Reply to Do you have a good relationship with your MIL? Any advice?

Forum Index » Family Relationships

Reply to "Do you have a good relationship with your MIL? Any advice? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]My MIL (who is a widow) is overall pretty great.  My kids are 3 and 5.  What was hard for us was how DH would act around her, and her expectations of him.  When I was postpartum w/ #1, he whisked her off to the museum and out to lunch while I stayed at home bleeding, engorged, sleep deprived and surrounded by mountains of laundry.  When we go visit her, she has a boatload of household chores/handyman work for DH to do, and I'm left to entetain two kids in a home that is not child-proofed in a strange city.  I used to get so peeved at the way he would cater to her, that it would drive me nuts and create tension between her and I.

So, I had to set some pretty clear limits w/ DH in terms of his choices, but I also tried to develop a relationship with her based on her status as the mom of the man I love.  I always like to ask her about when DH was little, ask her advice about parenting stuff (which I dont' always follow, but I ask).  I have also made myself vulnerable to her about one of our kids' health issues, (she's a nurse), by talking about the worries surrounding it.  I have made an effort to give her and DH alone time when we visit, because I realized how little actual time together they had spent in the last few years.  He'll run her over to Home Depot to get a new faucet for her kitchen and then out to lunch, and I'll take the kids to a park or something.  She's elderly, and I know that when she is gone, DH will be so sad.  I want to make sure that I did what I could to ensure their relationship stayed solid.  I make an effort to help her build her own relationship with her grandkids by having them call her, and just putting drawings from school in an envelope and mail to her.  We always write thank you notes to her, because that's the kind of thing she cares about.  I send her a card on DH's birthday, to thank her for raising such an awesome dude.  I send her a card on her wedding anniversary, even though her husband has been dead for 25 years.

I also joke with her a lot.  Tuning in to her sense of humor helped our relationship A LOT.  She's kind of a martyr, but is able to laugh about it.  We have a running joke about how she won't let me do the dishes, even at Thanksgiving.  At first she would laugh politely when I would joke about it, but after ten years, she cracks right back at me.  It's pretty silly.  She's by nature fairly guarded, so it took awhile to feel this level of intimacy.

As time has gone on, I feel like she has become more and more respectful of my role as her son's wife, and that his obligations to his family meant that he could not be at her beck and call.  She sees how I'm raising our kids, and she respects my parenting.  I keep her connected to the kids, so that she knows what is going on with them and feels closer to our day-to-day lives.

Is visiting her "fun?"  Not sure, sometimes it is pretty stressful, but as our kids age, and they demand less attention and constant supervision, I'm finding the mental/emotional space to invest more in my relationship with her.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics