Member- bluepixie11
- 8 years ago
- Wedding: August 2015
I’m having some big issues trying to decide whether I want my Husband-to-Be’s mother at our wedding.
I’m a substitute teacher who also has a regular bartending job as well as selling upcycled furniture. Recently, my HtB and I were totally surprised by the gift of a house– My HtB’s grandmother moved into a retirement home a few years ago and didn’t want to take care of her’s anymore. She said: “I was going to leave it to you two when I kicked the bucket anyway. There’s lots of junk in the house, so you’ll have to sort through it all, but it’s yours to do with what you want. Here are the keys, have fun.” (This is ACTUALLY what she said, haha).
The house is very near my HtB’s immediate family- his father and sister are amazing people, but I had never really spent time with his mother. He is constantly fighting with her . He often tells people that he’s estranged from her- I always thought he was just overreacting. However, since living near her, I understand.
For example, recently our kitchen flooded (as overwhelming as it was, I was honestly so in love with my new home and with my HtB, I joyfully bailed out 2 inches of water with a dustpan over several hours.) Within half an hour our neighbours were over, helping us and laughing along (“Oh well, at least you don’t have to wash your floor!”). A little while later his mother came and reduced me to tears within the hour. She passively agressively insinuated that the flooding was my fault, then called me “flippant” for not being upset enough. Then while we were preoccupied, she took the opportunity to inspect our house (apparently she has OCD and is manic depressive). She demanded to know why there was food on the counter and dishes in the sink as we had been cooking supper when the flooding happened. She started yelling, “I can see the germs. Are you trying to poison him?”. She then snuck upstairs to see into our bedroom, went through my drawers and closet (called me frivolous for having “party dresses”). Once the water was under control she demanded that I do the dishes that were in the sink. My HtB actually does a little more housework than I do, as I work more outside the home. He said “Those are mine, I’ll do them when I’m ready”, she said “No, I want her to do them. You need to go to bed, you have work in the morning, this is woman’s work. I’ll supervise to make sure she does them.” Finally my HtB had had enough and asked her to leave. She made a huge scene on the way out
Then my HtB got called away for work for the next three months. Since then, these things have been happening daily:
- I’ve caught her looking in my windows trying to see if the house is clean.
- She’s come into the house uninvited and unpacked boxes that I’ve packed and forbade me to throw things away.
- She doesn’t approve that I’m a bartender (she’s never worked a day in her life and lives off her husband’s very small salary).
- She tells me that my refurbishing projects (which is basically paying for our renos) is “playing with trash”,
- When she doesn’t think the renovations are coming along quick enough she calls me and gives me a timeline for when she wants things done.
- I don’t make appointments with the contractor in the daytime because i might get called to substitute, so she accuses me of being lazy.
- I cannot accept anything as she loves guilt-trips (we forgot to lock our doors once and she broke in, took our laundry, did it, brought it back, and used it to guilt trip us into throwing away all the alcohol that was in the house).
- She tries to push her obessive tendancies on me (everything has to be cleaned 4 times for 1 minute each time).
- Regardless of the fact that I pay most of our bills, she thinks it’s my job to do 100% of the cooking and cleaning
- She calls me about 10 times a day barking orders at me, if I don’t follow them, she “politely reminds” me that it’s not my house, it’s my HtB’s and therefore she has “more of a right to it” than I do because she’s related to him by blood.
- And the one that hurts me the most: She’s told people that because my parents were divorced I “don’t know how a family functions”. And because my mother passed away when I was a teenager and I was raised from then on by my dad, apparently, I won’t know how to be a mother because I “never had one”.
I’m at my wit’s end. All of my HtB’s family and family friends have completely abandoned her because she has no boundaries- my HtB’s teenage sister wants to sleep at our house as much as possible (I think she may be being emotionally abused by her mother). Even the grandmother who gave us the house, whos’s the kindest woman in the world, openly calls my HtB’s mother (her daughter in law) “a spiteful bitch”.
My HtB has confided in me that HE doesn’t know if he wants to invite his mother to the wedding– He’s afraid that she might cause a scene amongst our family and friends (aside from hating the bride, she’s also extremely homophobic and racist). Plus the fact that everything at our wedding will have to be her way too– she told me that when the father-daughter dance happens she wants to dance with her father too! I definitely don’t want her there, and I can definitely sway HtB in that direction but i’m afraid he’ll regret not having his mother there and resent me for it, or something. What should I do???
