Navigating My Relationship With My In-Law’s

Wow.  My husband and I are back from a week spent with his parents who are spending the winter relatively near by so that they can be closer to some of my mother-in-law’s relatives who are not well.  Turns out that they are kind of helping her out more than she is them because my husband’s dad keeps deteriorating.

Needless to say it was an emotionally intense weekend.  I knew conversations about my in-law’s future we ratcheting up and my husband keeps being fairly oblivious to the urgency.

It’s been an interesting conundrum for me because there are just so many places where I could fall into my old patterns:

• I could try to push him into caring for his parents in spite of his ambivalent feelings because it would relieve the tension I feel around not being sure about how or if I will be there for my parents.
• I could do what his mother did – care for her mother-in-law in a super selfless way and not have support from my husband.
• I could care for his parents even when I don’t have strong bonding feelings toward them myself just because I want to be seen as a good person.
• I could step in and take care of them because I want to protect my husband and my in-law’s from feeling bad that he’s not taking a more active role.  Protecting people could come so naturally to me.
• I don’t want to urge my husband to do something I might not want to do.  It might be tempting to tell him what to do/what he should do.  (Ugh, that sounds so disrespectful, but I’m capable of that.)
• And there are probably a bunch of other things.

I’m actually pretty pleased with how I theoretically decided to handle things.  I’ll say more in a minute how it worked out in practice!

• I decided that I would ask him at key times – when we travel to see them only – about what his thinking was.
• I decided after our Thanksgiving trip to visit my in-law’s that as much as I wanted to feel close to his parents that I didn’t.  I didn’t have overwhelming feelings of my own that had me want to dedicate a good chunk of my life to looking after them, but that I was motivated to support my husband in looking after them.  Doing so would be fun simply because we’d be doing it together.
• I decided that my husband would need to take the lead on deciding what was important to him around caring for his parents.  I might think that he “should” do certain things but that I would leave that to him to decide what that was rather than get involved.
• At the same time I realized that I cared a lot about my husband using this time to work out within himself stuff about his father who has some significant character deficits which have been enhanced by disease.  We hope to have children and I have a desire for my husband to come to terms with his father’s limitations, to recognize and mourn those losses, so that he will be able to be conscious as he is a father of the impact of the fathering he received on him.  As painful as it is, I think it’s a gift to work this stuff through with a real live person and not just a ghost.  My father-in-law will not be with us that long.
• I also decided that while I wanted the above, that I could be obsessed by having it.  I could think that my life with my husband would be ruined if he did not do this work.  Doesn’t that sound like enmeshment on my part?!  So I also decided that I needed to focus on myself and my own issues which are significant enough!  I would not let myself talk to my husband about this after our trip for a month.  I even set it up on my calendar so that I would know when a month had passed.
• I also felt really worried that if my husband’s parents were more a part of our lives that our life would begin to feel small and that my husband would go back to acting with them as he did as a child because he does revert some today.  It’s hard not to.  Kind of like the thing above I decided that I could obsess over this and put a lot of energy into trying to get him to change.  Oh goodness, I could do this so easily.  But I decided instead that I would concentrate on living a great life myself and together with him.  If that reverting did happen, I figured he would work to grow out of that because he would like living from the place of adulthood with me far more.  I was really pleased that I figured out a way for me to manage my anxiety!

So we were there in Tennessee.  As I have shared here, I was struggling with anxiety/manic-ness last week as I have been confronting returning to a more regular life.  There has been a lot going on.  On the drive back last night, it dawned on me that while I was fairly relaxed about our trip that I had been feeling anxious about it, too.  I’m pleased to say that I not only survived but it was a great trip.  Back to the bullet points, these were some of the highlights:

• For a week or two leading up to the trip I worked on scanning some old negatives for my father-in-law.  I then organized them and put them into a nice format on a DVD.  It was interesting that I did this because I find him so hard to connect with.  I kind of worried that I was doing something I do often – keep trying with someone when I really need to wise up and give up.  But I decided that I was doing this project enough for me – I love photos – that I would be emotionally safe.  Sure enough he had no concept of what I had done, the amount of time, and he kind of ignored them for a while.  It was interesting to watch myself.  I was emotionally safe, but I did feel this internal frustration.  I was sad that I had to resign myself and that my husband and my mother-in-law also had to resign themselves to not being able to really enjoy my husband’s dad.  I wished my husband could have said something like “I just hate it that dad can’t appreciate the nice things people do for him.”  I felt alone in that moment.  I hated the situation.  And, I knew that there was nothing else to expect.  Later my husband and father-in-law were looking at the photos together and my husband was getting a chance to know his father more as they looked at the photos.  That made me super happy.  My husband later said that it was the kind of experience that they rarely had.  And I was glad that I hadn’t hidden from the wide range of emotions I’d had.
• For the most part I stayed pretty true to my decision that I would follow my husband’s lead on what would be the right amount of caring/involvement with supporting his family.  I was kind of waiting for his heart to kick in and motivate him to speak up and offer some ideas/help.  But it never happened.  I hate to say this but very recently this would have had me be undone.  His failure to do this would have sent me into a very freaked out place.  I would have hated that he was so flawed in this way.  I would have felt scared that he would be undependable emotionally.  I would have wondered what this MEANT about him as a person.  Blah, blah, blah.  In other words it would have been more about my unresolved feelings/trauma around my own neglectful parents and not about him as a real live person.  I would have needed him to be a certain way for me to be safe.  So it was really cool to not flip out and to be able to just be with him.  After what I had re-confirmed around his dad and the photos, helped me to recognize that it would be super hard for his heart to suddenly appear as a driving force in this situation because his relationship with his dad would not naturally inspire his heart.  Related to his dad, his heart probably knows resignation more than inspiration.
• What was a surprise, though, was how much more connected I could be with his mom.  I think since I’ve worked out a lot of my anxieties in the situation and I have given up hoping for his parents to be the in-laws I always hoped for, I have made more room for what is actually there.  And, not needing to control my husband helps a whole lot, too.  So she and I had some great talks.  It was really nice to be there for her.  I really respected her for the things that she could share with me, the feelings she had and that kind of thing.  I felt more close to her than before.  I found myself wanting to help her more directly.  That was nice.  I’m looking forward to sending her a care package of stuff.
• Still I was able to not take over and still recognize that I wanted to follow my husband’s lead.  I cared more but I knew I would be motivated by something not so healthy if I suddenly offered to do a bunch of huge stuff to help them.   So I did something totally unexpected.  My mother-in-law and I were hanging out and I asked her if I could give her some advice about my husband.  She said it would be okay, and so I suggested she ask him directly for what she wanted from him.  I said something about how if she were to wait for his heart to kick in that it wouldn’t happen, but if she asked him for specific things that he would then be able to figure out if he could do them or not.  He probably would.  I guess I really needed to say that because it was just true and it seemed like naming it would help.  I think I needed to also kind of say that I wasn’t going to step in the middle of things.  I didn’t say that exactly, but I guess I did intimate that I thought this was between she and him and that I wasn’t going to be filling in for him.  On the way home I did reiterate to him that once he decided to what degree he wanted to be there for his parents that I would be there to help him.  This time and once before when I said this he has let out a little sigh kind of like an – oh shoot I can’t run away from this one! – and I LOVE that I’m okay making him sweat a little.
• Also on the way home, we were talking about this stuff.  I’d asked him some questions about what he was thinking about this trip, and he kind of came up blank.  I was sitting there having a bit of a mini freak out and thinking that after all that had been said this weekend (we’d had a good conversation with his mom where she’d talked a good bit about her options) that he had nothing to say.  I knew I needed to keep my mouth shut.  I knew I needed to deal with my own anxiety.  So I kept quiet and immediately imagined talking to Andrea and telling her about all of the feelings I was having – the real and exaggerated anxiety, the challenge of not overstepping my bounds, how lonely I felt in that moment, all of it.  It felt good.  I knew I didn’t have to say anything and I could let my husband just be where he was.  Then he asked me a question, inviting me to tell him some of my thoughts.  Then it felt appropriate to say more.
• To my surprise I also said something that came out of my mouth without a lot of preprocessing.  I told him that I cared that he make his own decisions about this but that I also felt like there was a role for me in helping him to work through this, that I thought that he might not be able to get his arms around all of this now while it was happening and that it might be easier to just turn away but that 10, 20, 30, or 40 years from now that it might matter to him how he handled this.  I told him that I thought I might be able to help him a bit with this stuff just by asking him questions and revisiting this occasionally.  It was kind of neat that this came out of me.  Andrea and I had talked a long while back about how it’s okay to help your partner out.  Those boundaries are kind of fuzzy for me.  When am I helping out and when am I involved because of my own anxiety?  I guess I’d worked this out some so that I could say this to him and that being involved in this helping kind of way could feel good to me, to him, and to the relationship.  It’s a pretty subtle thing.  To even know that he needs me means being able to be with a wide range of my own emotions.

So anyway, it was a very interesting weekend.  There’s much I’ve left out.

I have been eager to get out in the work world.  Thankfully, I recognized that today was not the day to begin a temporary job so I will wait until later in the week to do that.  I’m glad I gave myself time to digest all of this.  At the same time I took a walk around my yard this morning and felt the urge to get to gardening.  I realized that usually after an emotionally intense and complicated weekend like this that it would usually be a good week before I’d be able to let go and get into something mindless like gardening.  But I really felt the urge to keep on moving through life.  This weekend didn’t take everything out of me that I had, like it would have in the past.  I want to keep on living, keep on muddling through.

Thank you for the chance to share this with you.