I was much more comfortable having people around when I had our second child, but the first, no way. When the walk to the bathroom in the morning was a rush due to leaking blood, with the drip drip drip of breastmilk from both sides, the last thing I would have wanted was to run into a 15 year old relative along the way. I got a couple hours sleep at night, was in a complete haze, and basically spent the first couple of weeks with no shirt on. I’m all for privacy and immediate family bonding, especially the first time when everything is a shock.
I didn’t say anything about the dynamic between you and your husband, so you must be confusing me with some other poster, but if your husband was giving his family the impression that they were welcome (and if he expected them and wanted them), then he functionally invited them, and your correction on that matter is pedantic.
You’re obviously getting all the reassurance and back-patting that you were looking for in this thread, so my opinion doesn’t matter.
Come on, Dio, this isn’t a routine social visit under normal circumstances. Putting aside who vetoes whom, do you really not see that the wishes of a woman who just gave birth should prevail on the matter of who gets to stay with them overnight?
No way are you being selfish. YOU are the one who is going through pregnancy, labor and delivery, and recovery, not to mention a rollercoaster of hormones that will bring joy and tears and time where you will want to be alone with your family to get adjusted. The in-laws need to respect your wishes and stay at a hotel. IMO, there is no need for you to compromise on this.
Sure, it’s your husband’s house too, and his baby too, but the mama is the one who is doing everything and having everything done to her for days and then coming home with this new little life. You’re going to need one-on-one time with your baby to bond and get breastfeeding going, and figuring out what kind of schedule your life is going to be on for those first few weeks. No way in hell do you need an audience for this.
Even if they do see it as selfish, they need to respect that yeah, this time right now IS all about you. And once the baby comes, it will be about the baby and you. If you’re like the vast majority of new moms, you will do the majority of care of the newborn infant. If you want help, you can ask for it, but the last thing you need is a MIL hovering over you telling you how to do everything. It’s your prerogative to do things the way you see fit, and to make your own mistakes. And your husband really needs to back you on this. It’s hard for me to imagine why he can’t see your POV and tell his mother to back off.
It’s great that she’s interested and wants to be a good grandma, but if you don’t set boundaries now you’ll be in an Everybody Loves Raymond situation (only without the laughs) from here to eternity.
There are laughs in Everybody Loves Raymond?
I understand totally.
But I think this is a situation that must be handled delicately.
“We’d appreciate it if you could stay at a hotel,” might be taken the wrong way. I know, I know. Their problem, not yours. But mothers don’t ever see it that way. They will think, “That bitch is trying to boss me around and not let me see my grandbaby! Let’s start some shit-drama over this!”
Compromise: You tell husband that his mother and brother they are more than welcome to stay, but they will be put to work. If the house is a mess, mother can’t complain. Mother will be expected to make meals and do some baby-watching while mother (and father) get some sleep. You, the OP, shall not be expected to be hostess to the mostess. Because you will be busy and exhausted and don’t need to juggle baby plus m-in-law plus bro-in-law.
If this comes off as a little tizzy, too fuckin’ bad. When relatives come to visit a new mother, they should already know their labor will be more appreciated than their actual presence. That period after you just gave birth to a watermelon you deserve to be a little self-centered.
So I would put the ball in their court. Have the husband do all the talking. “We want you to come…we need you to come…but if you stay with us, we are putting you to work. No vacation for you, sorry.”
Mom might enjoy being able to “mother” and she and the OP might form a stronger bond. Bro might not like being in this situation, but perhaps that will keep him from zoning out in front of the TV and being in the way.
Baby issues aside, my husband and I both have the veto over who stays at our house: if either of us were that uncomfortable with a particular visitor, they would get their way, because we put each others comfort above all others. Aren’t most marriages like that?
I do agree with Dio that you need to make it your husband’s job to run interference with you, and if he could agree to do that effectively, it might make them staying there more palatable. He needs to be the one either managing meals/picking up/serving snacks, all that, OR he needs to be getting them to do those things. He could say to them “Look, she cares so much about your opinion that she won’t be able to keep from stressing about things if she sees them undone, so we need to get there before her every single time. We can’t give her time to worry about anything, which means we have to get stuff done before she notices it’s needed. If we don’t, she’ll wear herself into exhaustion trying to be super-mom because she feels like you all deserve it”. If he’s capable of taking that role seriously, it might be ok.
If you all have a traditional gender roles type relationship, he may honestly not realize how exhausting playing host can be: how you barely get one meal cleaned up before it’s time to start planning for the next one, how much clutter house guests generate, etc. If he takes on responsibility for these things, he may come to better understand your reluctance.
I’d make sure she understood that these were special circumstances and that you don’t expect her to stay at a hotel for every future visit. She may be worried about that.
The part that bothers me is that no one actually invited MIL. She announced that she was coming and when she was coming. Already suggests some boundary issues. OP might need to listen to her instincts with this one. Husband agreed, even if not totally understanding her reasons, so unless we’re suggesting he’s under her thumb, we have to assume he’s a willing partner to this decision.
She’s producing a human being out of her body. That’s plenty veto-worthy.
Or are you now championing “Biblical marriage”? 
If he does stay there, is there somewhere else he can sleep? And as for him playing video games all night- to quote the great thespian Will Smith- “Aw, Hell No!” It’s stuff like that where Hubby needs to nut up or shut up.
You’re very, very seriously not being selfish here, OP, for all the good reasons listed before: you’re going to have just gone through an extremely demanding physical experience (best case scenario), your hormones will be going nuts, your body will be sore and behaving very weirdly, your sleep rhythms will be thrown into pure chaos, you and your husband will be working out what it means to be parents, you are going to need every bit of comfort and relaxation you can possibly find. Allowing the visit right at the beginning but with the buffer of their not staying every minute is an excellent compromise. Frankly, your MIL sounds like she needs to respect your boundaries way more.
I still remember when my in-laws wanted to stop by and visit when our firstborn was 9 days old. We had only been home for a few days (they had visited us in the hospital, so this wasn’t the first time they had seen him), and they called that they were going to be driving past our town on the way to friends, and would be there in half an hour. I jumped up, got cleanish, got dressed, and needed to vacuum the living room just as the baby starting crying. I have a vivid and irritable memory of vacuuming while nursing him. Of course everyone wants to see and dote on the baby, but they should all be considerate of the impact they have on you.
I was in a somewhat similar situation, and we did it like this:
MIL stayed in our house with her son, my husband, while I was in the hospital. She got to visit us in the hospital a few short times, but mostly she got to be with her son when he got home at night after work and after hospital visits. It was nice for my husband not to return to an empty home, but to have his mom there.
A few hours after I got home, she left again. She left the house sparkling. It worked out fine.
Well, I think you deserve some congratulations! You have done an admirable job of setting some boundaries, based on the needs of your small family, and that’s definitely praiseworthy! You would seem to still be open minded, about a closer relationship with your MIL, a good thing, and reflective of a maturity that does you proud, in my opinion.
Keeping that goal in mind, your actions here, will serve you well and were, to my mind, essential. The importance of ‘alone time’, for your family, if it’s highly prioritized by you, needs to be respected by her. While this may not align with her vision, of her role, it’s somewhat key that she be made aware that her role is to fit in with the way you live. Not the reverse.
I think you have done a lot of things right, including letting him deliver the news, that was as it should be. I think you’re going to do just fine. And I won’t be surprised to learn you do develop a healthy/manageable relationship with your MIL.
Give yourself a little pat on the back, you deserve it!
You’re about to give birth, which means you can demand whatever you want. You can insisnt that your MIL appear at the hospital in full clown makeup riding a unicycle, *and she damn well better do it. *
Also, you can say whatever you think about anyone, and blame it on hormones. No-one will hold it against you.
You are in a tough situation, I was there once too. Small house, 2 weeks past my due date which fell on the same weekend the inlaws had planned to visit. In advance I scouted B&B’s, hotels and motels in a 50 mile radius, visiting a few in person to be sure the accomodations were up to standards. I turned over all this info to the out of towners but in the end, and I have no idea how this happened, they invited themselves to stay with us. So I had my SIL, BIL and MIL arrive the day I got home from the hospital.
It really sucked for the most part, for them really, as I couldn’t be bothered to care what they ate, where they slept or nothing.
The highlight of the visit was when my cat pissed on my SIL’s open suitcase as they were getting ready to leave.
But your situation sounds a little different, let his Mom bond with her son and new grandbaby, make sure you know when they are leaving, hopefully after a day or two. In the meantime, take the attitude that they are there to help YOU out, and delegate everything.
I don’t know that I would say selfish, exactly, but kind of short-sighted in thinking about how this will affect your husband and future interactions, yeah.
It sounds like you guys are already in the “she doesn’t like me” feedback loop where you treat her a bit distantly because you’re not close and she thinks you don’t like her because you treat her a bit distantly–booting her out of your house, using your husband as the messenger-boy, and citing her much-anticipated FIRST LITTLE GIRL IN THE FAMILY!!! as the reason is going to look to her like you never wanted her to stay in your house and now you finally have an excuse to get rid of her. It’s pretty much pouring a gas can on the “your wife hates me” fire your husband has to listen to, and believe me he’ll be having to listen to it for years and years to come.
I’m not saying that not wanting extra people living in your house right after you give birth is in any way unreasonable. But I think delegating your husband to deal with this is probably the worst way to handle it. Calling her yourself and having an honest talk about how much it bothers you to leave somebody to fend for themselves when they visit, and how you just don’t know what kind of shape you’re going to be in, and you don’t want them to have a hotel thrust upon them at the last minute if you’re not fine because it’s not fair to them…I think that would probably go a long way toward defusing the situation. Hell, if it was a dishonest talk and you wanted to ham it up and burst into tears during the conversation and blame it on pregnancy hormones, you could totally get by with that too.
I think the husband handling it was not just ok, but spot on. They made this decision together (she saying what she needed and why and husband being ok with it and backing her up) and by husband calling it shows his mom that it’s not just the wife’s issue, but theirs together.
The fact that MIL is upset by a reasonable request (they can stay all day, but give us some evening time alone) is a red flag that a united front and boundaries should be set. I think a compassionate MIL might have chuckled at the help DIL was missing out on, but not have been offended and felt she had the right to give her son an earful.
When my daughter was born - she was born a few days before my own birthday. My mother in law is a very generous person who felt that my birthday was going to get lost in all of this and so she decided to come over and visit and celebrate my birthday and give me all the help I needed. I was in tears. It was the LAST thing I needed and EVERYTHING went wrong.
I was exhausted, I wasn’t sleeping - and there was little she could do to “help with the baby” since the issue was that we were breastfeeding CONSTANTLY.
They decided that so I wouldn’t need to cook they’d order out. But for some reason when I said I wanted whatever I wanted (I can’t even remember what it was) everyone else wanted something else - so they came over for MY birthday and I ended up not even getting the meal I wanted. I don’t think when it came time to talk about what to eat for dinner they even remembered that the whole reason they’d all descended on me was because it was MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY.
They hung around for far too long (so they could be helpful) and since there wasn’t anything for them to do, they sat at the kitchen table and talked. While I laid on the couch. I could hear them talk, but no one was making any effort to talk to me, they were talking to each other. But they also weren’t letting me nap. Going up to my room would have meant taking the baby with me - and while there wasn’t any expectation I should “entertain” - the whole purpose for the visit was supposed to be about me and the baby - regardless of their behavior, I felt that I couldn’t leave.
There wasn’t any housework that needed to be done - my own mother had swept in and taken care of that - nor was it set up to be a housework sort of day - it was a sit around, drink coffee, and chat sort of day. Had she swept in and started doing a load of laundry, made sure that I always had something to drink, been considerate of my exhaustion, and let me choose my own dinner - I would have still had someone else in my space.
It was that in my exhausted state, every little inconsideration was magnified. It was a HORRIBLE day - my daughter is twelve and I can feel the tears just thinking about it. I also had fairly significant PPD - which was not helping.
People are different and families are different. Some people like their space - I’m one of them. Some people in times of need or crisis come in and get stuff done and then leave - my mother is one of those (and that is how I respond to people in need). My mother in law is a comforter. When she is in need she wants someone just to come and be there - and so that is what she gives. And its the last thing I want. I want you to come in, help out, and get out. And her husband - a wonderful man - is someone who today would probably be diagnosed with Aspbergers. He does not pick up on social cues.
I am not to be pitied because I like my space - although it took my mother in law another five years to figure that out. I love my mother in law - we are not tight (like yours, she is excessively close to her son). But she is not my mother - she had not at that time earned the right to see me vulnerable in a situation where I did not need that - had I had no other choice, and had she helped, it would have been helpful. But her idea of help wasn’t helpful - and I had other choices (my own mother, my husband) for help.
Had she moved in with me for any period of time, I probably would have had a nervous breakdown - seriously (remember, pretty severe PPD).
I don’t think you’re being selfish at all.
My mother’s idea of showing up to “help” consists of watching TV on the couch and occasionally threatening to do the dishes. She never actually does them. She will also complain that I don’t have the right brand/type/whatever of something she’s accustomed to using. The food I like to eat is “weird” (because there are fresh vegetables involved). Cooking = nuking a frozen block o’ crap.
With both of my sister’s kids, mom promised to stay with my sister for a few weeks to “help out.” What I described above is exactly what happened. My sister ended up still having to cook for and clean up after my mom, including getting her own dishes done. I believe she conceded that our mom threw a load of laundry in the washer maybe once toward the end of the visit.
I had surgery in December and mom wanted to come down here and stay with me to “help out.” I told her she was welcome to a couple days after the surgery (it was relatively minor in terms of recovery), but I wasn’t having here there the day of or even the day after. Because I knew it would go like that (having been forewarned by my sister): accepting mom’s “help” is really just like agreeing to feed, water, and take care of a small puppy when you’ve got far bigger fish to fry.
I don’t think it’s selfish to set firm boundaries, but also leaving the door open to change your mind if things don’t play out the way you think they will. It also sounds like you have somewhat of a communication issue with your DH if he can’t understand how having guests in the house 24/7 with a new baby could be a huge strain that you may not be up for at all. Perhaps the two of you should have a bit more of a heart to heart because I think he’s not grokking.
You know… I don’t think it would. When my mom invites herself (and my dad) to stay with us, which she does once or twice a year, my husband is free to veto it. He usually doesn’t, but I always tell her I’m going to check with him before I give her the green light. (My husband’s parents, being lovely people, do not invite themselves; they ask nicely and take rebuffs well. That being said, I did veto the last trip they proposed, being how it was between two other sets of friends/family visiting and I didn’t think I could handle it.)
Anyway. OP, I concur that you may well find it useful to have someone to e.g. do night feedings, but that’s something you can work out after the baby comes. And I FULLY agree with everyone else that a) you’re not being selfish – newborn babies are really hard and whatever makes your life easier is what you have to do, and b) it’s your husband’s job to run interference and to channel your mother-in-law’s energy into useful work 