Hi Postnatal Blues,
Poor gal, bottling up your frustration for so long, can't imagine how you do that...
If you read my postings months ago, you will realise that we gave birth at the same month to baby girls and also encounter MIL problems during our confinement. I too tot that I would not survive the whole ordeal and 'D' pops up every now and then.
Can relate to how you feel. My relationship with MIL is pretty good before I popped, but things are different now. Not sure if it is due to hormonal change, but I realise that I'm really protective of my baby and actually detest my MIL to touch my baby. In order to avoid further conflicts during then, I often go out to shop and even end my ML earlier to go back to work.
May I asked if your baby is your MIL's first grandchild? If she is, then I can understand why she keeps coming to your house. Grandparents loves their grandchild more than their own child, this is just natural instinct. She may not meant to intervene with your life, just that she hopes to have more time with her grandchild and when she does so, that's when you feel she's intervening.
My MIL sometimes just blunt out things which are not pleasing to my ears and they sound extremely stingful during my confinement. She did not mean it, but when cooing to the baby, she just say what comes to mind and didn't take too much into consideration what it might mean to you.
Your husband becoming filial might also be caused by witnessing your child's birth and it hit him that his mum had such a tough time during birth and he realised that he should just be a little more filial than before.
Please don't regret about having your precious baby and being pregnant. Your baby is the most precious gift God has present to you. You should love your baby more. I can relate that it is painful, I have been through that. I survived and so can you. It takes time to adjust to motherhood and also to get tuned to relationship with MIL, you are halfway through and almost there. Please don't give up.
I look back at my confinement and realised as a first time Mum, I only have 'eyes' for my family "hubby, baby, myself" and have totally left out my MIL so when she starts coming into the picture, I backed off and freaked out. I started writing diaries during then and sob everytime I write. Just couldn't accept the idea of having MIL into the picture.
Look on the bright side and hey, by having MIL to look after your child, you can have quality time with your husband. This is important, to have paktoh time and rebuild and strenghten your relationship.
If you are uncomfortable with your MIL feeding 'things' to your baby, invite her during one of the injection trip to PD and pose questions to PD about feeding 'things' to baby. Let PD highlight on the consequences if certain 'things' are fed to baby. Bear in mind that Honey is a taboo thing to feed to baby.
About communication, it depends. For my case, can't work, cos sometimes I find her very defensive and avoids serious communication and might get offended at times. I realise that actions are better. I have been doing some stuff and heck I hate it, but looking at the bigger picture, things are getting better.. so why not.
If you would like, email me at
[email protected] for chats. I'm still figuring ways to 'handle' my MIL and we can share tips and can also 'grumble' to each other should we encounter 'stunts' from MIL again.
The above is just my point of view and my apologies if some contents proves offending to you.
Take care mate!
