Songbird76
Well-Known Member
I just felt like I didn't have a choice....I love my husband and want to be with him and we had nowhere else to go. And my own mother had been very controlling of me, too. Then my boyfriend in college became very controlling, and it was like...everyone was always telling me what I had to do to make them happy and no one ever thought about what would make ME happy. There were a LOT of tears. My husband would come home from work and I would just be a wreck. He kept telling me I just needed to pretend to agree with her and then do what I wanted anyway, (a tactic he uses with me, too), but that didn't work. She kept telling me I needed to bike to school, because Dutch people bike, not walk. I liked walking. She kept on and kept on, so finally I was like, sure, whatever. As soon as my husband got home, she told him he needed to take me out to practice riding a bike, because I wanted to bike to school. So that had backfired.You have the patience of a saint! There is no way I could tolerate that for three years! I am more of the slow burn type, but I think I would have eventually blown up into a mushroom cloud and came back to the US. She was controlling nearly every aspect of your life!
The comment about her being the number one woman in her son's life is straight up skeevy.I can't see myself ever saying that about my son. That is such a weird sentiment.
The worst thing I can say about my MIL is she talks non-stop and she sometimes talks over me. It does irritate me, because I am an introvert and I am not someone who talks a lot. It frustrates me that I am not being heard. I give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is just a very social person. But sometimes I will start talking about something and she's not interested, so she will say, "Hmm. OK." and then start discussing what interests her.
It's not just me who thinks she talks a lot. My MIL and SIL came to visit us once and when they got on the plane to fly back to the UK, my SIL asked my MIL not to talk so much. MIL kept talking, I guess, because my SIL pulled a hat over her face and said "I asked you not to talk too much." She kept the hat over her face for the entire flight. I don't think my MIL was too happy, because she told my husband about it when she got home.
When we had been to all the banks and we were told we couldn't get a mortgage by all of them, my in-laws didn't understand. They didn't know how mortgages work. They thought you chose a house, called the bank and the bank arranged for you to buy that house. So they were miffed that we weren't trying hard enough and they thought we were too picky. So they went for a walk one day, came home and sat at the computer whispering, which was odd...neither of them EVER used the computer except my MIL sometimes to play tetris or some bubble shooting game. I asked what they were doing and it was "Oh....nothing....nothing..." My husband came home and we were all downstairs and they were talking....just superficial "how was your day" stuff. I got up to go to the bathroom, and literally the second I was out of the room, they called him over to the computer to show him the house they had found for us to buy while they were on their walk. And this was a house that was probably 350k, when we couldn't even get 100k. They waited until I was out of the room...they had already decided this was the house we were going to buy because it was only a couple of blocks away from them, in a nice neighborhood, and apparently they didn't see a need for me even to SEE this house they had picked out for me to live in. I was FURIOUS. My husband didn't understand why I was so mad. I don't think he realized they had purposely hidden it from me. He thought it was coincidental that they showed him while I went to the bathroom. He didn't catch that they had been waiting for me to leave. We had a lot of fights about his parents' intrusion on things, or leaving me out of things that I should have been involved in. I came home from school one day exhausted, with a splitting headache. So I told my MIL I was going upstairs to take a nap and to pretend I wasn't home...no calls or anything please....just let me sleep. I wasn't up there for 20 minutes when the doorbell rang and then my MIL comes up to tell me one of the custodians at the school had called in sick, and I could fill in! I said no, I can't....I have a splitting headache! And she was putting all sorts of pressure on me that her son was out working every day and the least I could do is try to contribute, and I needed to take whatever opportunity presented itself, and the head custodian was downstairs waiting and what was she supposed to tell her.
Living with them was just a huge disaster. We get along SO much better now that there are boundaries. Every once in a while she crosses them, like when she comes over and gives me a list of chores she noticed need to be done. Or when my daughter's shoes were getting worn so we went shoe shopping, but the ones she chose weren't in stock in her size, so we had to wait for them to come in and her one shoe completely fell apart before the new shoes got there and my MIL scolded me about how I could let them get so bad before getting her new ones and I shouldn't have let her order those ones, I should have made her pick something else out. But what was I supposed to do? The shoes were worn, I bought new ones. I couldn't make them appear faster, and I didn't know that the sole was going to come loose 3 days after ordering new ones. But most of the time, she's really lovely and I love them both so much. I'm glad I stuck it out, because I really am happy here. I just wish we hadn't had to live there for 3 years...it took a while after we got our house before I could visit them regularly. And having kids helped because they could focus their attention on the kids instead of trying to find things I was doing "wrong".
But he didn't. I only kept it at 74 for about 40 min and I turned it back down. I looked at the thermostat in our bedroom and it was 68. I was worried it was going to be much warmer. So, that is my work around until the furnace is installed on Friday.
