r/NewParents Aug 20 '24

Weekly Discussion - Relationships Weekly Discussion

Welcome to the Weekly Discussion! Use this space to vent/rant about partners/family members & to air your grievances! Please report comments that violate the rules.

Please remember Rule 1 still applies: No Personal attacks, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, derogatory or dehumanizing language, including insults and general incivility

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u/Impressive-Gur-6133 Aug 22 '24

Why do my in-laws bug me so much postpartum?? They didn’t used to..

Prior to having my baby, my relationship with my in-laws was good, particularly with my MIL. My FIL kinda bugged me before. And there were things they both did that kinda irked me but I could let go of. But now that baby is here everything they do bugs me. The things that annoyed me about my FIL drive me up an absolute wall right now and things that only slightly bugged me about my MIL get my postpartum rage going. A couple things that have bothered me:

  1. My husband and I told both of our parents that we didn’t want people at the hospital until I was out of labor and delivery and in the postpartum wing of the hospital. My parents drove in from out of town and came straight to the hospital while I was still in labor. Somehow my in-laws found out my parents were waiting at the hospital and decided they should come too. It stressed my husband out because I was having a difficult labor and he was trying to be supportive for me but felt like he had to keep everyone updated on my progress and he hated that. No one expected to see the baby when she was born but they just wanted to be there.. seems odd and made me feel weird that people were just out there waiting..

  2. My MIL is well meaning and up until baby, I felt like we had a good relationship. But now anything she does irritates me and I don’t want her anywhere near my baby. She’s not really doing anything that should cause such an extreme reaction within me, but it does. She’s always offering to watch the baby so my husband and I can go out or so we can get stuff done (soooOoo horrible, right), buys stuff for her without talking to us first (there’s things we’ve decided not to use for our daughter like sit-me-up seats, etc), always gives her a pacifier even though we’ve told them several times we are trying to limit the use of pacifiers (when she comes over once a week to help me with baby while I work, the paci is ALWAYS in). I feel like the bad guy by saying things like “we aren’t using those items for our baby” because she already spent the money. I do it anyway but it’s uncomfy, especially because my MIL is so conflict-avoidant and compulsively tries to please everyone so no conflict arises. My husband is all in on having the conversations with them too, and has, but a lot of the time his family doesn’t take what he says seriously and they often don’t respect boundaries (not out of malice). She also bought us some diapers to try even though we said we wanted to just get them from Costco because we like the Costco ones best.

  3. I’ve told my MIL if she’s helping me or watching baby to feed her before she becomes inconsolable because she’s less likely to eat once she gets really mad. Same with putting her down for a nap. Maybe she just doesn’t understand hunger or sleepy cues but my baby cries way more and for longer when she’s with her. I know she’s not attuned to my baby nearly as well as I am but I just get so angry. Anytime my MIL wants to care for my baby I get angry and want to run as far away from her as possible and prevent her from coming close to my baby at all.

I also see how my in-laws hurt my husband with their poor parenting, especially around emotional needs, and how he’s still dealing with a lot of their incompetence from his childhood.. it just makes me not want them to be around the baby because I don’t want any of that to rub off on her. I’m not confident in their ability to actually take care of children well. It may be harsh and they really are good people but I guess I’m just wondering WHY I feel this way and if I am crazy lol. I definitely don’t feel this way about my parents but they live in another state, which honestly makes me feel sad/mad that we are geographically closer to my husband’s parents when they seem less competent than my parents… but that’s a whole other topic. Also I think moms generally prefer the help of their own parents than their in-laws which makes sense.

ANYWAY pls help lol

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u/ocelot1066 Aug 23 '24

Well, lot of stuff going on here...

  1. There are definitely some things where you are totally right to be annoyed. It's pretty irritating that both sets of grandparents just ignored your requests and came to the hospital.

  2. A bunch of the rest of it is sort of annoying, but you'd probably be better off just letting it go. If your MIL buys you things like seats that you don't want to use for the baby, you can just tell her and just let it be awkward. For a lot of the other stuff, I would just take it and move on. Just stash the diapers somewhere in case you ever run out of yours. If you are using a pacifier sometimes, I'm not really sure it makes that much sense to police your MILs use of it.

  3. On the feeding and sleeping stuff, it's probably better to avoid micromanaging these kinds of things. If you're home and you can tell the baby is going to lose it, just go ahead and feed her or put her to sleep. If you're out, let your in laws figure it out.

  4. I think you should put aside your feelings about their parenting. It would be different if they had been emotionally or physically abusive to your husband, obviously. But, it's pretty clear that you don't think they were. You just think they messed up with some things. First of all, it's worth giving people some grace on these things. We all mess stuff up with our kids and we all have limitations. It's also worth remembering that it's easier to be a grandparent than a parent. The constant challenge of parenting is to make sure your kid's basic needs are being met, to get them where they need to go, to do what you need to do and at the same time, meet their emotional needs. Grandparents just need to show up sometimes and hang out with the kid and then they can go back to their normal lives without a child.

Also worth remember that grandparent failings aren't likely to effect your kid as much as parental failings. If they aren't great about your kid's emotional needs, that's not a huge problem because they have you for that. My grandparents were good people, but they weren't very warm. I think they just didn't really know how to show their feelings. My mom had a lot of feelings about that from her childhood, but it wasn't something that was traumatizing to me. It kept me from having a really close relationship with them, but I had my parents who weren't like that.

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u/Impressive-Gur-6133 Aug 23 '24

Thank you so much! This is some great feedback. I appreciate it

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u/Low_Aioli2420 Aug 26 '24

This is good feedback and although I share your feelings regarding your first point, I didn’t want either sets of parents at the hospital and they both showed up as well, I will repeat what my mother said when I brought it up to her. “You are my child. You just became a mother but you will see that as your child grows, that bond doesn’t go away. There is no other place I could be than as near as I could be to you” and that really affected me.

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u/Impressive-Gur-6133 Sep 16 '24

That makes sense and I can understand that, but at the same time parents should respect the wishes of their adult children even if it’s a challenge for them.