Wanting no contact, exhausted
I originally wondered if I was just being hormonal or overreacting, but looking back, this has been years of repeated boundary violations and emotional exhaustion.
I’ve been with my husband for five years and we’ve been married for three. His mother has openly admitted she struggles with all three of her sons becoming adults, moving away, and getting married. She also struggles with alcoholism, frequently calls my husband while intoxicated to trauma dump, and has made hurtful comments to me about my own sobriety. I’ve been sober for seven years through AA, and while I understand addiction, I also know it’s not my responsibility to manage someone else’s recovery.
Please be gentle with me. My husband is transgender, and despite the boundaries he has worked incredibly hard to establish, she repeatedly ignores them. She deadnames him, makes inappropriate comments about his body and medical care in front of family, and says things like, “If I was a better mom, you wouldn’t be trans.” Watching him constantly defend his identity to his own mother has been heartbreaking.
When we were trying to conceive using a donor, she also made racist comments about choosing “white sperm” so the baby would fit into the family better. I’m Black, my husband is white, and those comments were deeply hurtful.
When my husband finally had top surgery, she insisted on coming to “help,” but instead created more stress. She pushed for accommodations that prioritized her comfort, and once she stayed with us, she expected my husband—who had just undergone a double mastectomy—to fetch things for her and cater to her while I was 30 weeks pregnant. During the drive home after his surgery, her driving was so abrupt that both my husband and I were in pain. I experienced cramping and decreased fetal movement afterward, adding even more fear and resentment.
Since then, I was induced and our son was born. Instead of getting the peaceful beginning we hoped for, he spent the first week of his life in the NICU. As his mother, I was only able to hold my newborn son three times before he was finally stabilized. Those first days were heartbreaking and filled with fear.
Despite everything, I welcomed my mother-in-law to visit him in the NICU. Rather than recognizing what we were going through, she complained that it was “ridiculous” she wasn’t allowed to hold her first grandson and said it felt unfair to her. While I was grieving the loss of those irreplaceable first moments with my own baby, she centered the conversation around her disappointment that she couldn’t hold him.
Throughout my pregnancy and after our son’s birth, she also continued pressuring us to move to Colorado (mind you she doesn’t even live there , her other son lives there, recently moved for a job) so she and her husband could bond with the baby, despite us repeatedly expressing that we had no plans to move.
Now our son is three weeks old. In those three weeks, she has called only twice. The first phone call was to ask about the baby. The second wasn’t to check on how we were adjusting as first-time parents after a traumatic NICU stay—it was to tell us about her upcoming birthday trip. She expects us to attend a resort weekend in Palm Springs, book a cabana, celebrate her birthday, and then informed us she’ll be coming to town a few weeks later so she can hold her grandson. It feels less like she’s asking what works for our family and more like she’s informing us of when she’ll have access to our child.
At this point, it no longer feels like isolated incidents. It’s a longstanding pattern of making major life events—our marriage, my husband’s transition, our fertility journey, his surgery, our son’s NICU stay, and now becoming new parents—about her feelings instead of supporting us. The resentment I feel isn’t because of one comment or one bad day. It’s because every significant moment in our lives seems to become another opportunity for our boundaries to be ignored while we’re expected to manage her emotions on top of our own.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for holding space in your heart for my ranting. I’m trying very hard to separate my postpartum hormones from reality, but I don’t think postpartum is creating these feelings. If anything, it’s stripped away my ability to tolerate behavior that I’ve spent years minimizing. More than anything, I want to protect my peace, my husband, and our son.
She texted my husband this last night:
“I'm really disappointed that I feel like I give and give and give and get so little in return. I keep telling myself that this is just the way it is, as I continue to watch you take the trip to Washington (or wherever) over and over again. I always try not to rock the boat, but I'm feeling like I don't matter too much at this point, and I'm sad.”
I will be diving back into Alanon and choosing no contact for myself at this point.