaving early if you are hungry and dinner isn't ready. Stop bending over backwards to make her happy, because, trust me, she never will be. She will always find fault in how you spend your time. So you might as well do what you want.
FWIW, he sorta have somewhat of the same problem when we visit my ILs. We can't see them as much as we or they would like; however, they live halfway across the country and it isn't feasible for us to always go out to visit them and them never coming to see us. Anyways, when we do go out there, we are treated like a commodity and we do not like it. It is always a fight over which family we spend time with and God forbid we spend some time actually doing some siteseeing.
On our last visit my husband had enough and put his foot down when his mom and sister gave us a hard time for doing some siteseeing. He pretty said that this is our vacation too and we can spend it however we please. If they continued to give us a hard time about it, then we would choose to spend less time with them. They didn't like hearing that, not at all. But you know what, the world didn't end and we got to do what we wanted.
Thanks everyone! I know I just need to make a stand. I am definitely too much of a people pleaser and it is something I have been working on. It is a lot easier to stand up to people who you are close with and have a better idea of how they will react. :-) I will definitely let her know that the guilt trips are not going to work anymore and actually have an adverse effect.
Thanks again!
Yea, we do invite her over from time to time, I definitely don't want a totally open invitation.. I could see that turning against me. LOL. My fiance is definitely willing to handle his Mom if I need him to.. We will see how the dinner goes tomorrow when we show up at the restaurant instead of going to her house early and leave after dinner... I personally feel a couple of hours at a time is plenty of time.. It's not like we have a whole lot to catch up on since we keep in touch via phone and internet all the time. Most of the time when we meet up at one of our houses we just end up watching movies.... and that is fine and good, but.. I will be DD for the night and I'm not sure I want to spend the whole night watching movies after dinner when I could be in some comfy PJs sipping a glass of wine at home! LOL So if she tries to give us grief over that, I think I will have my fiance say something.
Thanks again!!
I don't understand the birthday theme. One was two months ago, the other last month, and you celebrated them both - so, what is this? Are you supposed to bring more presents??
Doesn't this just seem like a blanant demand for attention? And that line about "don't dine and dash" is a warning. Don't leave -or what? What's the threat? Will she be mad, sad, angry with you?? What?
I think you have accepted a highly manipulative invitation and she's put you on notice that you 'need' to give her boatloads of attention and lots of time. You and your FI have to sit down, really talk about what's going on and pop this bubble.
You can't be so naive as to walk into this fake "birthday" dinner and act like you're not being manipulated. Frankly, she knows that you are afraid of upsetting her and she's using it to contol you. She's not going to stop until you make her stop. FI needs to call her on this "birthday" celebration and ask, point blank, why she's calling it a birthday dinner and what she means about the 'dine and dash' comment. And shut-down any nonsense that she controls your time and can expect hours and hours at will.
Then, why don't you set-up a schedule. It seems like you already have lots of time with her, she just likes to demand more. A conversation that says "Thanks for the invite, but we will see you on May 12th and 20th, this weekend won't work." feels a lot better than. "Uhm, no, sorry." A realistic schedule REALLY helped me manage my parents expectations about when and how long I saw them. It helped ME comminicate. And don't tell you why you can't come - less information to her, the better.
It's not necessarily my responsibility... we had agreed to this birthday dinner back before the birthdays. But while waiting on a time and place to be set, his mother and sister will both IM/text me... I try to use the "oh, I will see what FI has planned" line, but if one of them asks me if I/we want to ____fill in the blank, I get put on the spot.
I did talk to FI about it and he is going to have a talk with his mom about pushing so hard, so hopefully that will help. If not, I have told him that I may start declining and let him go alone to some of this. I want to try to have a good relationship with his family... His immediate family has never done well with their extended family (I think in part to the mom and dad's personalities/relationships with their siblings) and I'd like to break that chain a little while still avoiding stressing myself out too much.
Tonights dinner went fairly well, so we will see how things go in the future..
Thanks for everyone's advise
My mother in law seems to do the same thing, although she aims it towards my husband more so than me..right now. I feel like that will change after we have been married a bit longer.
The best thing that seems to work is to just ignore the manipulative comments, and do what we can. I am a people pleaser too, so its hard when her demands arent met. She supposedly has been like this her whole life, and after she makes the comments she will apologize profusely. I doubt standing up to her will make her change, and for now ignoring snarky comments works best and keeps us out of trouble.
So I dont know if I would advise standing up to her on it..She might just get worse is my thought. Its easier to ignore and just go visit her when you want I would think
My in laws do the same thing - the exact same thing with dinners not being ready at a reasonable time. It's definitely a way for her to control you both and keep you there longer. Just try to find creative ways to take back that control... every other time you go to her house for dinner, offer to bring the food - like a casserole, stew, lasanga, whatever, anything you can pop in the oven for 20 minutes so this was you know when dinner is going to be on the table.
Do your best to not left yourself feel bad when she's laying it on. I've gotten to the point where I just flat out ignore the comments, pretend I didnt hear it and change the subject to something more pleasant right away.
Good luck!
I've learned to just let it flow... and so has a coworker of mine and it has worked well for both of us. I think this is something that your fiancee should handle since its his mom... and especially since hes all on board with you about this. I have actually found that flat telling them "Nope, we're not coming over because you're a constant guilt trip" works really well. When we were planning our wedding my MIL not only offered to have the wedding at their house (a total hell no, wouldn't even have my dog's birthday party there), but also to make my dress. My husband flat told her that I liked what I liked and that I'm not afraid to voice my opinion or have words with her if it came to it.
She acted all "oh she won't hurt my feelings, it'll be fine blah blah blah." So... he told me she had her warning, didn't heed it so for me to have at it. Its been no holds barred ever since and I think it works. For about a year we didn't go over there much because she got on my nerves so bad, but now things are starting to even out now that we've got used to eachother. She thinks I'm hateful, I think shes a pain in the ass. All is well, lol.