Mother-in-law Hell

I just wanted to share my experience with a (thankfully) now ex-MIL and her son.

I am 22 years old and I moved in with my partner (who at the time was merely a friend I had known for about three years earlier) at 19. I needed to get out of my current living situation and into something that would be what I THOUGHT was a healthier environment, mentally, for me and thus open doors for me in life.

Well, doors sure opened, but they weren’t necessarily doors that should have been opened.

Eventually, I did start dating the young man I was living with because we grew very fond of one another. I am a white woman and he was Hispanic, so it was a very unique and new experience for me to live with this culture and the mindset that seemed to come with. I learned to understand the family closeness that generally came with these people. It wasn’t so bad at first because I thought it was all a healthy relationship, and one I had never had myself with my own family.

The parents seemed to almost bend over backwards for their children and provide them with whatever they wanted or needed in life. Parents paid for their childrens’ colleges, cars, supplies, and were unusually accepting of people like me who needed refugee into another household. Kids talked to their parents about literally everything children fight about in American family households- drugs, alcohol, friends, lovers, bullying, school, etc. My partner was very open with his thoughts, wants, and feelings to his mom… including our relationship.

At first, this wasn’t a problem with me. I never really talked to her much about such things, because I didn’t even mention these kinds of things to my own mother. I wasn’t accustomed to talking to my parents about my sexual activities, my mental problems, or any other personal problems I was having. As a teenager, I was pretty typical in that instead of talking to my parents about bullying or friendship/relationship problems, I fought with them to just leave me alone. This is pretty normal, but I began to feel abnormal for not being close to my family. I also began to grow a little jealous of just how close my partner and his brother were to his parents, especially their mother.

Overtime, however, I grew to understand that the difference between his family and others’ was that there was a DEPENDENCY rather than a mutual, egalitarian, give-and-take relationship. I grew to realize that the closeness they had ended with their mother and that they did not share the same bond with their father. In fact, they seemed to resent their father, and so did the mother. He was rude, objectified women in front of her, a liar, and apparently cheated on her a couple of times. I later even learned that they were divorced but “lived together for the children”. The more I thought about this, the more it made me uncomfortable, because as I eventually learned to realize was that no parent who loves their child stays in an unloving relationship for the kids. What does that teach to children to see such a dishonest and unbalanced relationship?

The truth was is that she was with him for the money, and he was with her probably just for the sex and bragging rights of being with someone. She was afraid to be on her own because she felt she HAD to have a man in her life, and since she could not get the love she wanted from her husband, she spent the majority of her sons’ lives taking and asking for all their love. And unfortunately for me, I happened to fall for the son she babied the most.

Even when we both turned 21, we still lived with his mom and dad because he began going to school. He didn’t mind me working part-time and pursuing my art, in fact he encouraged me to. However, his mother clearly hated this and wanted more of me. Living under her household, this seems reasonable, right? It would have been HAD SHE TOLD ME.

The worst part of aging with this young man was learning how completely dishonest his whole relationship with his mom was, because it reflected onto OUR relationship. His mother never told me she wanted me to work more, or go to school. Instead she told this to her son who never told me. They constantly fought about me behind my back and every time she was sick of him being around me, he caved into her demands and we ended up doing something for her that he knew I didn’t want to do. That consisted of us either going to a movie, out of town, out to dinner, etc wherever she wanted to go. Whenever I said I did not want to go, he told me “But my mom would really like it if you came.” The most aggravating part for me is that I am socially phobic. I get nervous in large crowds of people and I cannot hide this. She knew this. She could see it. She knew I was uncomfortable going to weekendly family get-togethers and she whined whenever I declined to go. I was willing to go out with the family every now-and-then just to please her, but I think it was unfair of her to force me to go out in public and thus force my social phobia, thus forcing trauma and making me extremely unhappy and uncomfortable, just so SHE could be happy.

I became guilt-tripped to do everything mommy wanted, including the housework. It first started out with helping doing the dishes and cleaning up after her sloppy husband. Then it escalated to cleaning the whole house twice a week and every day because the men in the house were just that messy. But she still wanted more (though she never told ME, but instead her son). The men in the household never cleaned up after themselves and yet I became obligated to “do something”, while they got to act like children and throw their clothes around the house and on the furniture, drag mud on their shoes and leave food on their dishes.

Soon enough, she wanted me to work full-time. She never ASKED me to get more work, she merely offered me a job one day. It was minimum wage in an office. I didn’t want it. I could do better. When I thanked her but said no thanks, she became very angry. However, I did not know this. I never knew how offended she was that I didn’t take her job offer until AFTER the relationship had ended. Half the problem of me not being able to keep full-time work while I was living with him was because every 4-5 months I flew back to my hometown to see MY family for a couple weeks. My mom constantly begged me to come see her, and I missed my friends. I had no friends when I lived with my partner because I had no car, no connections, and did not know the town. They kept me isolated and inside their house pretty much like a pet, yet blamed me for not doing more.

His mom freaked out whenever I wanted to take a walk at night and she constantly turned on the house alarm that they never taught me how to unlock. It came to the point that whenever they took the alarm off, I watched from a distance to learn how to disable it so I COULD take my walks. But when I would it was almost guaranteed that when I would return she would be awake in her robe, waiting for me, claiming she was “worried”.

Whenever my partner and I went out she just HAD to call, even if it was to the store for 40 minutes. She couldn’t bare the idea of him leaving the house with her being able to contact him, and going out of town was like escaping prison. She wanted to drive us and be there with us, because she didn’t think we could find the directions on our own or get back on our own. And the majority of the time we did have to be driven around by her, despite the fact her sons each had their own car. Simple trips to the zoo two hours away became vacations because we had to plan a weekend she could take off work and other things just so we could rent a hotel room out and she could drive us up and back. I hated it. I merely wanted to leave town for a day with HIM and take some photos and come back. But she clearly couldn’t bare the idea of him doing something without her!

Eventually, she started calling me her “daughter”. Despite the fact I barely had a relationship with my own mother, she seemed to enforce I have some sort of relationship with her. She became frustrated when I wouldn’t “talk” to her (as explained to me by, again, her son, rather than HER), but she never really tried to talk to me. She never sat down by me while I was relaxing outside with my cat, nor asked me about my art or what I want to do while I was writing my stories. Her effort towards a real family relationship with me was nonexistent… she was basically expecting more than she was willing to give.

The worst part was the years of hearing her or my partner say how she couldn’t bare the idea of him leaving. She constantly said things like “If you leave, I’m going to follow you. I can’t live with your father”, “I’d kill myself if you left”, “You can’t leave me, what will I do without you?”. The more and more I heard those things and things like it, the more terrified I became of her and the family in general. It was too much. She clearly never cut the cord.

And I began pleading with him and fighting with him almost constantly over his over-dependency on her, which of course, he saw nothing wrong with. And why would he? He got everything he wanted. He had me, lived comfortably in a house where both his mother AND her partner served him hand-and-foot, and over the years we were together, the less I served him, the more he preferred his mommy. And the more she took advantage of this. To this day, heaven knows the kinds of things she said about me to him behind my back, but I have a pretty good idea.

I was under an extreme amount of pressure while I lived with him. My family was constantly riding me for everything in the past and current problems in the future. I did what was reasonable to do- I cut them off, because I wasn’t living with them anymore and I didn’t want them trying to run my life. I visited less, however, I kept family “duties” in that I visited them during holidays, more or less because I felt obligated. My brother and his partner were doing drugs and causing me a lot of trauma- my brother was always abusive to me and he was abusive to his partner. He ended up in jail, begged me and my mom for money (to which I gave him some and regret ever doing so) and every holiday visit where we were all together was nothing but fighting, him egging on old past pains, and generally just uncomfortable, unnecessary and traumatic. My best friend of 14 years was dating an abusive man who continued to isolate her from me, my high school friend left my life without any notice with a MUCH older man, so I felt abandoned and confused, my dog (who I loved VERY much) died, and the fact that I had no friends to talk to or be with, was pretty much caged constantly inside the damn house with my partner (who I can now say was a terrible partner) and his whiny, manipulative, and overbearing mother left me feeling completely dead inside and so deeply depressed I eventually stopped doing artwork at all. I couldn’t even sketch. This lasted for a year.

And as you can imagine, this did not help my reputation amongst the family nor did it help make MIL like me more.

So eventually, I went back home to visit my mother because she was getting remarried, and she wanted me to be the bridesmaid. I planned for a short visit, so short in fact, that I packed a backpack- a sketchbook I wanted to use but knew I would not, probably two pairs of panties, socks, and a pair of jeans and a couple shirts, a book, and some music to listen to on the plane. I paid for a round-trip and was set to come back a couple days before my partner’s birthday.

Two days before my flight back I receive a call from my partner telling me: “My mom thinks we should take a break”.

!!!!!!!

Naturally, I was furious with his mother. Mainly because after a butt load of issues that arouse between my partner and I (don’t care to discuss here) I learned that she wrote MY mom an e-mail MONTHS before asking HER to tell me to go back home. In fact, she called my mother and spoke to her about it on the phone- it was the first time she ever spoke to my mother in the three years that I lived in that household. That’s right- She asked MY mom to tell ME to come home rather than doing it herself. Rather than her sitting me down and telling me she wanted me out, rather than her asking me what she wanted me to do, she waited for months on end, behind my back, smiling falsely behind her teeth at me, to tell her SON to tell me two days before my scheduled plane flight that she didn’t want me in her house anymore. Seriously, what a fucking bitch.

My mom refused to tell me and told her it wasn’t her job. Because it wasn’t. She told her that SHE had to be the one to tell me, and yet she never did because she “didn’t want to hurt my feelings”, which is utter bullshit, because as a grown woman, she knows which way hurt would hurt my feelings more and she took the manipulative route because she is a manipulative person.

So I was left with pretty much nothing. I had lived there for about three years and I had all my things there- my books, my art supplies, my art, my clothes, my exercise equipment, my living supplies, MY CAT. These people never gave me a chance to sort my life out and prepare myself. They basically kicked me to the curb and acted like I had no right to be furious. Even apartment owners give their residents at least a few weeks’ warning to get out. But they gave me NOTHING.

It took six months to get the first box of my clothes back and another three to get the second box. No doubt this is because his mother expected me to pay the UPS fee. I never got reimbursed for my exercise equipment, despite the fact I paid a total $450 for it and asked, numerously, that they please, please sell it and send me the money and if they’re going to keep it, they properly pay me for it, because I bought those out of my own fucking debit card with my own earned money. I also never got my cat back. I offered to pay, at first only half, of the shipping and vet fees that would be required to fly him over here, and I even did all the work of finding out the information of how to ship a pet properly and the vet care and paperwork required. Eventually I gave in and said I’d pay all of it. But all I got in return was “Sorry….”. No reason why he couldn’t, no reason why he wouldn’t. I guess it would have been too adult of him.

And all in all, I never even ONCE spoke to his mother. Everything his mom said, wanted, or did was relayed to me through one of her sons. She was a complete and spineless coward. They all were.

So what I want to emphasize most is that the BIGGEST, underlying problem never was, and never is, the mother-in-law- it’s the sons. Yes, she was a manipulative person, and yes, her selfishness caused me a lot of trauma, but ultimately, she was not THE trauma-dealer. Because you can cut the mom off, move away, and burn all her photos, but you can never stop the dependency these men have on their moms… a dependency these women have planted, nurtured, and maintained since birth. The hardest realization for me was realizing that the problem was not his mom but HIM. Because regardless of how much he whined about her and her control, he STILL allowed her to be in his life and he STILL chose her over me. He could have told her no. He could have been HONEST with me and told her what she was doing and saying behind my back. He could have cut her out or told her that I was more important than her (which I clearly wasn’t) and he could have put his foot down and told her she had no business running our relationship. He could have planned a little better, and we could have moved out together and away from her. But none of that happened because HE chose for that. He chose to let her do all this, to both of us, and it’s fine if he wants his mommy to run HIS life, but it’s not when it becomes my problem. And I didn’t deserve any of that.

A lot of these men have serious issues with how they see women, which can rightfully be blamed on their mothers for feeling the need to fight with every other woman in the world and cherish their sons more than their very own lives. But by the time these men are adults, if they’re not cutting the cord, they’re as equally monstrous as the mom who is raising hell in your life.

It took me, albeit so much faster than many others to realize this, too long in my life, for my age, to realize this. But it was a great lesson that I will keep close to me to know what to avoid in the future.