At this point, being a mother-in-law who respects a couple’s boundaries must feel like being a patient and understanding woman who happens to be named Karen.
But while I believe either one when they say in frustration, “I swear we’re not all like this,” it’s still easy to understand why the stories of other people’s worst behavior tend to get the most traction.
After all, not only is it is obviously abhorrent to most people when a mother-in-law wears her wedding dress to a bride-to-be’s wedding or secretly changes her grandchild’s name to something she prefers, but it’s also behavior that many of us wouldn’t have imagined until we heard about it.
However, other cases of a mother-in-law overstepping boundaries tend to be a lot more common, which is likely why one story of subterfuge resonated with so many people.
Even before the woman we’re about to hear from got married, her husband’s mother always seemed to have zero consideration for their privacy.
As she explained in a Reddit post , the mother-in-law used what was supposed to be an emergency key to their old apartment often enough that she walked in on them while they were being intimate on two different occasions.
Although the husband wasn’t perturbed by this and wrote his mom’s behavior off as “just the way she is,” it made the woman reluctant to trust her with any such key to their new house.
Unfortunately, this didn’t stop the mother-in-law from badgering her about it day and night.
So instead, the woman got her hands on a key that didn’t open anything and delivered it to her personally.
And while she said the mother-in-law looked smug at this apparent victory, it wasn’t until shortly before Christmas that she realized what she was really holding.
So when that Christmas dinner rolled around, the mother-in-law called the woman out for giving her a fake key in front of her whole family.
This led her to ask when she discovered this happened, to which the mother-in-law admitted she had come over while neither the woman or her husband were home.
As the woman replied, “Didn’t you promise you wouldn’t use it unless there’s an emergency? So You tried to get in when there was no emergency and you broke the promise you made to us!”
She immediately turned red and her family stared at her while some laughed. She then ran into the kitchen and ranted so loud the woman was sure the neighbors could hear it.
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In her words, “Literally I’ve never heard a 60+ year old woman throw a tantrum like that.”
However, it seems she wasn’t the only angry one, as the woman’s husband later blew up at her for manipulating and humiliating his mom in front of his family.
But while commenters noted that he never acknowledged that his mom tried to humiliate the woman first and proved she couldn’t be trusted, their concerns for this marriage grew deeper once the woman posted an update.
Because when she showed her husband some comments she found helpful, he became even angrier for talking about the matter online and tried to get her to surrender her phone so he could delete the post.
With that, the common opinion shifted from perceiving him as a complicit mama’s boy to a controlling and potentially abusive one.
h/t: Reddit | Checkinout2022
