A father’s perspective: I resent my well meaning, loving MIL since the birth of our daughter
I’m struggling with the relationship to my MIL since the birth of my daughter. I see a lot of posts here from mothers with similar problems and how they get encouraged to set stricter boundaries with their well meaning husbands mothers who are driving them crazy. It seems to make sense to me for a mother to just exclude the MIL and see her less. The comments always have these sentences about the mother and her child, nobody can tell them what to do and the mother comes first etc. However when I swap out the genders, I feel a bit lost because it doesn’t seem as obvious anymore and I can’t find references.
My MIL is amazing. She cares and wants to help and genuinely loves everyone involved (but more than anyone, she loves the baby, haha). She has a history of overarching and being controlling, though.
Some examples:
- treating our apartment like hers: she puts kitchen papers everywhere to protect pans from each other or tomatoes from fridge surfaces etc.
- she goes around and folds every piece of clothes she can find, reorders things in the kitchen and baby room (for reference, i keep the order in those places, not my wife)
- when we were younger, she had a key to our place and would enter and wash my woollen laundry too hot after being told not to touch it
- when i stayed at her place she “unpacked my backpack for me” and didn’t understand why that’s not okay
The important part here is that she really doesn’t mean any harm. This is her showing her love by caring for is. She wouldn’t let anyone help in her kitchen though, because she has “her own ways of doing things there”.
The problem is she keeps “forgetting boundaries when we set them” (to her defence, she is older and does forget things) and she easily gets emotional and cries when confronted. My wife enables her because after half a life of struggling with the controlling behaviour herself she is very used to it and lets her mother get away with a lot in order to keep the peace, because she loves her mother a lot.
It doesn’t stop here, I also get quite uncomfortable when she is around our daughter. She constantly makes sounds and tries to get babies attention and wants to hold her and play with her whenever she can. She visibly suffers when the baby even just sneezes or has food in her face and has to hold herself back to intervene and make constant comments about her being cold or whatever. Due to her age and health I requested that she should sit while holding the baby, but my wife doesn’t agree and wants her mother to enjoy the baby fully by being able to walk around with her. After setting the boundaries, then pushing them back and forth for some months, both of them kept pushing the boundaries and took me not saying anything anymore as a permission.
Before the birth I loved this woman (I still do but also resent her) since it was possible to somehow set boundaries and avoid her when necessary. Now it has become impossible: we see her multiple times per week, because they buy us food and offer to bring it over or we see them because my wife needs something she left at their place or there’s a family gathering etc etc. They help us a lot and are extremely generous and that has lead to us depending on them because of all kinds of things , like our car breaks down and we use theirs or whatever. Getting out of the dependency is an uphill battle, especially since my wife often doesn’t mind. She understands me and often speaks up for me or sets boundaries, like passing the baby to me when her mother asks for it etc, but my MILs overreaching care is so ever-present that it drives me crazy and the reason I am making this post is to find out if I am in the wrong.
I feel guilty pushing my MIL further away from my daughter, who loves her back intensely. But every time i let her come a step closer she takes the chance for a leap, a middle ground doesn’t exist.
Since I am not the mother, I can’t always just say “me and baby are leaving”, because my wife is breast feeding her and their bond is stronger. She needs her to fall asleep without a struggle and sometimes just can’t be without her.
This is why I can’t fully relate to all the other posts here. Are there any other fathers in this sub?