Seeing her family that often isn’t weird at all in my book. I know a lot of adults that keep in touch with their parents and siblings. If you don’t live far away, why not?
The call was intrusive, yes, but on the other hand, it wasn’t to you.
If she is talking about you behind your back to your wife, you have the right to ask her to say it to your face.
If you aren’t willing to do that, then I would say she’s not the only one with problems. Deal.
My own ex-MIL was fine, but no matter what I’m not going to complain because even though he’s my XH now, without my MIL my own children wouldn’t be here, so I’m just going to STFU and smile for her. Age and life’s trials deserve a little respect in my opinion.
And yes, Cell Guy wins the thread, sadly for him. I’m sorry about your in-laws, CG. That’s awful.
Umm, my first thought at reading this (and this is not something I typically think) was “wins the thread!”
But then I re-read. Being married to the woman with the worst mother is not the same as having the worst mother-in-law. My mom says awful, hurtful things to my sister and me with alarming frequency, but she’s perfectly civil to our husbands. (Sometimes just barely, but still civil.)
Until I hear that she told you she wished you dead I think I have to give the win to Lacunae Matata
Regarding the OP, we seem as a group to be discounting the role that the gossipy nag who narced on** Lancia**'s wife. Had she not been told your wife skipped church would MIL have asked anyone? Could your MIL’s problem with the situation be “Because of you I had to get an earful from Busy Body Helen!”? Every church seems to have one of those, and I know my heart sinks when I see her name on the caller ID.
I’m not saying your MIL isn’t out of line, but I’m not yet convinced she’s the worst.
Wife attending same church as her mother and sister? Completely normal.
Wife seeing her mother and sister 4-5 times a week? Above the norm, but not unheard of, and apparently normal for her. Some people’s major social outlet is their family or their church. It’s no worse than going to the bar 4-5 times a week. If it bothers you so much in your wife, why did you marry her?
And, we’re just hearing your side of the story. It’s possible that a more neutral version is that your MIL happened to be talking with one of her friends from church, and the friend mentioned that she hadn’t seen your wife in church that Sunday and wondered if something was wrong—was she sick?—so her mother called your wife to check on her.
MIL may well be evil, but you sure haven’t proved your case.
Wait, if your mother-in-law is truly the “worst MIL ever,” how can any of us be dealing with the worst MIL ever? Unless we’re also dealing with her, that is.
Tried that once. When she asked my mother condescendingly “What are you going to do about that daughter of yours?” I was mentally tallying my bank balance to raise bail for the assault charge…
Besides, my own mother doesn’t come clean my house. I don’t want anyone moving my shit around for me, even with the best of intentions.
Mine isn’t evil. She’s good; she’s just TOO MUCH. She’s very good at left-handed compliments like “that little bit of grey in your hair makes you look so distinguished!” and she’s a social worker and counselor and she’s never off duty. I can’t say “What nice weather we’ve been having!” without getting “And how does that make you feel? What does that mean to you?”
I told my husband once that after spending the day with his mother I came home feeling as though I’d been beaten with an empathy stick.
She’s close with her family, they see each other a lot. They all seem to be happy with it, so what’s the problem? If it’s an issue for you, shouldn’t you have been aware of this trait before you married? I mean it sounds like it’d be hard not to notice.
The only real issue is being snitched on, about not attending church (tres Christian, by the way!). And your wife seems to feel this is acceptable and evidence of caring.
Where is the intrusive? MIL likely called, knowing full well, wifey would see it as care and concern for her. Which she did. Not seeing intrusion. (For me, yeah it would be. But it’s clearly not for her.)
My mother’s mother got along fine with my dad, but she used to get my uncle to drive her to our home and she would proceed to drive my mom nuts with cooking and cleaning (my mom’s cooking and housekeeping left nothing to be desired), just because she had nothing else to do. Grandma would also do things like rearranging the food in the cupboards and the silverware in the drawer (and Mom would have to put it all back after she left). Grandma, get a hobby! Then my mom would be all wound up for days afterwards and we’d all have to deal with it. Thanks again, Grandma!
I used to have a supervisor years ago who saw her daughter several times a week (they lived in the same small town), and they talked on the phone at least once or twice a day. They were more like girlfriends than mother and daughter, which personally I find slightly disgusting for some reason. What made it worse was that the daughter was married to a guy who found it hard to find work (he had a drinking problem and had his own construction business; he was cheap because he wasn’t very good and took forever to finish a job) and was possibly cheating on her (how do these married losers always find girlfriends?). Yeah. Anyway the daughter and mother used to band together against him and bitch about him and gang up on him, which solved nothing except to make him more willing to take construction jobs out of state (thus making possible the infidelity). They were all family-values conservatives, though, so divorce was out of the question.
There’s more going on here than just too much socialization with family or a difference in opinion of what constitutes too much concern. Worst MIL ever, maybe not, but that sounds just this side of openly hostile to me.
I tend to agree though that the biggest offense here was nosy church lady tattling to MIL in the first place.
My mother-in-law can be pretty evil (she once made a child appear out of thin air in order to foil plans I had made that she didn’t like), but she’s mostly OK.
Perhaps I should scale back my assessment from “worst MIL ever” to “nosy, interfering MIL who needs to STFU for a decade or two”.
She hasn’t always been this way. My wife’s family has always been close, but this… I dunno what to call her behavior… has been getting worse over the past couple of years. My wife runs a daycare, and on top of that she helps organize training for other daycare providers. So she stays busy with stuff that doesn’t involve ‘family’. As near as I can tell her mom is threatend by this. God only knows why. So she (my MIL) guilt trips my wife whenever my wife doesn’t follow some schedule that MIL approves of. This behavior is getting worse. She didn’t pull this shit when we got married.
I’ll add that the nosy church lady, while a pain in the ass in a sorta peripheral sense, isn’t the issue. A lot of people have dealt with office gossips, it doesn’t take much to simply ignore it.
That would be very annoying to me, too, but I think it’s up to your wife to set some boundaries with her mother. Maybe you could encourage her to do that in a kind, loving way.
You didn’t mention it, but did your mom beat your Grandma within an inch of her life for this? It drives me crazy when my mom comes to visit and she puts the dishrag in the wrong place - it’s MY KITCHEN! Yeah, I know, I’m very territorial.
But it’s not really your issue, from the sounds of it. I believe you, that she’s getting worse, wasn’t always like this. It’s still between her and her daughter to work out, though annoying to you.
When you wife grows so weary of this that she can’t take it any more she’ll lay down some boundaries. Until that day arrives, I dare say, you’re stuck with how it is.
OK, the start of Alzheimer’s here. Sit your wife down and have a calm discussion about what you guys will do when it gets bad enough that the MIL has to be put into a home. Having such a discussion beforehand is always helpful.
It should be easier for you to put up with MIL’s interfering since you understand it’s not just her, but the disease causing this.
It’s a long story. We were in the middle of a 2-week-plus visit at my wife’s parents’ house. During these visits my wife and I usually go off for a couple of days by ourselves, leaving the kids with their grandparents (at their insistence). This time, I had the idea that we would take the kids with us the first day and their grandfather would bring them back to the house (so my wife, the kids, Grandpa, and I would go and the kids and Grandpa would return the same day). My wife and I would return two days later.
Grandma had her own ideas. She wanted us to take their car (leaving them without a car for three days) and not take the kids at all. I told Grandma that I appreciated the offer of the car, but we wouldn’t need it once we got there so it would just sit unused until we returned. I wanted the kids to see the place we were going, and I thought that Grandma could use a break from the kids because she had just worked two twelve-hour shifts at the hospital in the prior two days.
Grandma still didn’t agree, but she said “Fine. Do whatever you want,” which should have let me know that I was ultimately going to pay for crossing her. I just didn’t expect payback to come so soon.
Immediately after Grandma “agreed” I told the kids about the plan. They were excited and started getting ready to go. Then I heard Grandma calling for the kids. I went to see what she wanted. Grandma was standing there with the girl from next door, who was there to play with my children. In the 45 seconds between when I told Grandma what we were going to do and when I told the kids to get ready, she managed to go next door (which is about 200 feet away), collect this child, and have her back at the house to foil my plan.
I knew I was defeated. I found Grandpa and said, “It’s as if she willed that child into existence.” He smiled knowingly, having been on the receiving end of her evil many times himself.
In the end, she came up with a plan in which they drove the kids to meet us on the final day of our getaway, they left the car with us so we could drive back, and Grandma and Grandpa took the bus home. I don’t see how that plan was any better (it seemed markedly worse, since my plan didn’t have anyone stuck on a bus for hours), but it was her plan, not mine, and that seemed to be all that mattered to her.