Podcast #186 – The Mother-in-Law I Never Wanted to Be

We all intend to be great at this mother-in-law thing, but it tends to be a bit of an ugly mess as we learn a whole new parenting role.

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Resources mentioned:

• Podcast 185 – The Black Wedding Dress
• Podcast 80 – Mistakes We Made Parenting Our College Student Who Lived at Home
• Podcast 102 – Homeschool to College
• Podcast 161 – Mothering Sons into Adulthood
• Podcast 163 – Spending Time with Your Teens
• More Than Grand website

TRANSCRIPT

I have a dirty little secret. I have not transitioned very gracefully from being a mom to being a mother in law. This podcast is going to be a very candid, raw conversation about my own struggles, but also struggles of other mothers.

My struggle is a little unique and a little different, but I have heard from so many different mothers and soon to be mother in laws that I found some things that we all seem to have in common. And it tends to be along the vein of jealousy.

Hello friends, welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from raisingarrows.net and this is episode number 186, The Mother in Law I Never Wanted to Be.

Now if you listened to my last podcast, number 185, you know that not too long ago our third child got married. This is the third child to get married and also our third child. So I am not new to having young adults get married. And this was a little bit different this time because it was a daughter and not a son. The other two are boys. And so I think there’s just a difference there. But I know that even when it is young men getting married, there is something in a mother’s heart that breaks and there is a part of her that becomes jealous. And where that jealousy is, is aimed is different for all of us.

Typically we hear about a mom who has sons who tends to feel like she’s been replaced by her son’s significant other. And through that process, she doesn’t seem to transition very well or very gracefully and she struggles with it and sometimes even comes out the other side not really liking her daughter in law.

We see this as well with daughters. It just manifests itself a little differently. And that is usually not that you’ve been replaced – because there is something different about daughters. I know that my mom has this saying about “sons are sons until they take a wife, daughters or daughters for life.” And so it is different, but there is this sudden replacing of authority. And sometimes mothers are overstepping their bounds in that marriage relationship with their daughter and her husband because they still want to be the authority in that relationship.

And that’s the big reason that I posted on Facebook the picture of my daughter and her husband on the bridge after their wedding. I wanted to illustrate for people what it’s like and how it should be once you have an adult child married, and that is that you now have your side of the bridge and they have their side of the bridge and, and we don’t really belong on each other’s sides anymore. We belong in the middle, on the bridge, where we can have a new relationship, but we’re not interfering with each other’s sides. And so that’s something that I really wanted to convey to people.

But interestingly, I had a friend who sent me a screenshot of the Facebook post and she said, “I just want to tell you that I am not making this transition very gracefully.” She has older sons. She has girls too, but they’re much younger. But she’s just stepping foot into those waters of sons who have significant others. And she said, “I’m just not doing well with this.” And I got to thinking, you know, we don’t talk about this very much. We often lament our own mother in laws and difficult relationships that we have with them. And we will lament the fact that our daughter in law did this or our son in law did this, but we rarely talk about our own feelings and our own contributions to this issue.

And so I wanted to be very candid in this conversation, conversation with you today about what I have dealt with and also what other mothers have dealt with to kind of start a conversation there so that you have some awareness of what’s going through your own mind and whether or not it’s legitimate and whether or not it’s going to end up ruining your relationship with your own children and their significant others in the future.

Now I want to back up a little bit and just explain to you my relationship with my children as they’ve aged and why this is significant to the conversation. First of all, I have always had a very good relationship with all of my children. We have lots of deep discussions, very lively conversations and debates. My children know that I love them. They love me in return. They enjoy spending time with me. I enjoy spending time with them. As they have gotten older, it has been even more enjoyable.

Most of our children have still lived in our house until about the age of 20. And so I get to usher them into that young adulthood. And I really get to make that transition in a way that is super edifying and wonderful for both of us. It’s been a learning process, but at the same time, I really feel like we’ve done a pretty good job of transitioning from child to young adult.

I do have several podcasts where I talk about this transition into adulthood. One of those is number 80, where I talk about the mistakes we made parenting our college students who lived at home. Another one is podcast number 102, homeschool to college – transitioning your teen. And then number 161, mothering sons into adulthood. And 163, spending time with your teens. All of these talk about that transition and things that I did right, things I did wrong, things I have changed. And so those are some good podcasts if you are in this season of life. Whether or not there is a relationship on the horizon, this is more about your actual relationship with your children.

So, like I said, I have a very good relationship with my children. they come back often. Those who have left, they come back often. They call often. We have deep discussions. We enjoy spending time together. So that all prefaces where I’m going with the specific issues I have when it comes to this jealousy that happens when your child finds a significant other.

Now, for a lot of people, this jealousy has to do with the other person, the significant other, the spouse, the fiance, the boyfriend, girlfriend – it has to do with them. And I don’t discount that at all. In fact, that’s the thing that my friend was struggling with. In fact, I think most people struggle with that.

As I said earlier, moms often feel replaced or their authority is no longer needed or respected as much, or not as important. So there is this jealousy that happens between the mother and the new significant other.

I am acutely aware that my time spent with my adult children is less than it was when they were obviously living in my home or before there was a wedding. I know that I am secondary, and I think that transition was not as difficult for me because I was already doing these things to help my children become arrows that would be shot out of my quiver. I was already acutely aware that I could not just hang on to them and have them stay in my home forever and be my little tiny children forever. So I wasn’t mourning that loss. I was mourning a different kind of loss. And in the process, I was feeling like I needed to prove my worth.

Now, initially, I would have told you this was a fluke. I only felt like this when my first child got married. And then I would tell you that when it happened with my second child who got married, that was also a fluke because it was different circumstances. However, when it happened with my third child, these feelings of jealousy, I knew that it wasn’t a fluke.

Now, here’s the funny thing. I’m not jealous of the significant other. I’m not jealous of my son’s wife, my son’s girlfriend, my daughter’s fiance. I’m not jealous of those people. I have a jealousy problem, which I hesitate to even call it that, but at the root of it, it is jealousy. I have a problem with the other mother.

Let that sink in for a minute.

The other mother.

I feel like I am in a random, weird competition with the other mother. And like I said initially, I thought it was just my first child. He got married when he was 24. His wife is, roughly the same age. Her parents only had one child, so it’s just her. So they had very undivided attention with her. They’re also about 10 to 15 years older than my husband and I. And so I initially would have told you this competition I was feeling was simply because I was dealing with feeling a little inadequate. I have all these kids, we live a much simpler life. I don’t have undivided, undistracted attention with my one child. So am I going to be as good a mother and mother in law as her mother?

And so I felt this competition to be a good mother in law, to be more fun, more relaxed, more enjoyable to be around. Ultimately, I think I was jealous for their time and jealous for their affection and well wishes toward me. I wanted to prove my worth. And as a mother and a mother in law, I wanted to be good at this.

I didn’t have the greatest example in a mother in law. And because of that, I actually based a lot of what I don’t do on my own mother in law. And so I wanted to be really good at this. I wanted to be way better than my own mother in law had been.

Now I do want to say my mother in law has some very good qualities. There just were some things where she did not transition well into being a mother in law and not interfering and not trying to tell me how to parent and how to take care of my husband.

There were just some things where she was on my side of the bridge and we weren’t meeting in the middle. And so it made for a very strained, difficult relationship throughout the years. I didn’t want that for my own daughters in law.

So I thought that was a one off – the fact that I felt like I was in competition with her mother. And sure enough, as soon as the wedding was over, I no longer felt that strain. It was really just from engagement to wedding. And then I didn’t feel like I was in a competition anymore. And so I kind of just relaxed.

Well, then about a year later, our second son got married. Now I would have excused my behavior or my thought process the same way because this was a unique circumstance. They were 16 and 17, they were pregnant. They were going to be living in our home once they got married and when they had the baby. And so I think what was going on there was that I felt like I had to be the strong parent, the stern parent, the one who was keeping all the ducks in a row and together. And in the process, it felt to me like her mom was a lot more fun. And I felt like I was in a competition to be fun yet steady. I had to be the calm in the chaos, but I didn’t want to be irritating and pushy. And so again, I felt like I was in a competition with her mom. Now, the circumstances, like I said, were very different. So I was just going to excuse that feeling in my head that I was in competition.

And these are all things I didn’t really voice. I didn’t really act on any of these. I wasn’t behaving oddly toward either one of these mothers. And I wasn’t like actually acting out. It was in my head. All of these were feelings that I was feeling and they were disconcerting to me. They were annoying. But at the time, I was just all in with it and I was going to be the best mother in law. And strangely enough, as soon as these young people were married and they were settled into our home, I stopped feeling like that, I guess, because any competition that could have been there was over. I don’t know. I don’t know. But like I said, I would have told you that was just a fluke. It was just an accident. It was just an excused behavior, excused feeling. I don’t really feel this way.

Until my third child got engaged. And this time the circumstances were so normal that there was no denying that I had a problem. And I was going to have to face this head on and recognize this about myself. Because our daughter married into a family that we have known for almost two decades and we are very good friends with them. We have spent many, many holidays and weekends and entire weeks with them. They’re the ones who helped us build the apartment in our basement for my mom. We spend a lot of time with these people. We have known them for a very long time. So this isn’t some random person that suddenly appeared in my life and I have to feel competitive. I have known my friend’s parenting style for 17, 18 years. I have known how her son relates to her and how her son relates to me. I have all these normal factors in. And yet when they got engaged until they got married, I felt a weird feeling of competition with my friend.

And that was when the alarm bells went off and I realized, no, this is something that I have to deal with. So the first thing that I did was I actually talked to my husband and I told him what I was feeling and how I realized what I was doing, but I didn’t know how to fix it. And the first thing he suggested was to simply talk to our daughter and let her know that I was feeling a little left out. I was feeling like I didn’t want to interfere, but I was somehow in a weird competition. And just to let her know where I’m at and that I had no intentions of actually acting out on anything, but that I was actually feeling like I was hanging back even more because I didn’t feel like I belonged.

And that was a real epiphany for me, simply talking it out with my daughter and realizing that what I was feeling a need to prove my worth, a need to still have her heart, a need to not be replaced, and a need to still be important in her life.

One of the big factors of what I was feeling was that she was going to be moving away. She was not staying in the same town, she was moving two and a half hours away where she would be closer to his family than to our family. And I think that was part of the competition feeling was that I had to compete for time, I had to compete for energy, I had to compete for the little things that she was going to get versus what I was going to get.

I also felt inadequate. I felt like there were things I was not good at that my friend is good at. And so I felt like I could not offer anything in that department to my daughter. And so talking all of this out with my daughter, both of us were able to kind of console each other and realize something about each other. The vulnerabilities that I have and the vulnerabilities that she has and the things to keep an eye on as we moved forward into this new relationship. Meeting on the bridge, what’s that going to look like?

And also a realization for me that I am not my friend, I am not the other mother in any of these cases. We are all so different and we bring something different to each equation. It is not a competition. And like I said, for the most part, once the wedding happened, I no longer felt like I was in a competition. It was very strange.

But I do know from my own mother in law that that competition can continue well into the relationship where you are constantly vying for more attention. And it astronomically and exponentially intensifies when they have children. Because now you have these little people running around that you really want them to get to know you, you want them to love you, and you feel like the only way to do that is if they spend more time with you than with any other grandparent.

And this is what had happened in my own life. My mother in law was constantly trying to get more time with my children than the other grandparents got. We would go visit, and then we’d go visit the other grandparents. And she would always want us to come back and meet up with her one more time before we left town. And she was always trying to be the one who was there more than anybody else. So she always volunteered to come help. she always volunteered her house for us to stay at, which felt really great. But as time went on, we also saw where there was this weird competition and she needed to be the better grandparent than any of the other grandparents. And so I think that’s kind of a natural.

Again, jealousy there that comes in especially once you have grandchildren. That is a totally different podcast. So I want to stay focused here on this jealousy that we feel as new mother in laws or going to be mother in laws, because that is the thing we have to address first.

So I talked to my husband, I talked to my daughter, and then I had to address my own feelings of inadequacy. I had to address the fact that this really was a real thing that I was dealing with. I really did feel competitive toward the other mother and that I needed to recognize it and nip it in the bud and deal with it when it crops up. Because you can’t really squash emotions. You have to just feel them and then move on. You’re not going to be able to say, I will never feel this again. I am pretty sure the next time I have a child get married, I am going to feel this again. I am certain of it.

So when I say I have to deal with it, I’m not going to deal with the fact that it’s going to happen again. I’m going to deal with the fact that when it happens, I need to recognize it, take a deep breath, and quit trying to be the better mother.

Many of you who’ve listened to this podcast know that I reiterate over and over and over that we need to respect who we are as individuals and families. We need to be well aware that we are not somebody else’s family. We are made up of very different people in a very different order than anyone else out there. And we need to respect the order and the family and the way that God put us together. We have very different circumstances from anyone else. There are no two families out there that look exactly alike. Even if they look alike on the surface, they’re not. We have to respect that and we have to realize that we bring a unique dynamic to our children’s lives that the other family is not going to be able to bring, but that they will also bring something of merit to that relationship. And we have to recognize that we’re not in a competition to be exactly like the other family or better than the other family. We need to simply be who we are and be that for our children moving forward.

And if you have cultivated a good relationship with your children from the start, they’re not going to suddenly think that their in laws are way cooler than you are. And ultimately that is not the point anyway – we’re not trying to be cooler.

I think something with my generation, Gen X, we’re always trying to be super cool and relevant. I’m really on the cusp of Gen X and millennials and I think that’s just a thing that we all deal with, is that we’re just trying to be better than what our parents even were. We’re trying to be more focused, we’re trying to pay more attention to our kids, we’re trying to be better at our jobs, better at our relationships, and on and on and on. And we tend to, compare ourselves with ourselves, we’re comparing ourselves with everybody around us rather than what God wants us to be. And so I have really had to pull back and make sure that this competitive feeling I’m feeling does not go any further than inside my own brain.

So if you are a mom who is feeling jealous towards your child’s significant other, their fiance, their wife, their husband, whatever it is, girlfriend or boyfriend, even if you are feeling like you’re in danger of being replaced, or you are feeling like you are finding things wrong with your daughter in law, or finding things wrong with the boyfriend that maybe really aren’t all that important. Check yourself. Go have a discussion with your husband. Go have a discussion with your child. And keep it chill, keep it calm.

Make sure you’re not pointing fingers and accusing the significant other of all sorts of things, trying to turn your child’s heart away from them. Now if there is a legitimate concern, absolutely, we need to have those conversations too. Again, that’s not this podcast. This podcast is more about dealing with your actual feelings that are probably not legitimate issues. But you are having an issue and you need to have that discussion. Step back. Take a look with objective eyes instead of subjective eyes at your child’s significant other.

Are they a believer? Are they teachable? Are you going to be able to contribute to their lives in a good way? Don’t just come up with problems for the sake of coming up with problems simply because you’re jealous.

I have seen lots and lots of very good relationships almost ruined because mom and dad can’t stand the fact that there’s somebody else in their child’s life. Don’t be that person. Be very rational. Step back. Step outside of yourself. Have a conversation with your spouse. Have a conversation with your child. Again, not pointing fingers and not making assumptions, but just a conversation that lays on the line what you are feeling and not making that somebody else’s fault, but owning the fact that you feel this and it may or may not be true.

And then from there, have that open dialogue with your child about what can we do with this, how can I find my worth here in this new relationship, and how can we help each other to navigate this new season? Again, this does require you to have had a very open relationship with your child where you have been able to talk about things, you’ve been able to be vulnerable with your child about things. You have not been accusatory or demanding or so overly opinionated that they can’t hear you anymore. You do have to have a good relationship with your kids for this to be a thing.

And go back and listen to those podcasts and learn from my mistakes and start working toward that. Because no matter what, unless you sabotage every single relationship any of your children ever have, there is going to come a point where there’s a significant other in your child’s life and you are going to have to deal with the feelings that come from that.

I don’t think anybody is immune to feelings that happen when there is another person in your child’s life. I think some of us manifest it differently. like I said, for me it was this jealousy of the other mother. I think that’s maybe unusual compared to jealousy of the actual spouse or fiance or boyfriend or girlfriend.

I do want to throw out one resource that is really aimed at grandparents, but I have found so much good in it for in laws as well. And it’s called More than Grand. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook. She does a lot of reels and posts about being a good grandparent and what that looks like, but a lot of that is a respect of your children and your children’s spouses. And I think you have to start there before you’re ever a grandparent. You have to start with respecting each other and respecting your child’s spouse, respecting their fiance even.

My husband likes to say they’re not part of the family until they’re actually married. I agree with that. But you do need to practice ahead of time. You can’t just expect to jump into being an in law and be really good at it. And so take a look at More Than Grand. She has so many good resources there to just help with that transition.

And I would love to hear from any of you about how you have dealt with this feeling of jealousy or competition or trying to be better than or be appreciated more. I would love to hear from you about how you’ve been dealing with that and how God’s been dealing with you on that, and what you’ve learned from that. It may make it into a future podcast. Of course, I won’t use your name, but I think we need to learn from each other and we need to learn from these very candid, raw conversations about what we’re feeling and how we’ve dealt with those feelings in Christ. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Raising Arrows podcast. We’ll see you next time.