Hi all.
Normally I come on here for my mum, but of late its been DH’s mum who is getting under our skin. She got worse as soon as- you guessed it- we told her that I’m pregnant.
DH is the “screw up” out of the 3 brothers, and his mum treats him as the lesser of the 3. He’s the only one who didn’t go to university, and he has a less prestigious job than the other 2. As far as she’s concerned, “giving her a grandchild”, and the first grandchild, is going to be his biggest achievement in life to date.
DH has been ill the last few days with some sort of stomach bug, and because he works in a kitchen he is not allowed to be there if he is ill (food hygiene laws) and can’t be in the building for 48 hours after his last incident of sickness. Friday and Monday he went in and was sick again so was sent home. He should be back on Wednesday.
He has been to his GP and they said it sounds like a bug and there’s not much they can do and they won’t do anything unless it persists.
This morning he got this message off his mum:
Have you gone to work today? If not, you should go and see the doctor and get yourself better because you need to keep this job. You have the biggest responsibility of your life coming and you need to provide for [q_o_t_n] when she’s on maternity and for the baby. I’ve been worrying and it’s keeping me awake as you can probably tell 🙄 I know [q_o_t_n]’s mum was planning to give her some money but you can’t rely on gifts forever xxx
(My nan apparently plans to give me some money to make up for my loss of pay during mat leave, but with our savings and his income we should be fine. I have no idea how his mum knows about this unless my mum told her)
He showed this message to me and shrugged and said this is how she’s being at the moment. Minutes later she phoned him and kept phoning him until he picked up. She then had a completely normal conversation with him about his step dad coming up to see us this weekend while he gave 1 word answers and was clearly ticked off. I feel like this was her sweeping it all under the carpet. He feels that setting consequences isn’t worth it because when he does she has a tizzy then acts like everything is normal until it is.
Is this reasonable and are we overreacting? How would you handle this message? What should we/he say? Im considering sending a message myself as she doesn’t respect much that comes directly from him.
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I’m mean it’s not coming from a terrible place I guess but she needs to stay in her lane and stop criticising her son.
My mil was like this, she let her anxiety run the show. If it were me I’d just tell her that you both have it under control, end of convo.
Her text may have come from a place of concern, but it was definitely patronizing. Your husband was already doing the right thing, and she acted like he wasn’t even trying.
My MIL would try to “suggest” things, and my go-to reply was, “We have it covered.” She did not need to know details. She just needed to be reminded that we are adults who are capable of handling our own affairs.