Reply to Why do so many of us have issues with our ILs?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it’s because — especially with MILs — when you’re child gets married you are moving into a new phase of life. You are no longer the center of a family. You could be someone’s grandmother. At least it was this in my case. My MIL retired, became a mother in law and a grandmother, felt her mortality and her importance slipping away and tried to claw it back by staging constant power trips and head to heads with me over things like: whether I was “allowed” to bring food to Thanksgiving and who my husband should spend his birthday with. Every single potential decision was a showdown. From what to eat at dinner to what MY HUSBAND AND I should name our child! If she “won” she reassured herself that she was still the mother, the center, and I was 26, resentful and angry and would push back. Twenty years later, I have embraced the gray rock and we get along fine now. But then again, we only see her 3/4 times a year when we used to live down the street. [/quote]

I am so happy to be free of most decisions.  I let my married kids, with little kids, make the plans.  They always ask my input, but I always insist we do what works best for the group.  I don’t care.  I’m happy to be invited and I love my children’s spouses and my grandchildren.  I get to do what I want all the time.  I’m flexible when we do family dinners, trips, etc.  It’s a relief not to stress over plans.  Just let me know what time to be where.[/quote]

My mother takes this approach (but maybe to another level), and it creates a lot of stress for me as the oldest sibling. We all have young kids now and if we want a family get together, I basically have to plan it, coordinate it, pay for it and often host it, and in some ways I feel like holding the family together has become my burden (and blessing).  I wish my parents, who have much more time and resources than any of their kids, would take the lead in offering to plan family dinners or vacations.   No one does this for DH's family and they've basically fallen apart. We see each other at weddings and or funerals. [/quote]

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