u/uhlee_gee

I know what people will come here to comment “who cares, do what you want” but if were that easy of a decision I wouldn’t be posting.

We love the holidays. I don’t love spending the holidays with my husbands mom, sister or her husband. These are the three people who gang up on me when they’re all around me. It comes in passive aggressive insults, exclusion, and trying to take my daughter away from me to do their own thing. They will try to make me mad and then look at me to see if I’m upset and then look at each other. I don’t know if it’s a game to them or they just want me miserable because it makes them feel better about themselves.

My husband doesn’t know how else to be but friendly. He’s afraid it will make the holidays not enjoyable if he shows up and grey rocks them. He doesn’t really even know what that means when I try to explain it to him. He’s extremely kind by nature, he doesn’t really have a mean bone in his body. He used to have a temper before we went no contact with SIL and BIL/ quit taking his mothers feelings into account. He was always afraid of what his parents thought or if they’d be disappointed in him. Now he doesn’t care. He hasn’t had one temper outburst since this change and that’s been almost 2 years. We have been so happy since we decided to live for each other and our kids.

So that’s what I try to tell him, let’s continue to be happy and have our own Thanksgiving and invite your parents and grandparents here. It doesn’t even have to be on Thanksgiving. He says he wants our daughter to experience seeing her family, not SIL/BIL in particular but his grandmother and other aunts/uncles but they don’t usually come. But we could invite them to our house if he wanted.

I don’t really know what he’s afraid of. Maybe he’s afraid of his parents’ reaction if he tells them we want to do things differently this year. I do know he said he feels like he will blow up on SIL/BIL and doesn’t want to start that kind of drama or let our kids see that. He’s afraid he won’t see or catch their passive aggressive comments because last year he didn’t catch the ones they threw at me at Christmas. I told him he can go see his family if he wants and me and the kids will stay home but he said he’ll never go there without me.

I struggle with deciding on what to do because on one hand, I don’t want my children around them. I feel sick bringing my youngest around SIL/BIL because they told MIL while I was pregnant that they didn’t care how stressed I was from them being mean to me and it potentially causing me to lose the baby (I had a miscarriage scare and had to go to the hospital because I was bleeding at work, luckily he was ok). Last year BIL made fun of my daughter’s shoes and she looked at him like she didn’t know what to say. I felt so sad in the moment because it seemed like he was doing that to hurt me.

But then I also think I could go and tolerate the treatment for the sake of my husband and children so that he can spend time with the family he wants and the kids can play with their cousins. I don’t want my husband to resent me in the future and I told him as such. He said he wouldn’t ever resent me. Or maybe my kids might. I can’t predict the future.

I just don’t know what to do. If y’all could kindly tell me what you would do in this situation, maybe it could help us make the decision. Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment

My daughter is 6.

Today, on the way to take her to an appointment she asked me “what if I had a secret but you didn’t know?”

We have had big talks in the past about tricky adults and unsafe behavior, meaning any adult that asks you to keep secrets especially from mommy and daddy are not safe and that she should tell us immediately. We always stress to her that she won’t be in trouble.

I said to her “well, I guess I might be sad because I’d want you to trust that you could tell me anything and you’re not supposed to keep secrets from mom and dad.”

She says “but you wouldn’t know” and I said “true, but I’d be sad because keeping secrets from mommy isn’t good and you should always come to me if someone is making you keep secrets.”

She said “even grandma?” My husband’s mom. I said “well, is she asking you to keep secrets from me?” And she said “I don’t want you to be mad” I told her I’d never be mad at her, that it wasn’t a good thing that grandma told her to keep secrets if that was the case. Then she told me she made it up and she was just asking a hypothetical, basically.

She’s done this a few times where she mentions grandma and secrets and I try to get her to tell me but every time she says she’s telling the truth that there are no secrets with grandma. I’m a little weirded out and don’t know if she keeps mentioning secrets and grandma because of my reactions or that i keep pressing her to tell me if there is a secret. I think she knows that if grandma made secrets with her that her dad and I would cut her unsupervised time with grandma for a long time and she probably doesn’t want that.

I don’t know how to get my child to tell me what’s really going on or if nothing is going on with grandma? Am I bad parent if I leave it alone and assume it’s nothing? I have tried so hard to get my children to feel as if they can tell me anything and I’d help them/save them/protect them but idk what to do here

Edit to add: my in laws and I don’t have a good relationship. There’s been a lot of hurt and exclusion of me. And my MIL likes to over step and thinks she doesn’t get enough time with my daughter even though she sees her once a week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JUSTNOMIL/s/XXhETLHkB7

👆🏼link to my last post

So I showed my husband all the replies to my post and he agrees what his mom is doing is wrong but he doesn’t want to have a talk with my oldest because he’s afraid of her repeating things. He wants to wait until she’s older and will understand. She just turned 6 as of yesterday (Whoohoo💜)

I tend to have a lot of anxiety, my therapist diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder so I’ve had a big fear for a while that MIL was trying to slowly turn my daughter away from me or make her not trust my word. My husband says if we ask her about her Mimi saying things to her about me or keeping secrets and she says no she’s not doing that then we should leave it at that. But my opinion is my daughter doesn’t know she’s being manipulated and Mimi doesn’t have to say explicitly mean things about me to her to turn her against me.

Also if y’all could keep in mind that my husband has seen his family treat me badly and exclude me and he doesn’t like it and it makes him very upset. He has already decided his sister and her husband are not allowed in our or our children’s lives anymore because they don’t want me to be apart of the family and they have been very mean to me over the years, even saying they didn’t care about my pregnancy or if I miscarried. We tried to come together with them to get an apology but each time they either laughed at us or gave us a non apology. So husband said he was done with them. He doesn’t want to cut his mother off like he has his sister and I wouldn’t ever push or ask him to. He has spent his whole life trying to make his parents happy and over the last few years he has come out of that, deciding to put his own little family and what he wants to do first. I’m very proud of him.

But my anxiety is getting to me. I don’t want my daughter to be manipulated, she already has this underlying idea that mommy and mimi don’t get along but Mimi is the one to believe.

What do I say to husband? Should we wait? Should we just scale back? MIL is very pushy and forces herself into our lives once a week. If we miss a week with her it’s guilt trips until she sees us again

I just have this feeling in my gut that my MIL wants my children to blame me for the tense relationship between me and my MIL/SIL/BIL. I can see it on all their faces that when my children love me loudly or my husband compliments me or gives me physical affection or is overall nice to me they have a weird reaction almost like it’s awkward or they don’t like it. Keep in mind it’s not like we are all over each other it’s just common niceness amongst a married couple or compliment or playing with my hair.

I’ve caught my MIL twice saying things to my 5 year old that I thought were strange. First she told my daughter that if she didn’t go to bed at MILs house when I said to that I wouldn’t let my daughter stay over at MILs ever again. My daughter came home and acted guilty for some reason and immediately told me MIL said this and I told her that I wouldn’t ever keep her from her Mimi

Second was my daughter’s first day of school yesterday. My husband and I were excited. We took my daughter to school and I left my phone in the car with my husband and baby and took my daughter into the school. MIL called while I was inside and husband didn’t answer my phone. I called her back and told her I’m sorry I left my phone in the car. After school MIL called and I asked her if she wanted to talk to daughter and she said yes. As they were talking MIL said to my daughter “I wanted to pray for you this morning but your mom didn’t tell you” or it was “your mom didn’t let me” i couldn’t hear her because we were inside the grocery store. I asked my daughter to clarify what she said and my daughter said “i don’t know” so I didn’t push further. I told my daughter I’m sorry I forgot to tell you when I picked you up the Mimi wanted to give her prayers.

These are only two situations but my intuition is telling me it’s not good for MIL to be framing conversations with my daughter like I’m the bad guy or keeping them apart?

Hi all,

My MIL and I did therapy last year, talked about how she has over stepped and been very controlling and how we can work to mend our relationship. I genuinely think therapy was a bad idea because now she knows what has hurt me in the past and after promising to keep the things we said in therapy between us, lied and told her daughter (SIL) and BIL everything I said. We tried doing one thing together to bond and she just used it to try to get me to make up with SIL and BIL for treating me horribly over the years. Every time we met she basically told me to get over it if I loved her. But anyway, we are here now. D(dear)H and I are No contact with SIL/BIL and don’t have to go to go MILs house every single weekend. But now things are definitely strained after placing boundaries with MIL. I always try to be kind to her, cook for her on her birthday and Mother’s Day and give her expensive gifts. This year she has started to leave me out of things. She sent out a news letter telling everyone of a vacation they want us all to take next year, sent the email to DH, SIL, BIL but not me. Then they wanted to start some sort of family plan through Google and sent everyone the invite but me. Sometimes she has left me out of group messages too. She has my number and knows my email and has sent me emails countless times over a decade. She even forgot to tell me happy birthday this year but I’m not upset about that one. Part of me thinks she really did forget that day and even if she didn’t - my children’s birthdays matter more now than mine so who cares.

So DH noticed she was leaving me out of emails and called her and told her he noticed I wasn’t on them and asked why, did she mean to do that? She came back with “I’m sorry I just got busy and forgot” DH did a good job telling her she needs to include me and I was actually so proud because he was genuinely upset that she did that.

DH and I are on the phone talking about the convo he had with her and I asked him, do you really believe she forgot both those times? All these years she’s never left me off an email or text and now after therapy and making it a point that it hurt when I wasn’t included, she’s starting to forget? (Keep in mind we weren’t arguing, I just am having a hard time believing she forgot) and DH said he wants to believe she forgot. That he knows his mom. And I said well why didn’t she forget SILs husband? He said I don’t know I just want to believe she didn’t mean to.

So I’m asking all of you, if you think my MIL could be doing this purposely. To be truthful - I’m not even upset she’s excluding me if she truly is then that just shows DH what his family is really doing. But I want to know if she’s playing a game or not

I don’t know how to deal with people who hate me. My BIL and SIL hate me and are very jealous of mine and my husbands life. They only take out their jealousy on me and my MIL lets it happen. She often times tries to upset me and poke at me with things as well. We’ve cut BIL and SIL out of our life because they continued to be mean to me especially when my husband wasn’t around. I can list all the things they’ve done here but it would take up the whole post. It’s basically a death by a thousand cuts situation. They also continued to treat me horribly and stress me out while I was pregnant and after I had a miscarriage scare. Now my MIL tells them everything my husband and I say if we dare speak about them in her presence. My husband finally realized to not talk about them to her because it will cause them to text and harass us. Husband can’t block BIL because BIL works with him but my husband is in a position above him. My mil is nice to me and is a good grandmother to my children but I fear she is so good to them so that she can one day turn them against me. My MIL is scary in the sense that she always finds a way to get her way. She’s very controlling. She will tell me she wants a mother daughter relationship with me and then when I try to give that to her she and her daughter say I’m jealous of their relationship. My husband says we can’t move towns or states because the business that he owns is also here. My parents tell me “they’re jealous, who cares don’t let it bother you” and my therapist is trying to help me find ways to cope. To be honest I just want to end it all sometimes but I know that’s what they want. They want me out of the picture so they can take my kids and manipulate and influence my husband to marry someone else and my children will forget I ever existed. So I stay here earth side.

since christmas my uncle has made rude off color remarks about my daughter and husband. he was never like this before so its odd he started acting this way out of the blue. It will annoy my parents to where they would tell me but then when I say I’ll say something back or ask them why they didn’t say anything they just tell me to leave it alone. But it’s obvious and every time we see him now. It genuinely makes me angry because at christmas he said if his kids talked the way my daughter talked (she just said she wanted to do something herself and yelled it) he would beat their ass. My daughter was 5 years old. It was so odd and out of the blue. Then on Memorial Day he couldn’t stop making fun of my husband for drinking white claws. My husband buys them for me and he drinks them if we have them. My uncle kept calling my husband gay for drinking them. I just want to go off on him. He only cares about one set of his grandkids, got fired and never looked for work, now he just substitute teaches after being out of work for years. The guy is very clearly insecure. If I retaliated i don’t even know if he would stop. But I want to defend my children at least. My husband said he can defend himself. I told my parents to stop inviting my uncle to parties but the 4th of July party is coming up and they invited my aunt and him. What’s the right thing to do

since christmas my uncle has made rude off color remarks about my daughter and husband. he was never like this before so its odd he started acting this way out of the blue. It will annoy my parents to where they would tell me but then when I say I’ll say something back or ask them why they didn’t say anything they just tell me to leave it alone. But it’s obvious and every time we see him now. It genuinely makes me angry because at christmas he said if his kids talked the way my daughter talked (she just said she wanted to do something herself and yelled it) he would beat their ass. My daughter was 5 years old. It was so odd and out of the blue. Then on Memorial Day he couldn’t stop making fun of my husband for drinking white claws. My husband buys them for me and he drinks them if we have them. My uncle kept calling my husband gay for drinking them. I just want to go off on him. He only cares about one set of his grandkids, got fired and never looked for work, now he just substitute teaches after being out of work for years. The guy is very clearly insecure. If I retaliated i don’t even know if he would stop. But I want to defend my children at least. My husband said he can defend himself. I told my parents to stop inviting my uncle to parties but the 4th of July party is coming up and they invited my aunt and him. What’s the right thing to do

since christmas my uncle has made rude off color remarks about my daughter and husband. he was never like this before so its odd he started acting this way out of the blue. It will annoy my parents to where they would tell me but then when I say I’ll say something back or ask them why they didn’t say anything they just tell me to leave it alone. But it’s obvious and every time we see him now. It genuinely makes me angry because at christmas he said if his kids talked the way my daughter talked (she just said she wanted to do something herself and yelled it) he would beat their ass. My daughter was 5 years old. It was so odd and out of the blue. Then on Memorial Day he couldn’t stop making fun of my husband for drinking white claws. My husband buys them for me and he drinks them if we have them. My uncle kept calling my husband gay for drinking them. I just want to go off on him. He only cares about one set of his grandkids, got fired and never looked for work, now he just substitute teaches after being out of work for years. The guy is very clearly insecure. If I retaliated i don’t even know if he would stop. But I want to defend my children at least. My husband said he can defend himself. I told my parents to stop inviting my uncle to parties but the 4th of July party is coming up and they invited my aunt and him. What’s the right thing to do

This post might be all over the place with my thoughts so I’m sorry about that but I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this.

My MIL is a really good grandmother. She is very helpful with my children and follows 99% of my rules. The other 1 percent is that my children aren’t allowed to talk to or have a relationship with SIL or her husband. We haven’t told our children about this rule because they are so young. But last time one of my kids went to MILs house MIL let my child talk to SIL on the phone. Both my spouse and I feel that if someone hates me or can’t respect me, they can’t have a relationship with our children. I’ve been in that situation as a child and I was treated more harsh than my other cousins because my aunts and uncles didn’t like my mother/parents and I don’t care if SIL/BIL say they wouldn’t ever do that - they don’t get access to my kids. Since this big blow up with cutting contact with SIL/BIL, MIL insists that I must be jealous of SIL, that SIL is better at certain things than me, etc. MIL is still nice to me but she is constantly trying to subtly jab or insult me in this way. It’s very clear she chooses to side with SIL instead of my husband. Because of this, she doesn’t get to watch my children as much. But I can tell that when she does watch my kids she will tell them that SIL and BIL are good people and are nice to their mommy and I feel like my MIL is almost being manipulative with how much she dotes on and loves my children so that when the day comes to tell them why SIL and BIL aren’t in our lives or why they didn’t see MIL as much because she’s so wonderful that my children won’t believe me when I tell them. I don’t want to end up losing my children to MIL one day or have my children tell me I was wrong. BIL even tried making fun of one of my kids shoes to try to insult me and get at me when it made my child cry. This is a big reason why I don’t want them to have a relationship. I don’t want my kids to think there is something wrong with them because of how they treat them.

So what do I do? Do I wait until they’re old enough and say “SIL and BIL aren’t in our lives because they constantly hurt mommy and her feelings and exclude her” ? Or “we didn’t want their hatred of mommy to affect you kids?”

When do I have the conversation? Do I write my kids letters? Idk how to navigate this

Thank you for reading

I am 7 months postpartum with my second child. My anxiety and depression are pretty high. Mostly it’s my anxiety causing me to be depressed. I feel like everyone close to my spouse hates me and it makes me feel like he deserves better than me and I cry a lot about this and the fact that I can’t get my house in order and most days I just want to sit. I used to love working out and I can only make myself do 30 mins of cardio a day. I think I can make myself do these things because I’m on Wellbutrin. But there’s not a day that goes by that someone tells me “you look stressed. You look tired. Are you ok?” I think about what it would be like to end my life a lot but I know I’d never go through with it because my in laws would become primary caregivers of my children and they would make my children forget or hate me. I have some letters written to my spouse and oldest child just in case. Like I said before the thought of my MIL becoming my children’s mother makes me sick. My in laws constantly excuse being mean to me and leaving me out of things. A lot of my friends say if they were stuck with in laws and parents like mine they would be going insane. I forget things a lot. Like I can’t remember sometimes what I’ve done during the week or even yesterday. I don’t want to be committed to a mental hospital because again, in laws. My spouse works a job plus owns a business and he is so busy that I know he would need their help. I think I should maybe try Wellbutrin plus lexapro and maybe that’ll help? Idk. I just want to be happy and normal

Or maybe just people in general but for me, a certain group of people seem to be making passive aggressive comments towards me and it genuinely feels like I’m always their punching bag. My therapist says I always come from a negative perspective when it comes to these people but I’ve been right before. Every time I have an assumption it seems I’m rarely wrong

Hey, that rhymed.

I just started topical GHKCU. Like yesterday. I’ve always wanted to try tretinoin but every time I ask my derm she says no or bypasses my question, without explanation. I do have dry and sensitive skin but I am turning 32 and I really want glowing skin like all the people I see on tiktok. Also when I go to my injector and ask for my crows feet to be taken care of, she says she won’t do botox there on my eye and doesn’t give me any other solutions. I had my second baby 6 months ago and am desperate to take care of myself and look pretty.

1. Has anyone’s derm or injector refused to script them tret or treat their crows feet?
2. Where are we buying tret in the US?
3. Can I use GHKCU topically and tret?
4. Is Botox the only way to treat crows feet??

Thank you to those who take the time to read my post and answer with kindness 🫶🏼