Found messages of MIL blaming me for everything.
I’m looking for some outside perspective because I’m really hurt.
My partner’s mum has never liked me. Over the years she’s criticised my weight, my job, my family and, since our twin girls were born, she’s questioned their health, appearance and our parenting. It got so overwhelming that I asked my partner to set boundaries, which he eventually did, and the comments about the girls have mostly stopped.
Today I accidentally saw a notification with my name on my partner’s laptop. I know I shouldn’t have, but I read the messages between him and his mum where she had made comments about me.
The worst was her saying I “ruined” her son by introducing him to drugs and alcohol. The reality is we got together when I was 16 and he was 18. I didn’t drink or smoke before we met. He was already drinking and had smoked weed when he was younger, whereas I never did. We’re now 25 and 27, have careers, a home and twin daughters, and have long moved on from that stage of life. She has no idea whether either of us uses drugs now, yet she still blames me.
She also criticised us for having a few drinks on our first night away since the twins were born (they were three months old and safely cared for), saying, “When a man drinks it’s bad, but when a mother drinks it’s worse.” We hardly drink, but she seems to assume we do. She grew up with an alcoholic mother, so I wonder if that’s influenced her views, but it still feels unfair to judge us based on assumptions.
She never says any of this to my face, only to my partner. To be fair to him, he has stood up to her about comments regarding our daughters after I asked him to set boundaries, but he never told me she’d been saying these things about me, and as far as I know, he didn’t challenge them.
I think that’s what’s hurting me the most. Finding all of these messages at once has made me feel like the trust between us has been damaged. I can’t stop thinking that he was willing to defend our daughters but not me. I understand he may have been trying to protect me by not repeating her comments, but instead I feel blindsided and like he let her speak about me that way for years.
Am I justified in feeling this hurt? Would you tell your partner you found the messages, or just let it go?