If there’s one thing in this world that’s older than jokes about your spouse, it’s jokes about your spouse’s mother.
And unfortunately, there are no shortage of mothers-in-law that live down to this unpleasant reputation of being overbearing about the way their grandchildren are being raised or just not respecting boundaries in general. But at the same time, there are just as many who are happy to treat the new members of a family as if they’d been there all along.
So sometimes, it doesn’t have anything to do with a mother-in-law’s actual behavior when a family argues about her. As the thorny issue we’re about to look into illustrates, sometimes the biggest fights are about a complicated situation that’s beyond her control.
Four years ago, a couple got married and the husband welcomed his wife and her two children into the home he had inherited from his parents.
As this man explained in a Reddit post , this inheritance had gone through about a decade ago and he had done a lot of work on the basement in particular in that time.
And until recently, the family’s living arrangement has gone on swimmingly as the 10-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl now have their own rooms and a yard to play in.
However, it seems that may soon change in the wake of his father-in-law’s passing.
His death has been particularly hard for his mother-in-law, so his wife got the idea of moving her into the house so she’s not alone.
Due to the mother’s unspecified health issues and the changes to the family’s dynamic that would result from letting her stay, the man was hesitant to do so at first.
However, it seems he’s more amenable to the idea after discussing it further.
This means that the big issue under debate now concerns where she would actually stay.
They don’t have a spare bedroom for her, so the wife suggested turning the basement into a kind of suite for her mom.
However, all that work I mentioned above was done so the man could make that basement into a man cave with a bar, pool table, poker table, and a big screen TV.
Since he had worked on this before he even met his wife, it didn’t seem fair to him that he should both give up his special space and invalidate all that effort.
Instead, he suggested setting aside one of the children’s bedrooms for his mother-in-law and having the kids share a room.
However, the wife vetoed this idea, saying that the kids have gotten used to having their own space and she won’t force them to give that up.
But as the man put it, “I asked her why it’s OK for me to have to give up my space, but not anyone else?”
This led the wife to call him selfish and stubborn, as well as to remind him that it’s now her house too.
This has been the subject of arguments for weeks and both sides are about as intractable as when they started.
As the man said, “My wife is getting more and more hostile towards me and our relationship is suffering.”
So now he’s wondering whether he should just let her mom have his basement or whether he’s already given up enough.
Although Reddit can usually reach a consensus on matters like these, the community he reached out to seems to be fighting as hard as the couple is.
Some believe he’s giving a lot more to this relationship than his wife is, while others find it concerning that he’s prioritizing his space over that of the children he agreed to raise.
Still others can both see why he wouldn’t want to give up his space and why his wife would want to keep her mother close. Meanwhile, there’s another camp that thinks they’re both wrong for not compromising.
Even so, there were aspects of this case that most people could agree on.
Namely, few seemed to think it would work out in the long run for the kids to share a room. But more to the point, many didn’t think the mother-in-law should move in to the basement due to the danger the stairs will likely become for her as she continues to age.
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Some also pointed out that we don’t actually know whether the mother-in-law even wants to move in.
For this reason, users suggested that finding her an apartment close to their home would be the best solution for everybody.
Finally, they also figured that a marriage counselor may be more equipped to handle the couple’s problems than a bunch of random people on Reddit.
h/t: Reddit | needmyspaceaita