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Dear Amy: My mother-in-law is causing a rift in the family that's hurting my husband.
We haven't been married long, and his divorce was a contentious one. His ex managed to delay every step of the divorce, and went after everything she could, including the house, which he ended up leaving to her just to bring the proceedings to an end.
My husband cried when he told his parents years ago how unhappy he was in the marriage, and his mother's response was only, "How will this affect the grandchildren?" While they were divorcing, she took the grand "children" (they're twins in their early 20s) and their mother to Disney World! Most recently, she took her grandchildren out to dinner on their birthday with – you guessed it – the ex, and not her son/us.
He and I have asked her and the rest of his family to wean off from socializing with the ex. My MIL claims she's afraid the ex will cut her and her husband off from their grandchildren because the ex is very manipulative and the twins are very immature (they don't drive, live with their mom, and have no life).
The rest of the extended family has respected our wishes to cut ties with the ex, but not my MIL, and this has been very hurtful to my husband. He feels like he doesn't have his own parents' support. (His father is passive and let's his wife do whatever she wants.)
Please advise us on what we can do. We do not want this dynamic to continue.
– Disturbed
Dear Disturbed: The way you describe this situation, your husband’s ex is the gatekeeper, controlling access to his grown children – or at least, your mother-in-law perceives it that way.
Ongoing contact with your husband’s ex makes you uncomfortable, but you can’t insist that it stop. Unless your mother-in-law is inviting the ex to family events, forcing her into proximity with you and your husband, you really have no say in how she chooses to conduct this relationship.
Your husband should work on maintaining a relationship with his sons. If he has a good relationship with them, his mother might not have to go through his ex to spend time with her grandsons.
https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/askamy/s-2755271?fs
We haven't been married long, and his divorce was a contentious one. His ex managed to delay every step of the divorce, and went after everything she could, including the house, which he ended up leaving to her just to bring the proceedings to an end.
My husband cried when he told his parents years ago how unhappy he was in the marriage, and his mother's response was only, "How will this affect the grandchildren?" While they were divorcing, she took the grand "children" (they're twins in their early 20s) and their mother to Disney World! Most recently, she took her grandchildren out to dinner on their birthday with – you guessed it – the ex, and not her son/us.
He and I have asked her and the rest of his family to wean off from socializing with the ex. My MIL claims she's afraid the ex will cut her and her husband off from their grandchildren because the ex is very manipulative and the twins are very immature (they don't drive, live with their mom, and have no life).
The rest of the extended family has respected our wishes to cut ties with the ex, but not my MIL, and this has been very hurtful to my husband. He feels like he doesn't have his own parents' support. (His father is passive and let's his wife do whatever she wants.)
Please advise us on what we can do. We do not want this dynamic to continue.
– Disturbed
Dear Disturbed: The way you describe this situation, your husband’s ex is the gatekeeper, controlling access to his grown children – or at least, your mother-in-law perceives it that way.
Ongoing contact with your husband’s ex makes you uncomfortable, but you can’t insist that it stop. Unless your mother-in-law is inviting the ex to family events, forcing her into proximity with you and your husband, you really have no say in how she chooses to conduct this relationship.
Your husband should work on maintaining a relationship with his sons. If he has a good relationship with them, his mother might not have to go through his ex to spend time with her grandsons.
https://www.arcamax.com/healthandspirit/lifeadvice/askamy/s-2755271?fs
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The first is "Haven't you and your husband ever heard that living well is the best revenge?" and the second is "Why exactly are you the one sending this letter? HIS mom, HIS kids, HIS ex - let HIM send it!"
But seriously, MIL hanging out with Ex should not be "causing a rift in the family" unless Husband chooses to let that happen. I agree that it's weird and off-putting that she decided to take Ex and Kids to Disney (and, presumably, LW and Husband weren't invited) but, seriously, the best response is to act as though you don't care. And if you want to take the kids out to dinner on their birthday, the thing to do is to invite them out and not wait so long that MIL and Ex can make the plans without you.
Of course, for all I know, LW and Husband were invited on both these occasions and for some reason LW forgot to mention it.
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I can actually understand this one, because I see it frequently with my brother and SIL. There are certain things in our family that really upset my brother; these almost always involve our mother, who almost definitely has an undiagnosed cluster B personality disorder. It upsets my SIL to see my brother so upset but he doesn't want to talk about it, says things are never going to change and to just leave it alone. So instead she'll talk about things with me and my three sisters and ask for advice about if there's anything she can do to diffuse the situation, or if we know anything she can do to help our brother. My brother has no idea that my SIL does this, and we will never tell him because we know he doesn't want her trying to do anything, just like we know she's just trying to figure things out
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Maybe he inherited his father's passiveness and lets his wife do whatever she wants.
I think it's unreasonable to demand that MIL cuts ties with the ex. I can understand her fear of losing access to her grandchildren. And yes, LW, you two could be a bit more proactive in maintaining contact with the children. (Where did Amy deduce they were boys, or would that have been cut from the letter?)
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You sure don’t like these kids, LW. I’m glad grandma seems to be in their court.
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The kids are in their twenties. They may not be the most functional adults according to LW, but they are adults; they are capable of making their own choices. And it's husband's job to manage that relationship, not LW's.
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Yeah, I thought that too.
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ESH, if this is an accurate relaying of events (which, as some of you point out, it may not be).
Alternately there's a passle of missing reasons about the divorce. Taking your son's wife to Disney while said son and wife are divorcing contentiously might just be a massive dick move (even if you're friends with the daughter, that one is a little over the top), or it might be that your son is being a jerk and you're siding with the wife for good reasons. Or it could be for practical reasons that the LW doesn't list.
But based on the words on the paper, this is not a family for hanging out with, this is a family for laying down and avoiding.
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"Unless your mother-in-law is inviting the ex to family events, forcing her into proximity with you and your husband, you really have no say in how she chooses to conduct this relationship."
Maybe there was additional information edited out of the letter that contributed to this answer, but did Amy miss the part where MIL IS inviting the ex to family events? And then excluding her son? The question was about how to deal with MIL and make her realize how much her actions are hurting her son, not her husband's relationship with his children.
Of course, there could be missing factors that contribute to the prioritization of the ex - maybe husband had a torrid affair, or was physically abusive, or gambled away all of the family savings. Maybe MIL is trying to show grandkids and ex that she does not approve of her son's decisions. Who knows.
I saw a couple of other comments speculating about "We haven't been married long, and his divorce was a contentious one. His ex managed to delay every step of the divorce" - I swear I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, but I have very close relationships with people whove been through situations that could be described very similarly to this so I want to provide additional perspective.
My sister M was 23, living in Hawaii, dating a man in the Marine Corps. They found out she was pregnant a couple months before he was scheduled to be restationed, so in order for her to be able to move with him and for him to be an active father in their child's life, they got married. Unfortunately, M miscarried a few weeks later, but she still moved to North Carolina with her husband. A couple months after the move (and about 7 months after getting married), they admitted that their relationship just was not working and decided that they needed to get divorced, but NC requires a couple to be legally separated - which includes having completely separate residences - for a full year prior to filing for divorce. M and her husband had just spent a massive amount of money to relocate and to rent a place, plus M was having delays with securing permanent employment, so they still had to live together for another two months. M moved out and started dating just to have a social life, met someone she really hit it off with about 3 months after the decision to split up and 1 months after the legal separation; by the time she could finally file for divorce, new boyfriend had moved in with her and they'd been together for a year. M was just really screwed over by the laws of the state she moved to.
My friend B bought a house with his girlfriend 4 years into their relationship; one year later, she moved out of the house while he was at work. This started a lengthy legal battle regarding ownership of the house, because he wanted to buy her out of it and she thought they should sell and split the profit. She kept turning down every offer he made and demanding more money from him; he eventually found out that she knew she wanted to leave him 6 months before they bought the house but that she stuck around because she thought it was an opportunity to get money out of him and his family (she'd bragged about this to a friend, who ended up relaying it to B). Between the information the friend shared and video evidence B had of his ex stealing his mail and entering the house when he wasn't home, B eventually ended up getting his ex to agree to an amount that was roughly $3,000 higher than what he'd initially offered; of course, by this point it had been almost an entire year and she'd accrued thousands of dollars in legal fees as well. B spent time on dating sites during this entire ordeal which is actually how we met, but the contentious breakup was well underway before I met him.
Just a little food for though.
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