Reply to "Your spouse should handle the ILs" Why?

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Reply to ""Your spouse should handle the ILs" Why? "

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[quote=Anonymous]I met my in-laws when I was 18.

When I was 22, my MIL went off the deep end and left FIL for a really inappropriate person (think Jerry Springer show material). Inevitably, the new guy left her (after being abusive to her), but not before she really tried to manipulate both of us into accepting him.

For years afterwards, my MIL and her parents would tell me that *I* didn't arrange visits with them enough. They clearly viewed it as my role, as the woman, to facilitate their relationship with my spouse.

So I adopted a "they're your family; you deal with them" approach. If they were mature, functional, lovely people, I wouldn't have needed this boundary. I would have voluntarily spent time with them. Alas, they are/were not.

But later in life, I grew more confident in myself and realized that my MIL was mostly afraid of losing my approval, and I better understood the conflict avoidance my spouse developed as a coping mechanism as a child, and I don't have a problem saying my piece if I need to. Other times, deflection and punting are preferred methods because, again, we're not dealing with someone who is emotionally healthy.

These days, MIL sends spouse messages saying, "I don't see you enough, I wish we were closer, you don't make me a priority," and I am blessedly left out of these manipulations. It's always an option to just say, "Hi! I'd love to see you this week. Does a certain day work for you?" That's all that MIL says directly to me, knowing that I do not respond to guilt-trips.

Unfortunately, I predict that in a few years when my kids are legally adults, MIL will send them the same kind of messages.

It's all a balancing act of trying to maintain some kind of relationship with someone with a lot of emotional and cognitive deficits. I don't think MIL is at estrangement-level crazy. That might make things easier in a sense. But she's also not a completely safe person whose judgment we can trust; we made the decision not to leave our kids with her overnight for this reason.

Thankfully my spouse has had a lot of therapy and understands his mother's deficits. I suspect she would be diagnosed as BPD, but as she told me once, she took a semester of psychology in college, so she's an expert. ;) [/quote]

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