Most parents expect their biggest house rule battles to be with their kids, not their spouse’s parent living in the next room. She finally had to draw the line with her mother-in-law and tell her to find somewhere else to live, but the news went over like a lead balloon.
How do you stay firm on protecting your home and kids when a relative starts weaponizing family loyalty to manipulate you into backing down?
This woman lives with her husband, kids, and her mother-in-law. While her mother-in-law adores their kids, who are little, she always goes behind their backs on how they want to parent them.
She and her husband have endlessly spoken to her mother-in-law about the routines and boundaries surrounding the kids, as well as their safety and how they should be eating, but her mother-in-law does whatever she wants without heeding their wishes.
Whenever she and her husband call her out, she accuses them of being unappreciative of everything she has done for them all. But she and her husband never ask her mother-in-law to do the things she lists out that she feels they’re ungrateful about.
“We’ve tried over and over to approach things respectfully and find compromise, but it feels impossible because she takes any disagreement as a personal attack instead of a conversation,” she explained.
“One of the biggest issues for me is how she interacts with our 6-year-old. She speaks to her very aggressively at times, is constantly overly sarcastic and rude toward her, and will literally bicker back and forth with her like they’re equals in an argument instead of adult vs. child.”
“It creates such a tense environment in the house, and I hate seeing my daughter spoken to that way.”
Needless to say, her mother-in-law has made it stressful at home, and it also doesn’t help that her mother-in-law slams doors, storms around, and hides out for days in her bedroom when things don’t go her way.
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So, this is why she and her husband recently told her mother-in-law that she had a one-year notice to rehome herself, because they’re done living with her.
Additionally, her mother-in-law is cagey about money and irresponsible with it, which makes her and her husband concerned. They knew she would need a lot of time to prepare her finances for moving out.
Anyway, since telling her mother-in-law that she has to find somewhere else to live when their lease is up, her mother-in-law is insisting that she’s heartbroken and betrayed over the eviction.
“She’s laying a lot of guilt on him emotionally, saying she can’t believe he would do this to her. What makes it more complicated is that, according to my husband, she wasn’t a very emotionally present mother during his childhood, so now it feels manipulative that she’s suddenly weaponizing the ‘family loyalty’ angle,” she continued.
“We are NOT throwing her out overnight. We gave her an entire year’s notice specifically to avoid putting her in a bad situation. We just genuinely believe our marriage, parenting, peace, and children would benefit from having our own home and healthier boundaries.”
“But she insists family should live together no matter what, and acts like we owe her indefinitely because she helped us.”
Her mother-in-law has truly overstayed her welcome, and good for her for giving her an eviction notice (because that is what it is, let’s not sugarcoat it).
It’s high time for her to put her foot down, or she’s going to be spending the remainder of her life living with her cantankerous mother-in-law.
A year’s notice, by the way, is more than generous. So the next time her mother-in-law tries to talk about it, she should refuse to do so and ask her husband to be a united front against her mother-in-law’s crocodile tears.
Do you think she’s doing the right thing by telling her mother-in-law to pack her bags?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
