MIL wants to move her whole family wherever my husband and I go
Strap in, this is a long one. I’ll try and cliff note as much as possible but really struggling with how to deal with this.
Me (28F) and my husband (28M) have been together in total for 11 years. Started dating in high school and did long distance pretty much the entire time. We lived anywhere between 45 minutes and 12 hours from each other during the first 7 years until we moved in together. As hard as the distance was, it wasn’t the hardest part of our relationship, it was my (now) MIL. She is incredibly controlling and manipulative and has been her whole life (per my assessment of how she’s treated her family). She had a really hard time controlling my husband, who is the oldest, and they butted heads A LOT. When we started dating, she used me as a punishment. If he didn’t listen to her, she took the car so he couldn’t see me. If we had plans on the books weeks in advance, she would ground him right before for something like his performance in a baseball game. Or she wouldn’t even give an excuse, she would just tell him no. In college, he was living at home for a semester due to community college being right by them so he could save money. One weekend he drove 5 hours to come see me and she told him to turn around and come back because his Life360 said he drove 90mph on the highway. He obviously said no and didn’t come home until Sunday and then she grounded him for 2 months, again he was in COLLEGE.
I have a million more examples and I can give more if needed but trying to condense this as much as possible.
One weekend, my husband went to visit a big city, we will call it *city*, for a friend’s birthday weekend and he fell in love with it. Told his parents he would love to move there one day, and me and him talked about it a lot during our last year of college about how fun it would be to move somewhere like that one day and raise our family.
We ended up buying a home in our hometown because of where our jobs were. Got married. Lived there for 2 years and then my job caused us to move to Florida, which we were ecstatic about because more recently, we had talked about wanting to move there. We only lived in Florida for about a year (one hurricane season was enough for us to not want to worry about that every year) and during that year, MIL visited about 5 times. Looked at the area, asked us what places we liked, and whether we were serious about moving there for good. Would make comments about how one of her kids would actually love to be in Florida and the other ones would need a little convincing, and I thought that was weird but didn’t think anything serious about it.
When we figured out Florida wasn’t for us, we floated Virginia being a really nice place. I always loved Virginia growing up but we had never really been together so started planning a visit to go see the area. Suddenly MIL is asking about cities there to live and where they’d go. And now I started figuring out what was going on. I told my husband my suspicions and he felt weird about it as well but we were like ok let’s not draw conclusions.
His other siblings were about to join the workforce and I guess wanted to potentially live at home for a little to pay off student loans. Suddenly they all get jobs in *city*. Then his parents announce they’re selling their home and renting a home on a short term lease in *city* until they find out where they want to buy.
I found out I was pregnant and we decided to move back to our hometown. We announced it to the family and MIL was beside herself that they decided to sell their home.
Throughout our relationship, we always talked about potentially moving to my college town. We had so many great memories together and it was the one place we could truly be together without the control of his mom. And with the baby on the way, we knew this would be a less expensive place to raise our growing family. Softly we decided that’s where we were going to move but didn’t know when exactly we would end up doing it.
At my baby shower, my college friend went up to my MIL and talked about how excited she was to have my husband and I back in the same city to hang out and raise our kids. She snapped back at her and said “they won’t move there, they’ll move to *city* where family is.”
When I was 36 weeks pregnant, she was hounding us to visit them at their rental home and see the area, which was a 9 hour drive from us. I was like I’m sorry I can’t travel that far, and she would say things about how she did it all the time when she was 36 weeks pregnant. Which was just rude and insensitive but I was used to that type of treatment so I rubbed it off and we never visited.
Fast forward to postpartum, my husband and I realized very quickly where we were living was too small even for just the 3 of us. We started a home search in my college town and found one we loved and put in an offer and we got it. Everything happened so quick so we picked up and moved and we were SO happy.
All of a sudden, my husband is getting calls from MIL about how expensive *city* is and how they just can’t find anything they love. His siblings constantly wondered why they even moved if they weren’t sure that’s where they wanted to be. Then it all comes out that the reason they had moved there, was because we talked about it years ago as a place we wanted to end up. And now she’s pissed we didn’t move there.
Then she calls my husband and says they were just casually looking at houses in my college city and after 2 years of looking at houses, she finally found one she loved. Starts naming all the details about the house and talks about how it’s definitely going to sell quickly and she’s so sad about it and so my husband was like oh wow where is it? And she “couldn’t remember” exactly where it was. You remember everything about the house but don’t remember where it is? So I decided to look at houses for sale right by house and would you believe I found the exact house she was talking about. One neighborhood over.
Naturally I flipped out. My husband and I had a big talk about it and obviously told them that this was too close. You would’ve thought we started World War III. She starts talking about how she can’t believe the level of betrayal and how they wouldn’t just randomly stop by and she doesn’t understand why it’s too close or why her son would say something like that to her. She starts crying to her other kids about it and is just completely distraught.
Now, 2 of her kids have gotten jobs in our city and they’re looking at homes, but claim they won’t be right by us. Yet we never hear about what neighborhoods they’re even looking at or what suburb it’s in. To make matters worse, one of her sons starts a job in 3 weeks and he doesn’t have a place to stay so now he is moving into our house!!!! While we have a baby!!!! And MIL didn’t even question whether it’d be okay or not, she’s just forcing everyone to this city because she knows we won’t move wherever they go.
My SIL even said to me that she made a comment to them “it feels like we’re just following them around wherever they go”
I’m seriously trying not to flip out but I do NOT want them here and I don’t know what to do. We would love to have his siblings but I think his parents moving here would just ruin my life and I don’t know what to do. Help.