“She Is Not This Baby’s Mom”: Mom Desperate After MIL Starts Acting Unhinged Around Her Baby

The annoying mother-in-law is a trope so played out, the ancient Romans were making jokes about them. But far, far worse, is a mother-in-law who goes from annoying to downright intrusive particularly when they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with your child and have no regard at all for any boundaries.

A concerned mother turned to the internet for advice after sharing her MIL’s weird behavior around her kid, including her insistence on baptizing the child directly against the parent’s wishes.

The many, many negative cultural depictions of mothers-in-law (and parents-in-law in general,) seem to come from a real set of beliefs that many people hold. While it might not be clear which came first, the MIL-joke-eggs or the real, annoying MIL-chicken, jealousy, mistrust, and competition are commonly felt emotions between a person in a relationship and their partner’s parents. This situation is exacerbated when there are cultural or even economic differences between the parties. It’s not all doom and gloom, in some cases, the partner’s parents become a form of “found family,” particularly when the partner doesn’t have the best relationship with their own parents.

As with so many situations in life, we adapt to this tension with humor. Unfortunately, mothers-in-law tend to be the butt of jokes more often than fathers, for a variety of reasons. First, many fathers simply do not take enough of a role to ever get to the point of being overbearing. Secondly, a father-in-law being joked about might respond with violence. Regardless of the reasons, mother-in-law humor has been around since the Classical era. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote in his Satire VI that married couples best “give up all hope of peace as long as your mother-in-law is still alive."

Despite this long history of mocking that exists in every sitcom since the invention of the television, some studies suggest that actual mothers-in-law are rarely offended by this humor. As usual with humans, we tend to always assume we aren’t the problem, so many surveyed MIL’s reported that the constant jokes in media do not bother them, as they are so exaggerated as to seem fantastical. However, in the same study, the mothers-in-law also reported not finding the jokes funny. Exaggerated or not, stories like OP’s show that every myth has some bearing on reality.

Solutions to the problem remain elusive. Going no-contact might work, but is also the “nuclear” option. Other couples attempt to set up effective boundaries, although this requires in-laws that both understand and respect boundaries, which is not a given. This can go as far as building separate domiciles for in-laws, sometimes referred to as a “mother-in-law house,” despite the fact that, presumably, the FIL would stay there as well. This can give the couple and their children some privacy while allowing many of the benefits of extended family assistance, like babysitting. However, in OP’s case, this simply would not work, as her MIL needs to be kept away from the child.

Fortunately, OP has both identified the issue and has a partner that supports her, even if he doesn’t quite see all of his mother’s flaws. While a bad relationship with the in-laws as a catalyst for a bad marriage is a trope almost as old as the “evil MIL,” research shows that this is rarely the case. In OP’s story, for example, her marriage would no doubt suffer a lot more if her husband had a “better” relationship with his mother and if she was less willing to create strong boundaries. Sometimes issues arise when one partner overestimates or underestimates the strength of the other’s relationship with their parents. A bad in-law might just be a bad person, full stop and their kids will dislike them as well, thereby not caring if their own partner likes or dislikes them. To take it even further, if your parent was a downright bad person, it would almost be weird to marry or date a person who liked them.