Gut feelings
Sep. 2nd, 2011 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
donnalotusI'm having some issues with my mother-in-law.....
I’m having some issues with my mother-in-law (MIL) lately. It’s probably me trying to establish a few boundaries around just who the mother of my child is, and who gets the final say in his care and raising – I know I’ve been over-reacting to a few things but there’s some odd things she’s said and done lately that really weird me out. For a start, she seems obsessed with seeing Declan naked… there’s a few reasons that this is weirding me out, and I’m refusing to step over these feelings. As soon as you step over a gut feeling, you will find out later that you should have taken action around something, that’s how this situation feels.
I don’t know to what extent MIL’s weirdness is, but she makes me very uncomfortable, and she also makes my Mum uncomfortable too. It’s like she’s a horny old lady who isn’t getting some, so everything is over-sexualised to her. She’s obsessed with Michael and my sex life for a start, always asking him whether he’s been “getting any” or whether I’m “satisfying him”. Like, who asks that about their child’s sex life? That’s just weird.
Now it’s starting with the baby. When he was about a week old she was sitting on the couch holding him, the rest of us were in the kitchen area (open plan living area so we could still see her) and then I heard Michael exclaim “Mum! What are you doing?” We turned around and she’s got the baby in one arm, precariously balanced on her knee (this is an issue in and of itself because she has major arthritis and is always dropping things like cups of coffee) and with the other hand she was undoing his jumpsuit. She said “Oh I was just checking out his bits and pieces” at first, and then changed it to “seeing if he needs a nappy change”. I was not impressed…
Then she wanted to watch when we were changing his nappy a few days later. She’s always offering to change his nappy for us, which is pointless because her hands are so rigid with arthritis she’d just screw it up anyway, it’s certainly not an activity you could let her do unsupervised, so she’s hardly doing us a “favour” by doing it for us as we’d have to watch over her. The latest thing has been that she wants to watch him take a bath. I was like “Why? It’s like a 5 minute activity, not like he’s playing or interacting with anyone. I swear she just wants to see him naked!” Michael disagreed with me, but I was sooooo proved right today.
She came up to watch him having his bath this morning, and stood there with her camera. We bathe him with one cloth over his arms anyway to stop any startle reflex a baby still has at this age. She wanted to take a “nudie” photo of him so I covered up the rest of the baby’s “bits and pieces” with another cloth and she actually had the gall to complain. I then said “Well, we don’t really want nude photos of the baby taken.” In this day and age, you have no control over who distributes photos, even if they are to remain “in the family”, and I’m sorry, there’s just too many weirdos out there in this technological age. She more or less cracked the shits with me, and made a comment to Michael when I was getting another nappy about how the one photo she did get of him wasn’t any good because “he might as well be in clothes” and “her friends would agree when she shows them.”
I was livid, for a start, naked photos of my child are not to be put online, period. It just seemed to me that she was more or less saying she was thinking of putting that photo on Facebook to share with all her Cityville friends (most of whom she doesn’t know from a hole in the wall because she adds random people who also play the same game for neighbours). She later said, when Michael said to her that she’s not to put any nude photos of him online, “Well of course not, I’m not an idiot” … but she doesn’t have any friends in person in Victoria, so the photo was going to be sent via internet somewhere whether to Facebook or to friends via email, and essentially, that photo could end up anywhere. Which pisses me off.
She made a comment to Michael that I’ve been giving her the cold shoulder. Well I wonder why? I don’t want her around him at all. I’ve laid the law down with Michael and she’s not to be alone with him ever. She certainly won’t be babysitting him on her own, ever. We can at least for the moment use the excuse of her arthritis for that because how is she going to be able to feed, change or hold him long-term if she can’t even hold a cup of coffee on semi-good days without spilling it? She’s dug her own grave with that one, the same reasons she uses to say why Michael needs to be over there doing stuff for her all day every day, are the exact same reasons I’m using to deny her babysitting rights.
Michael thinks I’m over-reacting a little, and maybe I am, but I’m not stepping over this. I’m not backing down either. A big part of it is that she needs to learn to respect the fact that I am the mother , not her, she’s had her son and raised him. She tried the whole “I’m the Grandmother, I can do what I want!” with Michael, but Michael told her to get stuffed, he’s our child and what we say goes. That’s my biggest struggle at the moment. I don’t care if I’m being over-reactive, or not giving a little bit on the issue, the point of it is that she doesn’t respect my wishes and does what she wants, regardless. If I don’t nip that in the bud now, then it’ll just get worse as he gets older.
Maybe she’s harmless, as Michael says, but I just don’t trust her; she’s deteriorating mentally, she’s weird, and you just don’t know. Abuse takes place more often by people you know and love than strangers… I don’t want to put any energy into that thought, but there’s an underlying energy there that’s a bit weird. If she was happy to have any photos of the baby just to have photos then I’d be a little less reactive, however she is so obsessed with the nude photos that it’s just making me uncomfortable. That’s exactly why I’m not stepping over it.
I’m having some issues with my mother-in-law (MIL) lately. It’s probably me trying to establish a few boundaries around just who the mother of my child is, and who gets the final say in his care and raising – I know I’ve been over-reacting to a few things but there’s some odd things she’s said and done lately that really weird me out. For a start, she seems obsessed with seeing Declan naked… there’s a few reasons that this is weirding me out, and I’m refusing to step over these feelings. As soon as you step over a gut feeling, you will find out later that you should have taken action around something, that’s how this situation feels.
I don’t know to what extent MIL’s weirdness is, but she makes me very uncomfortable, and she also makes my Mum uncomfortable too. It’s like she’s a horny old lady who isn’t getting some, so everything is over-sexualised to her. She’s obsessed with Michael and my sex life for a start, always asking him whether he’s been “getting any” or whether I’m “satisfying him”. Like, who asks that about their child’s sex life? That’s just weird.
Now it’s starting with the baby. When he was about a week old she was sitting on the couch holding him, the rest of us were in the kitchen area (open plan living area so we could still see her) and then I heard Michael exclaim “Mum! What are you doing?” We turned around and she’s got the baby in one arm, precariously balanced on her knee (this is an issue in and of itself because she has major arthritis and is always dropping things like cups of coffee) and with the other hand she was undoing his jumpsuit. She said “Oh I was just checking out his bits and pieces” at first, and then changed it to “seeing if he needs a nappy change”. I was not impressed…
Then she wanted to watch when we were changing his nappy a few days later. She’s always offering to change his nappy for us, which is pointless because her hands are so rigid with arthritis she’d just screw it up anyway, it’s certainly not an activity you could let her do unsupervised, so she’s hardly doing us a “favour” by doing it for us as we’d have to watch over her. The latest thing has been that she wants to watch him take a bath. I was like “Why? It’s like a 5 minute activity, not like he’s playing or interacting with anyone. I swear she just wants to see him naked!” Michael disagreed with me, but I was sooooo proved right today.
She came up to watch him having his bath this morning, and stood there with her camera. We bathe him with one cloth over his arms anyway to stop any startle reflex a baby still has at this age. She wanted to take a “nudie” photo of him so I covered up the rest of the baby’s “bits and pieces” with another cloth and she actually had the gall to complain. I then said “Well, we don’t really want nude photos of the baby taken.” In this day and age, you have no control over who distributes photos, even if they are to remain “in the family”, and I’m sorry, there’s just too many weirdos out there in this technological age. She more or less cracked the shits with me, and made a comment to Michael when I was getting another nappy about how the one photo she did get of him wasn’t any good because “he might as well be in clothes” and “her friends would agree when she shows them.”
I was livid, for a start, naked photos of my child are not to be put online, period. It just seemed to me that she was more or less saying she was thinking of putting that photo on Facebook to share with all her Cityville friends (most of whom she doesn’t know from a hole in the wall because she adds random people who also play the same game for neighbours). She later said, when Michael said to her that she’s not to put any nude photos of him online, “Well of course not, I’m not an idiot” … but she doesn’t have any friends in person in Victoria, so the photo was going to be sent via internet somewhere whether to Facebook or to friends via email, and essentially, that photo could end up anywhere. Which pisses me off.
She made a comment to Michael that I’ve been giving her the cold shoulder. Well I wonder why? I don’t want her around him at all. I’ve laid the law down with Michael and she’s not to be alone with him ever. She certainly won’t be babysitting him on her own, ever. We can at least for the moment use the excuse of her arthritis for that because how is she going to be able to feed, change or hold him long-term if she can’t even hold a cup of coffee on semi-good days without spilling it? She’s dug her own grave with that one, the same reasons she uses to say why Michael needs to be over there doing stuff for her all day every day, are the exact same reasons I’m using to deny her babysitting rights.
Michael thinks I’m over-reacting a little, and maybe I am, but I’m not stepping over this. I’m not backing down either. A big part of it is that she needs to learn to respect the fact that I am the mother , not her, she’s had her son and raised him. She tried the whole “I’m the Grandmother, I can do what I want!” with Michael, but Michael told her to get stuffed, he’s our child and what we say goes. That’s my biggest struggle at the moment. I don’t care if I’m being over-reactive, or not giving a little bit on the issue, the point of it is that she doesn’t respect my wishes and does what she wants, regardless. If I don’t nip that in the bud now, then it’ll just get worse as he gets older.
Maybe she’s harmless, as Michael says, but I just don’t trust her; she’s deteriorating mentally, she’s weird, and you just don’t know. Abuse takes place more often by people you know and love than strangers… I don’t want to put any energy into that thought, but there’s an underlying energy there that’s a bit weird. If she was happy to have any photos of the baby just to have photos then I’d be a little less reactive, however she is so obsessed with the nude photos that it’s just making me uncomfortable. That’s exactly why I’m not stepping over it.
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Date: 2011-09-02 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-03 09:33 am (UTC)