Wow. I just read this whole thread. Just wow.
Early on, a poster made this comment:
The behaviour and attitudes I mentioned had nothing to do with interference fuelled by over exuberance. I was thinking of grandparents, usually grandmothers, who regard themselves as the single most important person in a grandchild's life, who criticise parents, usually mummy, to the child, deliberately treat the child in ways that are contrary to the family's usual practice in matters such as snacks, discipline, bedtimes, potty training, etc. and, knowingly or not, set out to disrupt the family dynamic. I know of one grandmother who repeatedly told her grandchild that mummy didn't really love him and that the only person who did was herself, desperately confusing a young child who loved both his mummy and grandmother. The result was behavioural problems, much distress in the family and an isolated grandmother. Perhaps the word toxic is appropriate.
Those words resonated with me, because they describe almost exactly the kind of toxic relationship that I believe my son is in danger of being in.
I grew up in a loving family. I had wonderful, involved grandparents and an amazing extended family. They were loving and supportive, but never overbearing; they were always willing to lend an ear to listen, but still understood that most of the details of my life were not actually their business, and never pried - they understood that any information I trusted them with was a privilege, not their right. Suffice it to say, I could never understand how anyone could ever just cut off all contact with a family member, forever.
That was before I got married.
My MIL is overbearing to say the least. Many people don't understand why she causes me so much anxiety, but that's usually because I haven't told them the whole story. She invites herself for weeklong visits that we don't find out about until the plane tickets are booked. She calls my (and my husband's) house "our house" even though she never contributed financially or otherwise to its purchase (why should she). She shows up for her visits with groceries, insists on cooking all the meals, and prepares meals I don't even eat. I'm mostly vegetarian and make as much as I can from scratch, and despite the fact that both her daughters are vegetarians too, and she accommodates their diets, at my house she cooks pot roast because she thinks my husband needs to eat more meat, and buys dozens of prepackaged "just add meat" meal starters. She reorganizes my kitchen and closets. She enters our bedroom without knocking. She tries to do my laundry. In her mind, she's helping, and it doesn't matter to her how we feel about it. I feel it's highly disrespectful, and my husband tells her that EVERY visit. He even calls her numerous times before each visit to remind her that we don't want her to do those things. Yet every visit, she does them, and she appears shocked when we get upset. In short, she doesn't respect the way my husband and I run our household, or our decisions about our home and family in general.
She is also very controlling. She is constantly trying to give us money for things that we have decided we don't value enough to spend our hard earned money on (like cable TV, or a second vehicle). Every time, we turn down the money, because we are perfectly capable of managing our finances. Aside from our mortgage, we have no other debt. About two weeks after she leaves, my husband will have a sudden personal crisis, convinced that he doesn't make enough money, and convinced that he has failed in life because he didn't finish university and chose a trade instead. It took me almost a year and a half of marriage to realize he only ever felt that way a few weeks after she had offered us money for something she felt we needed that we didn't actually want. She also frequently mentions, usually through veiled statements, the fact that he didn't finish his degree.
She's also manipulative. When my husband doesn't return a text right away, or call her at least twice a week, she laments how her children don't appreciate her. When she visited her daughter the last time, two of the kids were fighting and tantruming at bedtime (both under 5) and she told her daughter and her son in law, in front of their children, that they were awful parents, and that her own children certainly never did things like that. Then she spanked one of the kids and her daughter told her that she was absolutely not allowed to lay a hand on any of her children, and so my MIL said if she wasn't going to be appreciated, she might just never come back to visit and her grandchildren wouldn't get to know their grandmother. Her daughter told her if that's what she wanted to do, they couldn't stop her. A few months later we all had suicide threat emails in our inboxes, because she couldn't believe how her daughter had mistreated her by cutting her out of her grandchildren's lives. We called the crisis line, and spent the entire night coordinating calls between the siblings, her, and the crisis line, because 2 of her 3 kids live 500-1000 km away, all 3 in different cities. I had to miss the next day of work because I got no sleep that night. I learned after that incident that she has threatened suicide numerous times when her own children were small as well as when they had grown, and had even said it in front of her grandchildren. My husband was afraid when he was little to make a mistake that would disappoint her, in case she might kill herself.
When I was pregnant I had awful nausea and vomiting throughout my whole pregnancy. My husband had to prepare all the meals and do all the dishes - I couldn't handle food or dishes without throwing up. He actually had to learn to cook, and he has become very good at it now too, but whenever he would tell his mother he had learned how to make something new (he was so proud of himself) she would make a comment to him asking why I wasn't cooking for him. She would tell me that I should be cooking for him, "because he works all day". I worked longer hours than my husband did. She couldn't bring herself to congratulate her son on his new skill. One visit she refused to eat what he had prepared because she "doesn't like to eat that," and I think because she was upset we had put our foot down about her trying to cook all our meals (but that's my guess only, not fact).
I don't say all of this to vilify her, I say it so that you have some idea of what it's like to interact with a truly toxic parent, one who denies and dismisses your feelings and your needs because they conflict with what she wants. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. For two years of marriage, I put up with all of this because she is my husband's mother, and when I married him I married his family, and family is important (and I didn't fully understand the extent of her abusive behaviour). No one is perfect, not even family, right? Who was I to judge her behaviour? "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone ..."
Then I had my son. He was born by c section, and he was a heavy baby. She came to visit when he was three weeks old, and I still couldn't get out of bed or up off the couch without assistance. I certainly wasn't able to do household chores. She made comments about how I could/should get things for myself, and told me that I should stop waking my husband up in the middle of the night to pick up the baby and hand him to me to feed him, because my husband really needs his sleep. I had been struggling with getting him latched on properly because I had engorgement from all the fluids, but I was working regularly with a lactation consultant, who gave the usual advice: feed often, feed on demand, watch for early hunger cues, don't wait until he's frantic and crying. My MIL decided I was feeding him too often, and holding him too much. She informed me of her opinion, and I told her I would continue to follow the advice I had been given by a medical professional. She asked to hold him, and I agreed. A few minutes later, I saw him rooting and putting his hands in his mouth. I told her he was hungry and I needed to feed him. She told me he was NOT hungry, turned her back on me, and left the room, chattering in his ear about how his mommy had no idea what she was doing, but don't worry, grandma is here. I couldn't get up to follow her, and even if I could have, I couldn't have physically taken him from her anyway, and she knew it. My husband was at work. I sat there crying until 15 minutes later she brought him back to me because he was screaming, and I had to endure an extremely painful feed because he was far too frantic to latch properly, and bleeding nipples, because they hadn't yet healed from all the damage from his poor latches. My husband was furious when he found out, but when he told her that she was way out of line and had no right to treat me or the baby like that, she argued with him, told him he was wrong and she was right, and then took a baby book she had been reading that my SIL had sent us as a gift, and underlined in pen all of the places where it said babies only need to eat every three hours. My lactation consultant had already warned me to ignore the feeding advice in that book because it was wrong and would jeopardize my milk supply and long term breastfeeding success. My MIL tried to say it only happened because she'd only been holding the baby for two minutes and she deserved to have her turn, and he'd just eaten an hour ago so he didn't need to eat anyway, because the book said. Never mind what the baby clearly wanted!
These are only my stories. She made plenty of comments to my husband that made him feel incompetent as a new father. Thank goodness my dad and my aunt had visited first, and told him how wonderful he was doing at adjusting to having a new baby and taking care of me (because he truly was doing an amazing job). He had been so worried he wouldn't know what to do or would make a mistake. Where my dad and my aunt told him he seemed to have really tapped into his fatherly instincts, his mother hovered over every diaper change telling him what to do, completely ignoring the fact that he had been doing it for three weeks without her there to tell him what to do and how he was already screwing it up. Throughout her entire visit, my husband's confidence in himself as a father slowly eroded to almost nothing. She left just in time. He only got a bit of that confidence back when his aunt (his mother's sister, no less) came to visit, took one look at the baby and proclaimed that we must be wonderful parents, because just look at him! I realized in that moment that his own mother hadn't said one positive thing to him or to me about our parenting. Don't get me wrong, it isn't that we need people telling us we are good parents; it's just that we don't need those who are supposed to support us to be critical of every move we make, and imply that we have no idea what we are doing. Even if it were the truth, it isn't productive.
We are talking about a woman who would rather "have her turn" than make sure a baby had his most basic needs met! She would not give a hungry newborn back to his mother to eat, and she felt justified in this. She made no secret of the fact that she had no issue undermining my parenting directly to my child, in front of me, just as she does with her daughter. She completely ignored the fact that I was a new mother, in need of rest and respite, and recovering from major abdominal surgery. She completely ignored her son's anxiety over being a new parent. My needs didn't matter, my husband's needs didn't matter, and my baby's needs didn't matter - the only things that mattered were what she wanted and her opinions.
Does anyone honestly think that any good can come of any form of relationship with a woman like that? She has emotionally abused her children their whole lives by making them feel responsible for her feelings and her behaviour. She has demonstrated that she will repeat those same emotionally abusive behaviours with her grandchildren. She doesn't think it's necessary to treat her children or their spouses with respect or dignity in their own homes. She will put her desires ahead of the needs of a newborn.
I know there is lots of evidence that relationships with grandparents are beneficial to children's well being and development. I work with young children, I've read the research on the benefits of multigenerational relationships. The thing is, no grandchild will benefit from an abusive relationship with a grandparent simply because they are the grandparent. I can give my child those same benefits by fostering supervised relationships with seniors in a local nursing home who are complete strangers to my child, or with all the lovely older members of my church who watched me get bigger and bigger in pregnancy, and then admired him at his baptism, and continue to ask after him week after week at mass. Shared DNA is not the reason grandparent relationships are good for kids. If the grandparent is not capable of having a healthy relationship with their adult child (who is theoretically capable of protecting themselves from abuse, and has the ability to understand that it is not their fault that they have been abused), then they are certainly NOT a safe person to be around their grandchild, supervised or not, for one minute or one hour. Frankly, I can't believe anyone would dare to suggest that I should expose my child to that person when I KNOW what harm they are capable of. I wish that things were different, but wishing doesn't change reality.
Believe me, it's a heartbreaking thing for me to do. My own mother died when I was 21; cutting out my MIL leaves my son and any future children with no grandmothers, and only one grandfather because my husband also lost his father in his twenties. I STILL have all 4 of my grandparents, alive and well, and I'm 31; my son deserves the grandparent experience that I had as a child and a young woman! But life doesn't operate that way. I didn't deserve to lose my mother, but it happened. And having no grandmothers is better than having a grandmother who is actually incapable of truly loving her grandchild - because no matter what she says, how can anyone call the way she treated him and his mother loving? Children are not able to understand that a grandparent's inability to have unconditional love for them is not because the child is in some way unlovable. You do not put your most precious and most vulnerable gift in life in harm's way like that. You just don't. They can learn about tricky people with examples from people they are not supposed to love, and who are not supposed to love them. They don't need loving relationships confounded with abusive ones, that sets them up to be abused by other people who claim to love them.
but just want to make the point I never said to my D about a gypsy way of life being hard at all, I didn't know he & his family were gypsy till after I was 'cut out', I did say in the courts that I wanted my GD [not his C] to learn our culture, which she wouldn't do with us all being 'cut out' of her life. If I had know he was a gypsy, it would have made no difference to me, I liked him and his family till I & the rest of our family were 'cut out', but then I wasn't seeing the real him! 
back later...
