I totally don’t remember posting this! ?

We have talked about moving many times. We are here through HS because we absolutely love our daughter’s school, but after graduation all bets are off. What I did was nothing. I planned no time with MIL outside of obligatory holidays. And the holiday time was pretty limited. I left it completely up to my husband to plan any non-holiday time with her. He never did so our time was limited to a handful of times per year. She lives locally, but not 10 minutes away so that helps. I would just disengage a bit more.

That sounds completely suffocating to me. Your DH needs to establish better boundaries whether you move or not. She needs a life outside of your DH.

When DH and I were married for 7 years and living in NoVA and MIL was living in DC, he and I moved to the west coast.
My relationship with MIL was strained from when we were dating although I was too young to understand the implications.

We had a baby shortly after moving which was a big reason I wanted to move. i did not want MIL, who was verbally abusive to me, to be involved with our child.

We moved and MIL was never invited to visit. We did occasionally visit friends in the DC area and DH took DC to visit MIL a total of 3-4 times in the 15 years we lived on the west coast.

I truly believe the move saved our marriage which is going on 24 years.

Anonymous wrote:OP! I'm worried that your MIL would move WITH you!

DH has a cousin who moved 500 miles away from his parents with his wife and young children. His parents decided that they wanted to be closer to the grandkids, so they ended up making the big move and bought a house in cousin's town. Nightmare.

I worry about that too. My MIL has no real anchors in her life except for her 2 kids, and she has made financial decisions to ensure that that her kids are both within a 5 mile radius of her. (She offered to help us with the down payment of our house if we bought near her, which I now obviously complete regret and don't need a lecture about because it haunts me and we won't take another penny from her ever again, and she also offered to pay my DH's sibling rent, which is still going on.) She has very few friends, she has no family here, and she constantly bashes her family in other states so I know she'll never consider moving near any of them. She doesn't go to church or anything like that.

The good news is that my husband also gets incredibly frustrated by her, even in short doses. But yeah, I definitely worry about her "announcing" that she'll be moving to wherever we are. I know she's not going away anytime soon because her parents, both in their 90's are still alive.

We wouldn't move because of her, but she would certainly be a factor if we do. For me, at least.

OP! I'm worried that your MIL would move WITH you!

DH has a cousin who moved 500 miles away from his parents with his wife and young children. His parents decided that they wanted to be closer to the grandkids, so they ended up making the big move and bought a house in cousin's town. Nightmare.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your post just makes me anxious! I think your mil is depressed and anxious and needs friends. My parents would throw a fit if I told them they needed to visit with my mil at her house when they come to visit me. She's way too involved and interested in your lives.

If this was my mother (not mil) I would tell her flat out that she doesn't seem happy to me and that she needs to develop her own interests, activities, friends and possibly get on antidepressants. I'm able to discuss things nicely with my family. If this were my mil I'd be in the same predicament as you because dh would never say a word.

My husband talks to her constantly about needing to find happiness outside of us. She's been a widow for 15 years, retired for 20 years, and my husband has tried to get her to date. True story: she finally let him convince her to join that match site for older people. Literally every time a man messaged her, she would tell my DH that she needs him to come help her write back. It was a disaster and my husband obviously didn't take the bait. He still encourages her to travel, find friends, boyfriends, etc, but I'm convinced she'll never find anything in this world as interesting as my husband.

This doesn't seem that unreasonable. If she is unused to dating and e-mail then this seems like a normal request. I have had co-workers who've asked me to look at responses when they have first started with online dating services. Honestly you sound too oversensitive and are seeing monsters in mirrors when they aren't even there.

She asked him to come over every time she got a message. When he declined to do so, she shut her dating account down.

I'll jump in to say that this doesn't sound unreasonable given experiences I have had with friends who have used online dating. In fact, if she hadn't been asking someone to come over and write the message with her then I would think that she just wasn't invested enough in it. I've read your other posts and as a DIL only I didn't read anything that makes your MIL sound horrible; however, it is very clear that if she sneezed then you think that this it is pretty appalling on her part.

Never give her a key to your home.

Anonymous wrote:Your MIL sounds like a bonafide narcissist. The expecting your parents to visit her is a dead giveaway. She sees her son as an extension of herself. In her mind, your DH and her are one. So his house (your house) is her house, his money is her money, etc.

Horrifying.

I'd do a 100% cut off. No longer welcome in the house, DH can have lunch with her once a week if he wants to. I just wouldn't tolerate that crap.

She is. Even my husband says she's a total narcissist. But we're not the type to cut her out of our lives because if it. We're always just carefully managing it. It's exhausting though.

Anonymous wrote:OP here again. We've disengaged a lot. I told my husband flatly that I'm in my 40's and reaching a "I don't give a F" mentality about trying to cater to others, especially to her. He has started seeing her for lunch so that our weekends remain free of her when possible. She's still crafty about finding reasons we 'need' to get together, but I've definitely become more hardened to her through the years. She'll barrage us in texts and emails and if we don't reply, she panics and calls DH, and then while on the call will say she bought something for our kids that she wants to bring by, and to let her know when she can come by. Stuff like that. She's a crafty SOB. This is turning into more of a vent than advice-seeking. Thanks all.

Signed,
40-something who no longer gives any F's about my MIL and wants to move far away from her

Time to block her from your cell phone.

Anonymous wrote:Disengage, and have dh take on more of the communication with her. Let him take the kids alone for visits. Don't take her calls, don't call her back. Stand down on the relationship, let your dh handle it.

This. Especially since there’s a chance she’ll follow you wherever. And stop meeting all the demands to meet if it’s building up resentment.

Anonymous wrote:I changed CONTINENTS and put an OCEAN between my mother and myself.

She wants me to put her first, or she wants to be first in my life... I'm not sure which, or if it makes any difference. She didn't want me to marry or have kids and basically do anything except accumulate advanced degrees and have the career she never had. She threw several fits when my husband and I expressed the desire to visit my dear MIL for a couple of days instead of spending our entire vacation time with her. She likes to be generous but it always comes with strings attached. I could go on.

Hence the utility of the Atlantic ocean!

Our relationship works by phone (if I ignore all her ridiculous anxieties and prejudices about many different topics) and we get along for about a 10 day visit until I absolutely need to put either one of us on a plane.

Me too! Toward the end it got soooo bad. MIL would come storming over unannounced to declare me an unfit mother for one reason of another. Once, it was because I had the temerity to throw out the gross trash (wads of used paper, rusty tin cans, slimy pieces of odd plastic, etc) that she had collected with DS on a hike through the woods, another time it was because I was unhappy when she put my son in a dumpster to collect art materials - he emerged with a huge gash across his chest from a rusted nail. She went from being annoying to beyond nuts.

Anonymous wrote:Your MIL sounds like a bonafide narcissist. The expecting your parents to visit her is a dead giveaway. She sees her son as an extension of herself. In her mind, your DH and her are one. So his house (your house) is her house, his money is her money, etc.

Horrifying.

I'd do a 100% cut off. No longer welcome in the house, DH can have lunch with her once a week if he wants to. I just wouldn't tolerate that crap.

You described my MIL. She was doing what OP's is, too, also trying to run his life, own him, and make him put her first at our expense. We live near her, and we're not moving, so we have had to do a kind of unspoken cut off. We don't give her any info, and we see her very rarely, and only in the most neutral situations. He disentangled his finances from hers, and started saying no to everything she tried to engineer and every attention-seeking gambit. She blames me, but he did it himself, with the help of therapists. With that poison-filled umbilical cord finally unwrapped from around his neck, he's happy and free for the first time in his life.

Your MIL sounds like a bonafide narcissist. The expecting your parents to visit her is a dead giveaway. She sees her son as an extension of herself. In her mind, your DH and her are one. So his house (your house) is her house, his money is her money, etc.

Horrifying.

I'd do a 100% cut off. No longer welcome in the house, DH can have lunch with her once a week if he wants to. I just wouldn't tolerate that crap.

Anonymous wrote:I changed CONTINENTS and put an OCEAN between my mother and myself.

She wants me to put her first, or she wants to be first in my life... I'm not sure which, or if it makes any difference. She didn't want me to marry or have kids and basically do anything except accumulate advanced degrees and have the career she never had. She threw several fits when my husband and I expressed the desire to visit my dear MIL for a couple of days instead of spending our entire vacation time with her. She likes to be generous but it always comes with strings attached. I could go on.

Hence the utility of the Atlantic ocean!

Our relationship works by phone (if I ignore all her ridiculous anxieties and prejudices about many different topics) and we get along for about a 10 day visit until I absolutely need to put either one of us on a plane.

I got ya beat. With me and my MIL, it is the pacific. Saved the marriage, that ocean did.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your post just makes me anxious! I think your mil is depressed and anxious and needs friends. My parents would throw a fit if I told them they needed to visit with my mil at her house when they come to visit me. She's way too involved and interested in your lives.

If this was my mother (not mil) I would tell her flat out that she doesn't seem happy to me and that she needs to develop her own interests, activities, friends and possibly get on antidepressants. I'm able to discuss things nicely with my family. If this were my mil I'd be in the same predicament as you because dh would never say a word.

My husband talks to her constantly about needing to find happiness outside of us. She's been a widow for 15 years, retired for 20 years, and my husband has tried to get her to date. True story: she finally let him convince her to join that match site for older people. Literally every time a man messaged her, she would tell my DH that she needs him to come help her write back. It was a disaster and my husband obviously didn't take the bait. He still encourages her to travel, find friends, boyfriends, etc, but I'm convinced she'll never find anything in this world as interesting as my husband.

This doesn't seem that unreasonable. If she is unused to dating and e-mail then this seems like a normal request. I have had co-workers who've asked me to look at responses when they have first started with online dating services. Honestly you sound too oversensitive and are seeing monsters in mirrors when they aren't even there.

She asked him to come over every time she got a message. When he declined to do so, she shut her dating account down.