Relief

Things are definitely getting better and I find it interesting that they have improved in a way that I wasn't expecting.

As I have said, Dh has been having a huge battle with depression.  I haven't gotten into it in terms of the cause or the reasons that he gives but they are now relevant to what I will say today.

His family is what could easily be called "difficult".  He and I have been together since 1991 and we have been dealing with off and on turmoil with his family the entire time.  The family is very small - just his parents, Dh and his sister, who is my age (and shares the same first name).  She and I could not be less alike.

For years, he and I have been upset by the way we have been treated by his family.  His father is very sweet and we enjoy his company.  His mother can be very overbearing, critical and utterly dismissive of the feelings of others.  I have found her extremely frustrating to deal with - we are constantly told what to do and the way that we do things is criticised, she openly favours the sister and her children (she has never even bought a gift for Pk, she just gives small amounts of money) and she does a lot of playing Dh off against his sister.  At times, we have distanced ourselves from them to avoid conflict.  It has been especially hard on me - I grew up in an open family, one in which we always knew we were loved, regardless of whatever trouble their might be.  We believed firmly in trying to talk through problems.  Our disputes could be intense at times but they were short-lived and we always resolved things and moved on.  In dh's family, there is an avoidance of anything that is uncomfortable and things fester and fester.  I have to admit, I might consider taking a break from his family entirely but for the fact that they are Pk's grandparents and I would not want to take away her chance to know them (although they will never be with her without one of us).

His sister is another matter entirely.  She is mean.  We have been thrust together for years and I have always been polite, helpful, kind and have felt myself filled with terror at the prospect of any family gathering.  She is highly critical but in ways that catch me off guard.  I will avoid conflict at just about any cost but with her, I come away feeling so upset at things she has said to me and I was so shocked that I just let it go.  I feel this strong feeling of claustrophobia and I just want to flee.  Whenever we are getting together, I try to prepare myself for whatever is coming and to find a way to deal with it directly without being nasty and she always manages to get me in a way that I was not expecting.  She is horrible to dh and has been for years and yet his parents continue to refuse to admit that she is out of line.  We have been told we are fat, that we were wasting time and money on our education, she has criticized our home, our parenting, our cooking, etc, etc., etc.  I could easily say things back (when Pk was first born, there was tremendous pressure on me to take Pk over to visit SIL during the day in the week so that Pk would know her well - SIL does home daycare and I had to stop going because the way she treated the children really upset me.  There were two girls, both three, and she would constantly talk in front of them about how bad the one girl was and how good the other one was.  She also told me, although fortunately, I didn't witness this, that she had washed the "bad" ones mouth out with soap for speaking disrespectfully to her.  You might not see that as being as inappropriate as I do but if Pk's sitter did that to her, I would have to debate whether to call  Children's Aid and Pk would absolutely not go back).  Anyway, I have avoided giving criticism for things that go totally against our values but I was not deserving of the same respect.

Last year, things got considerably worse.  I suspect that SIL was angry that we had Pk - she had been the mother for years and we were the freaks who were too busy to have children.  She had been very difficult when we got married and I suspected that it would be the same when we had a child and I was not mistaken.  She has been awful to dh and finally, after yet another nasty attack, last fall, I decided that I had enough and sent an email saying that I needed to disconnect until she was prepared to treat us with respect.  That blew things up, of course, but it became between she and Dh.  He has been so hurt by the fact that his family has refused to admit that he has had to deal with anything and they continue to insist that this is just "how she is" and that we need to just accept being treated this way because she "doesn't mean it."  I have seen how the conflict with his family has taken a toll on Dh.  This all started long before I cut off with her and I could see that their lack of recognition of his struggle was impacting his self-esteem.  I suspected that his short temper and hyper-sensitivity came from them but I wondered whether I was just finding them a convenient excuse for anything negative that he was feeling.

I can't tell you how hard this has all been.  I have felt so torn - family is important to me and I wanted dh to feel that I was there for him and would deal with his family as much as he wanted because I didn't want him to get into a situation of divided loyalties.  I felt like I had to choose between my own self-worth and family harmony and have been really hurt by some of the criticism along the way.  My inclination has been to cut off, at least from SIL entirely but as a Christian, I wonder whether I am somehow to blame and how much burden there is upon me to fix this.

Now, onto today.  Dh had seen an intake intern on Monday and she had told him, at the end of his appointment, that it was obvious that we have been hugely impacted by his sister's negative behaviour.  One of our struggles has been that we are baptising Pk in July and we didn't know how to handle his family.  SIL hasn't been speaking to us and we really didn't want her there to find a way to ruin it but my MIL can't stop going on about having SIL there and MIL is quite capable of coming and spoiling everything whining about SIL not being there.  We felt like we couldn't win.  The intern suggested that it is time that Dh and I deserve the chance to have a meaningful event for our family without it being a highly stressful experience - that baptising our daughter is such a momentous event for us, we shouldn't have anyone there who would take away from our joy.  We didn't feel like we could keep them away (in the meantime, I guess we have one bit of good news - SIL refused to come when FIL asked her to, so at least we don't have to deal with her, although we will have to deal with a maudlin MIL, I suspect).

Dh saw the psychiatrist today.  Her finding is that his depression is situational and largely related to his family stress, the lack of sleep he began to have because of worrying about it and unresolved trauma from events in his childhood (their home was not a nice place to be, despite the fact that they liked to broadcast that they were this loving, Christian family).  The only DSM diagnosis that he really heard was about his sister - based on what the psychiatrist heard, she strongly suspects that SIL suffers from both borderline personality disorder and clinical narcissism and warned Dh that she will not change and that for the emotional health of our immediate family, unless SIL gets help and does intensive work, we should have as little contact as possible.

Now, I wouldn't do everything based on what one psychiatrist says but after 18 years of criticism, attacks and self-doubt, it feels so good to have someone in authority finally recognize our struggles.  We are NOT the ones who are hyper-sensitive (as it has been presented to us) and we are not being "difficult" by setting boundaries and doing what is best for our stability.  I am glad that the psychiatrist is sending Dh for counselling to work through his feelings about his family and to learn strategies for dealing with all of this.  It's kind of funny, too - a good friend gave me a book last week called, "Will I Ever Be Good Enough?" - a guide for the children of narcissistic mothers... she had been reading it because of her mother in law and the more she read, the more she thought of what I had told her about mine.  No wonder Dh has issues.

This has definitely helped to get insight into who he is and how he came to this place.  The book on the narcissistic mothers talked a lot about coming into adulthood realising that one doesn't have the warm-fuzzy memories of mother contact growing up.  Just as an experiment, I asked Dh what he remembered of his mother growing up.  He could come up with stories of his father showing love and affection but he no loving memories of his mother at all.  How tragic.  It just makes me want to make the rest of his life so full of love that he can work past the lack of it early on.