My husband is one of four, and they all have children of their own. His parents divorced when he was young after his father had a long-standing affair with a woman he went on to marry. My mother-in-law was left worse off, while my father-in-law has gone on to live a fairly charmed life.
She is still white-hot angry with her ex-husband and his now wife. She can’t bear to speak their names and we all go to a lot of effort to ensure they never cross paths. There have been times when she has stopped speaking to members of the family if she feels they have had anything to do with her ex and his wife.
We’re a very close family, and I feel so lucky to have a mother-in-law who is devoted to my children. She’s the first we call in a crisis and we all see each other more than weekly.
Recently, she has been upset by her ex-husband attempting to muscle in on her and her family. No amount of reassurance seems to help. We can see this is all coming from a place of pain; she’s stuck in a cycle of anger and injustice and we don’t know how to break it. I am so worried that this will break up the family for good. All four of the siblings are losing sleep over this, and I’d love to help.
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I can sense so clearly how, in wanting to keep your mother-in-law happy, you are all treading on eggshells. This is never a sustainable or relaxing option. And for her children and grandchildren, not seeing their father/grandfather if they want to is not an acceptable option.
Psychotherapist Armele Philpotts (bacp.org.uk) and I had a long talk about your letter. We wondered what those “reassurances” you show your MIL look like? It can be easy to feel like we are reassuring someone when we may actually be shushing them, especially in response to family stories we sense we’ve heard before. I’m aware your husband and his siblings were very young when this happened, so there must be pain for them too, and maybe they learned to shush that away (or that mother’s pain was more important). Maybe no one has really seen or validated your MIL’s pain?
Philpotts also explained how “anger is a good thing because it tells us that a boundary has been crossed; it’s really about figuring out which one”.
In this case it’s pretty clear it’s the affair that has made your MIL so angry. “And it now seems like she is trying to hold a boundary by not talking about, or acknowledging, her ex and his wife,” she added.
I wondered if your MIL feels that “having” the family is her recompense for what she lost, and this is why she feels so fiercely possessive of you all. Maybe she thinks it’s unfair of your FIL to have done what he did, have the “charmed life” and have his family.
I also wasn’t sure what the set-up was – do you all see your FIL and his wife, but don’t tell her? “If you’re all going about it in a cloak-and-dagger way to protect her, that may replicate the secrecy of the affair,” said Philpotts, which may make her feel duped again.
Philpotts wondered if it was coming to a head because some of her grandchildren are nearing the age her own children were at the time of the divorce? We wondered if there could be a time and a place where one of you, maybe the person she finds it easiest to talk to, could broach it with her and say something like: “We can see how much this hurts you, if you ever want to talk about the pain, we’re here for you, but we don’t want to have to hide things from you or lie to you, so how can we manage this?”
Ask yourself this: if you’re constantly trying to keep the peace, do you actually have any peace?
Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a family-related problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa on a family matter, please send your problem to ask.annalisa@theguardian.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions: see gu.com/letters-terms.
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