Dealing with family issues can be tough. This woman has been having trouble with her mother-in-law for a while, and things got even worse recently. Since it affects her kids, she’s feeling unsure about what to do. So, she reached out for advice online without revealing her identity.
“There’s a lot of history with this lady, but I just need to talk about this ongoing problem to see if I’m not overreacting or doing something wrong.
This has been happening for years. I met my now-husband when my daughter was a few months old. She knows her dad well, visits him often, and even travels to see him since he lives in another state. So she’s mostly with us.
But my mother-in-law doesn’t believe she knows her dad or visits him. She keeps insisting that my daughter is somewhere else when I say she’s visiting her dad. She acts like she’s catching me lying and then argues about it. She also thinks I’m making my daughter call my husband ‘dad,’ but she does it on her own.
We don’t call the younger kids ‘half-siblings’; they’re all siblings. But my mother-in-law always corrects us.”
“MIL had a talk with my husband yesterday and said she’s tired of me supposedly lying to my 14-year-old about who her dad is. Since my husband didn’t back her up, she went ahead and got a DNA kit for my daughter to find out the truth. She even had it sent to our house, wanting us to give it to her.
My husband told his mom she was being silly and that our daughter already knows the truth. MIL insisted she was just looking out for our daughter’s best interests because she thinks we don’t care. Then she hung up.
I couldn’t sleep last night. MIL’s words are bothering me, but I’m also fed up with her always trying to prove I’m lying to my daughter. I’m tempted to just toss out the DNA kit, buy something else, put MIL’s name on it, and pretend her gift never arrived.”