Reply to WWYD - my mother uses my house like a free hotel...

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ugh, so my mother crashes at my house EVERY WEEK. My house is closer to an appointment she goes to. [b]She often doesn't even ask,[/b] she just tells me she's coming and shows up!

This means that every weekend, she's here for a night and half of the next day.

She does help with the kids, but she's also [b]super intrusive and will do things like try to organize my house[/b], make "innocent" [/b]judgey comments,[b] or be [/b]pushy about spending time with the kids solo[b]. She also [/b]does not listen to me about what to feed the kids[b] - she thinks it's funny to feed them tons of sugar and crap.

This has been going on for years. A couple of months ago, we moved, and in our new house, there isn't a separate apartment for her. There is only the (smaller) main house.

In the new house, [/b]she's decided that she doesn't like sleeping on the air mattress[b] that we set up for her in a bedroom, and that instead she will sleep on the living room couch. This feels even more invasive.

Today, she is "trapped here" because of the snow (that she "had no idea" about), so she will have to stay tonight too ([/b]ignoring the fact[b] that I asked her at 6:30am before the snow started what her plans were because it was going to snow).

I love my mother and enjoy spending time with her when I feel like I have some choice in the matter. This arrangement worked in our old house, but in our new house, which is smaller, it feels suffocating. If we had a separate guest apartment, I'd feel differently...

I crave full weekends alone with my own family and no guests.

She's very [/b]sensitive and dramatic, [b]so I know if I talk with her about this, it could lead to full-on tantrumming/stonewalling/seeing the kids (who love her) much less. It will also make her life much more difficult if she can't stay here, since she will have to book a hotel for those nights.

This gives me so much anxiety! Please help! Wwyd?

[/quote][/quote]

Sorry, I hit submit too soon. The lines I bolded are all the places where you have failed to set boundaries.

The problem as I see it is that your Mom has trained you that you are not allowed to have any boundaries with her.  Every time you try to set or enforce boundaries, she responds by throwing tantrums and you have shifted to just never bothering to attempt to set any boundaries to begin with.

Sounds like you are finally fed up with this dynamic and you are using this one huge boundary (you can’t stay here anymore) as a proxy for fixing the overall dynamic.

My advice is for you to seek individual therapy specifically around setting boundaries with your mom and start pushing back on all the little stuff.  For starters, tell her that it does not work for your family to have a guest on the couch. If she stays at your home she needs to stay on the air mattress. If that’s not comfortable, she is welcome to stay at a hotel.

If she attempts to re-organize things in your home, explain that she is welcome here as a guest but that guests do not have control over your organization system. If she’s not able to resist changing your home, she is welcome to stay in a hotel.

If she makes rude or judgmental comments, you need to find the words to call that out in the moment. You haven’t given examples of the specific things she’s saying, but this may involve asking her to repeat it and then calmly telling her that what she said is rude, or even asking for an apology. This is an area where a therapist can help you come up with some good strategies.

If she is pushing back on wanting time alone with your kids, you need to figure out what your policy is on that (how often and under what circumstances do you want your mom to have time alone with your kids) and communicate that clearly, then reply to all follow-up requests by restating your clear policy and telling her that if she can’t stop pestering you, she is welcome to stay in a hotel.

For the food, that can be a great area because if she is in fact providing you with free childcare, one of the downsides of free childcare is that you can’t control all the choices that she makes as the babysitter. But if you don’t actually want her to be the child care and would prefer that she simply act as a guest and spend time with the children while you go about caring for them but she is undermining that while you were also there, then I think it falls in line with the rest of what I’ve said: “mom, I have a right to feed my children what I think is appropriate and if you can’t support me in that then maybe you need to stay in a hotel.”

Finally, a little food for thought:
You said in your post that if your mom doesn’t get her way one of the tactics you predict is that she will cut off contact with the kids to punish you. I want you to think about that for a moment. Right now you are encouraging your kids to have a strong bond with someone who will happily cut off that bond instantaneously if anyone crosses her. You are setting up your kids to have her punish them in that exact same way when they get old enough to say and do things that she doesn’t like. It sounds like they are still relatively young, but by the time they are teenagers they are not going to want to do everything the way grandma wants to do it, including hanging out with grandma all day every weekend. Do you want your kids to be stuck dealing with this boundary issue because you never set a precedent that we can say no to grandma?[/quote]

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