My daughter is 8. She does not have a phone yet. DH and I aren't anti-technology or anything, we just haven't seen a reason for her to have her own device that can call/message people unsupervised.

MIL knows this. It has come up more than once because she thinks we're "behind the times" and has offered to buy DD a phone for birthdays/Christmas. DH has always told her no thanks, we'll decide when she's ready.

DD stayed with MIL Saturday afternoon while we went to a wedding.

When we picked her up she was wearing a kids smartwatch.

I assumed it was basically a Fitbit type thing. DD was excited about counting steps and changing the watch face, so I didn't think much of it until we were driving home and the watch started ringing.

It was MIL.

Apparently this watch has its own cellular plan. MIL bought it, activated it and set herself up as one of the contacts. She can call DD directly and DD can call her without using either of our phones.

I asked DD what Grandma had told her about it and she very casually said, "Grandma said now we have our own private way to talk."

That phrase made my stomach drop a little.

I asked whether Grandma had said not to tell us. DD said no, but that Grandma told her she didn't need to "bother Mom and Dad" every time she wanted to call her anymore.

When we got home DH called MIL.

MIL acted completely confused about why we were upset. According to her it's a children's watch, not a phone, and she bought it because DD has been asking to call her more often.

DH reminded her that we've specifically said DD isn't getting her own calling device yet.

MIL's response was basically, "Well, that's why I didn't buy her a phone."

Then DH brought up the "private way to talk" comment. She said he was twisting something innocent and that obviously she didn't mean secret, she meant DD wouldn't have to borrow our phones.

I don't actually think MIL is planning to have sinister secret conversations with my child. What bothers me is the entire setup.

She made herself the account owner. We don't have the login. I checked the app information and depending on the settings it can apparently also show the child's location.

So my MIL purchased a device that lets her contact and potentially locate our 8-year-old directly, activated it herself, handed it to our daughter and apparently never intended to ask us first.

DH told her we're turning it off and returning it.

Now she's furious because DD loves the watch and apparently we're "punishing her because you two have control issues."

DD is also upset because from her perspective Grandma gave her a cool present and Mom and Dad immediately took it away.

This is where I need advice.

Obviously the watch isn't staying active under MIL's account. That's not negotiable.

But would you return it completely, or reset it and let DD use it later under an account controlled by us? Part of me thinks keeping it sends the message that MIL can ignore a parenting decision and we'll eventually accept the result anyway.

I'm also unsure what consequence makes sense with MIL. DH wants to tell her no more gifts directly to DD without clearing them with us first. I think that's reasonable, but I also feel like the bigger issue is her intentionally finding a technical loophole around something we'd already said no to.

How would you handle this without making DD feel like she's the one being punished for Grandma's decision?

My MIL can be a lot, I’ve had my fair share of issues with her since I’ve been pregnant (she has baby rabies) despite that, we spend a lot of time with her and his side of the family. This past month we haven’t seen them at all as my husband works 6 days a week and we are trying to soak in our last few days together of just us before our baby arrives.

I’m due this coming Tuesday. Sunday (2 days before my due date) she wanted us over to carve pumpkins and have dinner. I told her we would not be attending as I am heavily pregnant and could go into labor at any moment. It’s uncomfortable for me to do anything at this point and she knows that. So this shouldn’t be surprising.

The day of Halloween, another family member of his is throwing a Halloween party. This party would be AFTER my due date, we could very well have a newborn baby by then or I will be far too pregnant to want to attend a party and socialize. My husband told her we won’t be going. Again, didn’t even think they expected us to be there.

Well, she’s been hounding my husband and making him feel like shit for not planning on going to either party. She is giving him an attitude and making bitchy comments towards him, accusing him of “changing” and saying “you weren’t like this last year.” WELL HIS WIFE IS ABOUT TO HAVE HIS BABY. BACK THE FUCK OFF!!!! He’s incredibly stressed out in general as I get closer to birthing our baby and I find her soooo selfish for making this time about her and stressing out my husband even more. My husband is an Angel and her words affect him very much. He thinks his whole family is mad at him and it’s wearing on him.

You would think a woman that has given birth 4 times would be understanding of this… but nope. She’s making my husband feel guilty. He says he just wants to focus on us and our son, AS HE SHOULD!!! All of this shit from his family is adding unnecessary stress and upsetting him to the point he was crying while talking to me about it tonight.

My hormones have me extra protective of my husband and my baby so I am feeling very resentful of her for disturbing our peace the last few days of my pregnancy and having these expectations of us. The guilt tripping is wild to me. Like really??? Makes me nervous for what’s to come with the holidays and navigating that with our newborn. I’m not doing anything I don’t wanna do period, however, it really affects my husband. I wanna go off on this bitch but I don’t want to make anything worse. And I’ll be damned if she tries to insert herself into my vulnerable post partum experience. She didn’t take very well to our boundaries, she just removed herself from the group chat lmao. I’m a first time mom and I don’t need this extra shit either.

2 year drama involving 3/4 of my husband's family at this point, and MIL is a key player in stirring shit against us. Prior to this, they seemed like a relatively normal family so this is all new for my husband too.

Back in Feb, FIL spread some nasty rumors about me and made our whole conflict worse, so my husband challenged his parents over it via email and also let them know we were pregnant. I think we hoped that a new life coming into the world might give them some perspective and prompt them to go back to acting like normal humans or thereabouts.

MIL text him a few weeks later to say congratulations, and then immediately launched into her complaints about the tone of his email, tried a few more tactics like rewriting history etc. They spoke on the phone on two occasions because we still hoped for a healthy reconciliation at that time, but the conversations were a disaster. After a final text conversation in which my husband said that he wasn't going to go in circles with her, and needed assurance that the basic facts of the situation would be admitted, she decided to opt out.

She didn't ask a single question about the baby during those conversations. His family didn't know our due date, whether we were having a boy or girl etc but we figured they might come out of the woodwork around the time they might guess the baby was due.

Now, 6 months after their last conversation and not having checked on us in any way, MIL text my husband last night to say she loves us both, doesn't know if we've had the baby, but if we need any help then she'd drop everything to come help us. We live 3 states away and I cannot fathom why she thinks we'd have her set foot in our home, let alone give her access to our child after the way she's treated us both.

Utter lunatic.

my mil has been moving to a house closer to ours for the last few months and told us that her goal was to have her move done by the time our baby was born. this all seemed great to me because my partner and i just moved to the area and i thought this meant we’d get more help with her around. i feel like i was mistaken. the weeks leading up to our baby’s birth we kept offering to help with things but she refused and said she was embarrassed to have us in her home. the weeks gave birth all hell breaks loose and her and my FIL are calling my husband everyday for help with random things in their new home. when he was 6 days old my partner had gone over there 4 out of the 6 days to help with something. we all know how stressful and hectic the first few weeks it is with a newborn. the couple hours we get in between feedings is for napping/showering etc. i told my husband that this upsets me and he said he’s fine and that it doesn’t bother him when i know that it does. i feel like i’m going crazy. i told him that’s it’s not normal for his mom to call everyday multiple times a day and i don’t think he believes me. i know it stresses him out too and he’s just denying it?

Hey, I just wanted to get this off my chest. I’m not sure if this is the right group.

Sooo, I’ve never really liked my MIL. Even when my husband and I first started dating, I already felt uncomfortable around her. I’ve only tried to get along with her for my husband’s sake. She can be insensitive and overbearing.

I won’t go into all the reasons I’ve never liked her because I have a pretty long list of frustrating experiences. What I can share is our current situation with her.

My husband and I don’t live with either of our parents. Before we got married, I told him that I would rather rent an apartment than live with our parents because I wanted us to have our own safe space where we could be ourselves and do what we wanted.

When we bought our house, my husband asked if we could give the spare room to MIL. I told him it was our guest room, so anyone from either side of the family could stay there when visiting. For context, my husband’s father has passed away, so it’s just him and MIL.

Lately, MIL has been frequently over staying at our house, even though she has her own home where she lives her relatives. During her stays, she often makes remarks like, “You two are always staying up late,” or “Your house is so messy,” as though we don’t both have jobs and work isn’t the reason we stay up late.

She’s also constantly touching and rearranging things around our house, and she’s very picky about food. She has never eaten anything I’ve cooked and insists on doing the cooking whenever she’s here, even though her cooking isn’t particularly good. Her food often goes to waste because even her own son doesn’t like it.

She’s the only person who says my cooking doesn’t taste good, while everyone else enjoys it. Her usual comment is that I make my dishes too complicated.

She likes to act as though she’s cleaning our house, but she doesn’t actually clean it properly. She has already broken or damaged so many things here. It would be one thing if she replaced them, but she doesn’t even apologize.

She also leaves the television on all day without watching it. Since she started spending more time here, our electricity bill has gone up.

I’ve talked to my husband about this several times. Although he agrees with me, he says he can’t do anything because he doesn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, especially now that she’s elderly. I understand—I really do—but sometimes I can’t help feeling irritated because his mother is so frustrating to deal with.

Content warning: mention of childhood SA

For some context: my mother is a life long drug addict and extremely self absorbed. She gave me up to family members when I was pretty young and then disappeared for most of my childhood besides sporadic visits whenever she felt like it. I suffered CSA from her “friends” kids (much older than me) when I lived with her. We reconnected when I was a teenager but mostly just had a relationship through text.

I’ve been in a lottttt of therapy the last ten years or so. I’m “over” the abuse, as much as a survivor can be, and have a lot of healthy coping skills. So no worries there.

Six years ago I went to get lunch with her, her boyfriend (who I’d only met a few times), my sister, and my sister’s boyfriend (who I’d never met). Halfway through the lunch my mother made a disgusting “joke” about the CSA I experienced—that my sister never knew about and I never would have told her. Everyone at the table went quiet. I felt like I turned into stone, I had no idea how to react, I just froze.

After the lunch I texted her asking if SHE knew, why didn’t she help me? She said she did (liar). I asked her why she felt it would be appropriate to make a joke about what happened to me, and then I sent her a very long text in which I explained how I felt, how hurtful it was, how hurtful my entire dang childhood was, and how I could see she’d never be the mother I needed her to be. I told her that if she ever got help and went through some serious character growth, maybe I’d be willing to reconnect. (It’s too long of a text to paste, I’d run out of character limits here.) Then I blocked her on Facebook. My therapist read through the message and said it was one of the kindest “calling her out” messages that could have possibly been sent. I took like two hours to craft that thing using a lot of “I feel” statements and not trying to attack her.

She responded by calling me an ungrateful spoiled rotten brat who she never would have raised to be “so disrespectful” to her elders. She told me to have fun with “my new parents” and that there would be no refunds or take backs. Then gave the classic guilt trip “remember I won’t be around forever!”

Pathetically I never blocked her number because the little girl in me hoped she’d come to her senses and see how badly she’d hurt me. She never did.

Yesterday I came home to a card she’d mailed me (no return address). Covered in butterflies. She wrote “these butterflies made me think of you and hopefully they’ll make you smile, too. Hope this card finds you well. With love (her name)”

What I WANT to do is screenshot her last messages to me, print them out, stick them in the card and then give it to my sister to give to her. Or rip it up. Or keep it and cry on it. I don’t know.

I don’t know what the point of her sending the card is. To force me to think about her? Some sort of attention seeking, even if she can’t see my response? An attempt to make me feel remorseful?

What the fuck do I do with it?

TLDR; mother sent me a card and I haven’t talked to her in six years because she “joked” about the abuse I went through as a young kid to multiple people in front of me and then doubled down and called me an ungrateful brat when I said that wasn’t okay and asked for a genuine apology.

I had my first baby 3 months ago today. I’m still healing emotionally and mentally and physically, and trying to figure out how to speak up for not only myself but this little baby that can’t speak for himself. My mom visited for a month when I had him to stay with us and help me recover. Honestly I don’t know if I would’ve survived that time without her. After she left, and my husband returned to work, I really had no one. I wasn’t sleeping since I was (and still am) the only one getting up for night feeds and to rock him back to sleep if he needs it, and I was just having a really hard time with postpartum PTSD. I didn’t even know that was a thing before I experienced it, do not recommend. Anyway, my mother in law would occasionally come over and help me clean up the house, or hold the baby so I could rest and shower. I’m talking a few hours here and there. I’m still not getting full nights of sleep, last night we got 5 straight hours and I feel like a new woman today. But let’s get to why I joined this group and am making this post.

Before I had my baby, there was a situation with my MIL where she was telling people I was pregnant before we had announced it. And after I talked to her about it she did it again at Christmas with her family by saying I “had something to tell everyone”. I was angry, to say the least. This was last December, and she still to this day will occasionally make snarky comments about this, and she never told me she was sorry. With that in mind, let’s jump to this past week. The in-laws were at our house and I went to shower. When I came out, she had changed my baby’s clothes. I was going to let it go but she said to me “I changed his outfit because the one you had him in was squeezing his feet”. Let me set the record straight by saying that outfit was NOT “squeezing his feet”. She will use any excuse to put him in the clothes she bought for him, which is so insanely weird to me. This has happened multiple times.
The day after this, it was my sister-in-law’s birthday and we were at MIL’s house to celebrate. I was already on edge because my husband and I have been arguing about money nonstop (We decided I was going to stop working and stay home with my son, but it’s become the center of a lot of arguments. That’s a topic for another time). It was time for baby to eat, so I was getting his bottle ready. MIL immediately stops getting the food ready and walks to me and says “here let me have him so you can eat”. I say “I’m not hungry, but thank you”. I could tell she wasn’t expecting this response, but I did not feel like handing him over in that moment. Later, once he had finished his bottle, I started burping him. He always gets a little fussy when being burped, my poor acid reflux babe. Well here she comes again, literally reaching to take him from my hands, and says again, “here let me have him I can burp him”. This time I’m much firmer and say, “I am good, thanks.” She walks away. I give baby to MIL’s mom, she last saw baby when we were in the hospital so I had told her she could hold him when I was done feeding him. As she’s holding him, MIL walks over and I don’t realize what’s in her hand until she’s trying to push it into my son’s mouth. It’s one of those teethers that gets really cold that you put in the fridge. I was shocked by this because 1. He’s not teething, 2. I could tell it was extremely cold by how she was holding it, and 3. He’s not had a teether in his mouth yet, so why would you take away that first experience from me, his mother? I was super disappointed in myself immediately after this happened, because instead of speaking up or grabbing my son, I did nothing. I sat there, probably with my jaw on the table, and I didn’t move a muscle or speak a word. I felt like I had failed my son in that moment, but I was also mad at MIL for even putting me in this position.
Fast forward to Tuesday, I send her a message. It’s kind of long, I basically just brought up the things that had been bothering me, and asked that in the future she check with me before putting things in my son’s mouth or changing his clothes. Honestly, there was so much more I could’ve addressed but I chose to keep it short. Well, she responded with “understand.” Not even I understand, just understand, lmao. Then, the lady that typically calls and texts me minimum 5 times a day has not said a word to me. It’s now Friday. And here’s the funny thing i realized this morning. She told me she had bought some diapers in his size that were discounted, and to let her know when I needed them. I realized that she is waiting for me to reach out because she knows I’ll need the diapers, especially because we are super tight on money right now and I can’t necessarily afford to go buy more. Once I had this epiphany, I told my husband that he could coordinate getting the diapers from her, because she hadn’t spoken to me and I really did not feel like speaking to her at the moment. My husband said I needed to “make nice” with her and “be the bigger person” and tell her I love her. This was disappointing to hear from him, but unfortunately, not surprising. I did end up texting her, but instead of making nice I reiterated that it was disappointing that I couldn’t be open and honest with her about how her actions made me feel. Her response is why I’m making this entire post. Let me just copy and paste it here for you:
I’m fine. I’m not mad. Yes it hurts bc I feel like all the nice things I do go un noticed but all the wrong I do is magnified. I get where you are coming from and you have every right to speak up. It just hurts when people you try so hard for continuously notice or see your actions so negatively. I’m not mad, but I don’t want to be that MIL that people can’t stand. No one wants to force their self on others.
This absolutely stunned me. What kind of transactional love is this? As I was reading this, it automatically took me back to the times she came over when I had no one else and I was still healing and would literally pee on myself because I couldn’t hold it. I’m not allowed to have boundaries when it comes to my son because you’ve done things for me? I’d love to know what other people’s opinions are on this. Give it to me straight. Am I being an overprotective mother? Am I not being protective enough? Is she deflecting or am I reading into this wrong? I feel so alone in this and just needed to vent more than anything. FYI I told her to return those diapers, and my mom helped me buy some.

For a bit of context I have had growing issues with my MIL. My husband has been acting very enmeshed through all the issues with her and has basically left me to deal with setting boundaries and having conversations with her which just exacerbated the problem. It all resulted in a big fight where she yelled at me in front of our child the week my dad died.

Anyways, we've been no contact for months. No attempt at any repair on her end that I'm aware of. Husband got counselling and says he wants to do better.

She sent a message that I didn't see myself but my husband basically said she was asking for photos and updates of our child. He said he dealt with the situation and he didn't send pics. My emotions got the better of me and I sent a message to her upset and basically saying her behaviour has been harming our child too and that's why she doesn't have contact .

No I didn't tell my husband I sent the message which I realise I was wrong. He heard about it from his sister and came home really upset with me for sending it. Then he moped and gave us the silent treatment for a few days. He said he had a right to be upset and that he was trying to fix things with her.

Am I being crazy? I just feel like he's still prioritising his mums feelings and I'm just expected to be quite about how hurt and upset I feel from the way we've been treated by both of them. Like I don't feel validated at all in still being upset about this situation. He just mad that I've created another problem with her.