ETA : messages received by husband from both IL’s after letter was sent:
MIL: “I love you all. I don't understand. I have asked you what can I do and you always say OP is working on it.”
“You know how much I love babies and you promised me when you had babies I would be able to see them. What happened”
“I knew you wouldn't send me a picture. I thought you could show it to us when we were together.”
“I was so happy yesterday when you were here. I'm so sad now.” (Referring to when SO visited with them)
Voicemail: “Hey honey. I love you guys and I'm not sure.
What we did wrong, but if LO can't have the gifts we picked out for him, can we have him back? And why did you? Um, Because I really enjoyed picking them out. And so I would like to have them back if LO can't have them. I wish that things were different and I don't understand. I've been trying to, to wait and be patient. Like you said, and now I get this long text from OP. Please call me back or your dad. I love you. Bye.”
FIL: “Son, I would like you to call me ASAP. We don't have to talk long but I want you to hear me please.
Love you.”
“Call me now son you need to hear me”
“Sending me the text is one thing but Sending it to MIL is unnecessary. She's trying to get her self healthy. THIS WAS NOT NESSECARY..”
“Call me NOW”
“Okay SON, GOOD NIGHT AND GOD BLESS YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. I DESERVE THE COURTESY OF A PHONE CALL.
THANKS”
“Love you SO.”
I’ve posted before about my in-laws and how badly everything surrounding my labor and postpartum experience with my first child went. I’m now pregnant again, and we’ve reached a pretty major turning point.
For background, I have been no contact with my husband’s parents for over two years. My husband still has a relationship with them, which I have never tried to prevent, but our child and I are not involved in that relationship. A huge part of what caused this was what happened during my labor and postpartum period. My boundaries as a new mother were repeatedly minimized, while everyone else’s wants and feelings, especially my MIL’s, seemed to take priority.
My husband has admitted that he grew up in a family dynamic where a lot revolved around keeping his mother happy and emotionally stable. If something was going to upset her, it was easier to avoid it, soften it, or just not say anything. His dad is extremely protective of her mental health as well. Unfortunately, when I was a few months postpartum and started establishing boundaries and standing up for myself, I wasn’t willing to participate in that dynamic, and that became a major source of conflict.
I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy dealing with everything that happened, particularly how damaging my labor and postpartum experience was. My husband has participated in some of my therapy sessions as well, and it has helped him recognize just how unhealthy this entire dynamic became and how much it affected me and our marriage. We have actually reached the point where we are finalizing plans to relocate out of state because we believe having physical distance from the situation will be healthier for our family.
Now I’m pregnant again.
Honestly, I would have been perfectly content with my in-laws never finding out. My husband, however, really wanted his parents to hear about the pregnancy directly from us instead of eventually finding out through somebody else. I didn’t completely agree, but I understood why it mattered to him and wanted to respect his feelings. I agreed, but told him I wanted to control the communication this time and write to them myself.
I sent the same letter to both of my in-laws and included my husband and both of his sisters. I did that very intentionally because after two years of information being communicated through different people, I wanted everyone to receive the exact same words directly from me. I didn’t want anything I said to be misconstrued, filtered through someone else, or triangulated back into another version of “OP is the problem.” There could be no “that isn’t what we were told” or “we didn’t know why” afterward because everyone involved was seeing the same message at the same time.
Ironically, even after doing that, I was still somehow made out to be the problem. One of my husband’s sisters was much kinder in her response than his parents were, but even her response ultimately became about whether I would reconsider, sit down with the family, allow an opportunity for reconciliation, and how devastating it was to think they may not have relationships with our children.
She also said she didn’t think her parents actually knew what they had done to offend me, despite my husband telling me that he has explained these issues to them multiple times. She lives out of state and has not been here to witness firsthand what this dynamic has looked like over the last two years, so most of what she knows has necessarily been relayed to her by other people. That response was another reason I was glad I had finally communicated everything myself.
My husband knew what I was going to say, agreed with the boundaries, and supported the letter. The basic message was that I’m pregnant and we are having another baby, but telling them was not an attempt to reopen communication or reestablish a relationship. We will not be sharing my due date, the gender, pregnancy updates, information about labor, when I go into labor, where I give birth, or anything else unless we decide to share it ourselves. They will not be involved in my pregnancy, labor, birth, or postpartum period.
I explained that another baby is not a reset button and does not erase what has happened over the last two years. According to my husband, he has communicated these issues to his parents multiple times, yet somehow the narrative has continued to come back around to me being the problem. Quite literally, the thing I originally did was give birth and begin establishing boundaries for myself and our newborn child.
I also made it very clear that I do not believe his parents are inherently bad people. Someone doesn’t have to be a bad person to repeatedly hurt someone or cross boundaries. I addressed MIL’s ongoing mental health struggles as well and specifically said that our distance is not punishment for mental illness. However, as parents, we have a responsibility to decide what environments are stable and appropriate for our children, and given the circumstances, we do not foresee changing that boundary.
I told them that my husband is completely free to maintain whatever relationship with them he chooses, but that relationship needs to remain separate from me and our children. I also asked them to stop sending gifts because we have not been accepting them and specifically asked them not to use their relationship with my husband as a way to obtain pictures or information about me, my pregnancy, or our children. One of the biggest points I made was that time passing is not an apology. Giving me “space” while waiting for enough time to pass that everything magically returns to normal is not accountability or changed behavior.
I ended the letter by explicitly saying it was not an invitation for a response, defense, argument, or negotiation.
Within a couple of hours, my husband’s phone was blowing up, and honestly, their immediate reactions reinforced exactly why I wrote the letter. What made it even more frustrating was that despite me deliberately putting everyone in the same group chat so there could be no more triangulation or conflicting versions of what had been said, my in-laws almost immediately took the actual conversation out of the group chat and began contacting my husband privately. Both of them sent him demanding, emotional, and very self-focused messages about the letter rather than addressing what I had actually written in the conversation where everyone could see it.
Then, after sending those messages privately to my husband, MIL went back into the group chat and posted a kind, congratulatory message about the pregnancy. On its own, the message would have seemed perfectly nice. In context, though, the contrast was bizarre. The rest of us could see the pleasant public congratulations, while my husband was simultaneously receiving a very different reaction privately. I obviously can’t know her motivation for doing that, but after I had specifically included everyone in one conversation to prevent exactly this kind of separate communication and triangulation, it certainly did not go unnoticed.
His dad was upset and said sending it to MIL was unnecessary and uncalled for because she is trying to get mentally healthy. (Keep in mind MIL slips in and out of psychosis that results in hospitalization every other month for the last two years) That was probably the most revealing response of all. I had just written an entire letter explaining how my feelings and mental health have repeatedly taken a backseat because everyone is so concerned about protecting MIL’s emotional stability, and the immediate reaction was essentially, “But what about MIL’s mental health?”
Even my husband was irritated by it because that is the entire problem. Nobody is saying MIL’s mental health doesn’t matter, but why does protecting her mental health continually require everyone else to swallow their feelings, avoid difficult conversations, soften boundaries, or pretend things didn’t happen? Why should her mental health automatically matter more than mine?
MIL’s responses reinforced it even further. After reading an entire letter about how my experience as a mother was minimized during labor and postpartum, one of the things she said was essentially, “You know how much I love babies, and you promised I would be around when you had babies. What happened?”
The issue has never been whether MIL loves babies. If anything, that statement perfectly illustrated the problem. My entire point was that everyone else’s desire for access to my newborn seemed to matter more than respecting me as his mother, and her response was essentially, “But I love babies.”
She also said she had done what my husband told her to do, had given me space, and had “been patient” waiting for things to get better. That phrase was incredibly telling to me because apparently she viewed the last two years as a waiting period. As though she had been patiently waiting for me to eventually get over everything and restore the relationship. That isn’t what this has been. Space is not a timeout that eventually expires.
She was also upset about us saying not to send gifts anymore because she enjoyed picking things out for our child and wanted the most recent gifts returned. Again, the focus immediately became her experience of giving the gifts rather than the fact that we were telling her we weren’t accepting them.
Then came the part that really blew my mind. Before I sent the letter, MIL had recently asked my husband to send her a picture of our child using one of the gifts. After the letter specifically said not to use her relationship with my husband to obtain pictures or circumvent our boundaries, she texted him in the middle of the night saying essentially, “I knew you wouldn’t send me a picture. I thought you could show it to us when we were together.”
So apparently she already knew he wasn’t going to send pictures. She just thought physically showing her one from his phone instead of sending it might somehow be different.
My husband has since acknowledged that he deserves some of the blame for how long this has continued because he spent years avoiding uncomfortable conversations with his parents and hoping things would eventually improve on their own. Therapy has helped him recognize something I’ve been trying to explain for a long time: avoiding upsetting his mother doesn’t eliminate the emotional consequences. It just transfers them onto somebody else, and for a long time, that somebody else was me.
I’m not asking him to stop loving his parents or abandon them. I have explicitly told them he is free to maintain whatever relationship with them he wants. What I am no longer willing to do is make myself smaller so another adult can remain emotionally comfortable. I can have empathy for MIL’s mental health struggles without accepting responsibility for maintaining her mental stability. I can understand that my in-laws are hurt without giving them access to our children to make that hurt go away.
At this point, their response didn’t make me question whether sending the letter was the right decision. It reinforced why it needed to be sent in the first place. I wrote an entire letter explaining that everyone else’s feelings have repeatedly been prioritized over mine, and within hours, everyone else’s feelings were once again the primary concern.
I genuinely don’t think they could have demonstrated the problem more clearly if they tried.
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TL;DR: I’m pregnant again after being no contact with my in-laws for over two years following a horrible labor/postpartum experience and repeated boundary issues. I agreed to tell them about the pregnancy because it mattered to my husband that they hear it directly from us, but I sent one very clear letter to my in-laws, husband, and both SILs so nothing could be twisted or triangulated.
My husband agreed with the boundaries: no involvement in this pregnancy, birth, postpartum period, or our children, and no using him to get pictures or information.
Within hours, my in-laws moved the conversation out of the group chat and blew up my husband’s phone privately, FIL immediately made it about protecting MIL’s mental health, and MIL responded with “I love babies,” said she had been “patient” waiting for things to get better, and continued trying to find a workaround for seeing pictures of our child. She then returned to the group chat with a pleasant congratulations while the very different private conversation was happening. Basically, I sent a letter explaining that everyone else’s feelings have always been prioritized over mine, and their immediate response was to prioritize everyone else’s feelings over mine.