Thursday 28 December 2017

MIL wants to take my daughter to Disneyland (again), and it’s causing a lot of stress. I don’t know what to do.


The Disneyland trip is a recurring issue that won’t seem to die, regardless of what I say. My MIL has been pushing to take my daughter back to Disneyland. Despite my feelings on the matter (which I’ll get to in a second), I agreed to let them go a couple of years ago. I thought that would settle her down, but six months later she started asking again, and has asked every six months ever since.My feelings on the matter: I would really love to take my daughter to Disneyland, which is a thing we are saving up for. I told my MIL that she can take my daughter after we’ve taken her, but we want to do these things with our kid. We don’t want every Disney memory to be with grandma. My MIL got very upset, told me I was being unreasonable, and then tried to bribe us by paying for our trip to Disneyland (we didn’t take her up on it).To some extent, I understand where she’s coming from: my daughter is the first and only grandchild, she’s the first girl born in the family in 42 years, and my MIL really, REALLY wanted a girl herself. She ended up with three boys. I can understand why she’s so adamant about doing this stuff with my kid. But she’s still my kid. My MIL got to experience the first Disneyland trip three times with her own kids, PLUS she took my kid on her first trip, she got to take them to new places and share things she loves with them. Now she wants to do the same with my daughter, but it just so happens that I want to do the same things. I don’t want to downplay her role as a grandma, I just want to create memories with my one and only child.When I attempted to sit down and talk to her about it, she made me feel terrible (she’s really good at guilt trips). Her sister, who lives for drama, decided that I am withholding my child from her grandma (my daughter sees them multiple times a week), and has told everyone they know. It’s really awful. I feel awful. I decided to compromise by suggesting they do a day trip to Disney while we are on a huge family trip to San Diego in March. She seemed excited, but ultimately decided it was a dumb idea.I’m not looking for anyone to tell me I’m right, I just don’t know how to handle this. While my MIL is a very generous person who loves my daughter a lot, she’s also manipulative. The whole family is passive-aggressive and will pretend everything is just fine when it’s not. They will deny that anything is wrong, only to use it against me later. Nothing ever gets resolved.I just want to feel like I can make decisions about my child without incurring the wrath of my in-laws. I’m so frustrated by all of it. And to be clear, this isn’t just about Disneyland. She wants to take my daughter to a lot of places that are special to me, without me. Disneyland is just the thing that keeps coming up.Edit for clarification: I did not tell my MIL that she could NEVER take my daughter to Disneyland, my husband and I simply asked her to wait until after we took our daughter. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2DryOSX

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