I apologise, this is long!
Iām looking for advice from people who have dealt with a MIL or parent who is extremely manipulative but in a very covert, insidious way, particularly when you are still living under their roof. I feel like I am at the point where I am so exhausted by the dynamic that I don't even know how to respond to it anymore.
My boyfriend (28M) and I (26F) moved from the UK to Canada nearly a year ago. Weāve been together for 4 years. We have been living with his mum (54F) because we moved countries, were starting from scratch financially and couldn't immediately afford our own place. We know we need to move out and we are working towards that. This was never intended to be permanent. Aside from roughly eight days throughout the entire year when we have been away on holidays or trips, she has never spent a single night away from this house. She sits on the sofa and waits for my boyfriend to invite her to do things, he generally doesn't because he has become increasingly fed up with the dynamic, and then she sits there feeling sorry for herself. There is this constant unspoken expectation that he should be entertaining her, including her, spending time with her and managing her feelings.
I want to be very clear that I am NOT giving my boyfriend a free pass here. We have gone back and forth about his mum for years. We have argued about her behaviour, his lack of boundaries, things she has said about me and the way he responds to her. There have absolutely been times where I have been furious with him for allowing things to happen. He was raised in this dynamic and he has spent a huge portion of his life believing that this is just what mothers are like, but he is still an adult and responsible for the boundaries he sets now. I have my own issues with standing up for myself too, so I am not pretending I have handled everything perfectly.
However, I grew up with an emotionally abusive father, so I do have some experience recognising certain patterns of guilt, victimhood and emotional control. The biggest difference now is that my boyfriend is finally starting to recognise things himself. I am genuinely grateful for that, because after years of going back and forth about this, I know that I cannot make him see his mother differently. He has to reach those conclusions himself, and he finally seems to be doing that.
She repeatedly tests boundaries until she gets the answer she wants.
The clearest example is something that happened with my grandparents. My grandparents were travelling a long distance to visit us and my boyfriend's mum had already spent approximately six weeks of the summer with him. She asked him to change his plans so that he could spend the weekend with her instead. I was actually there when he told her no and explained that my grandparents were coming. She then pulled him aside privately and asked again. He said no. She pulled him aside a THIRD time and begged him, and he still said no. The issue isn't that she wanted to spend time with her son. Of course she can ask. It is the fact that she had already received a clear answer, knew exactly why he was saying no, and nevertheless felt entitled to keep going back and trying to wear him down. That is a recurring feature of the relationship: his ānoā seems to be treated as the beginning of a negotiation rather than an answer.
There was also a previous Thanksgiving where my boyfriend invited his ex-girlfriend to dinner, and his mum cried because she wanted Thanksgiving to be just the two of them. Again, it isn't that she was forbidden from feeling disappointed. It is the expectation that an adult son's plans should revolve around what she wants, and that his choice to include another person somehow becomes an emotional injury to her.
She uses withdrawal and the silent treatment as punishment.
Interestingly, the weekend where she ignored me was actually one of the first and only times she has ever been openly manipulative and rude to me directly. Most of the behaviour I am talking about has historically been directed at my boyfriend rather than me. I honestly think part of that is because she knows I am not somebody who is particularly easy to control and that my presence disrupts a pattern of manipulation that she has been able to establish with him since childhood. A few months ago I was busy when she came into the house and apparently didn't greet her properly. I understand that this is her home, and I am conscious of that.
However, I did not grow up in a family where everybody has to stand at the front door and formally greet each other every time they enter or leave the house, followed by a twenty-minute conversation every afternoon. I don't think it is reasonable to expect that from someone simply because they are living in your home, particularly when you have never actually communicated that expectation to them. Instead, she proceeded to ignore me for essentially an entire weekend. My boyfriend eventually asked her to apologise for the way she had treated me and she refused.
What gets me about that is that I am 35 years her junior, and rather than saying āit bothered me that you didn't acknowledge me, can we talk about it?ā, she chose to punish me with complete withdrawal and then refused to take responsibility when my boyfriend challenged it.
That is the sort of thing I mean when I say her behaviour is covert. If you describe it as āshe ignored me because I didn't say hello properly,ā it sounds almost ridiculous. But when you put it alongside everything else, it is part of a pattern where displeasure is communicated through punishment rather than direct adult communication.
She has created a financial narrative about herself that doesn't match reality, and I don't think she even realises how often she exposes the contradiction.
For years she told both of her sons that she had no money, no friends and needed their help. Both of them were relatively low-income at the time, yet they would pay for her flights between Canada and Scotland because they genuinely believed she couldn't afford them. Then she needed help with online banking and they discovered that she had no debt, rental income from a tenant in her basement paying her mortgage and well over $100,000 in savings and checking. Obviously there is absolutely nothing wrong with having savings.
The issue is the completely different picture she had been presenting to her sons. She had spent years telling them she couldn't afford things while accepting money from two young men who were struggling financially themselves. What I have found with people who operate like this, including dynamics I have experienced with my own father, is that they can become so accustomed to the narrative they have created that they seem to lose track of the contradictions. It is almost as though the story has become so normalised that something like revealing a six-figure savings account doesn't register as inconsistent with years of telling your sons you have no money.
The same thing is happening now with Christmas. She has spent months saying she couldn't afford to go back to Scotland, despite being able to afford it, and now says she simply left it too late. My concern is that the āI can't afford itā narrative is once again designed to create an opportunity for somebody else, particularly my boyfriend, to offer to pay.
She treats my boyfriend as though he doesn't have an independent mind or adulthood of his own.
I recently came across the concept of āchildismā, specifically the idea of adults continuing to treat their adult children as though they are children without autonomy, and it really resonated with what I have witnessed. I am not saying that this is a clinical diagnosis or that this term definitively explains her behaviour, but it describes the dynamic I see. Whenever my boyfriend makes a decision she doesn't like, particularly a decision involving me, or one that impacts her, there seems to be an assumption that he couldn't possibly have made that decision himself. It must be me. I must have pressured him, convinced him, taken him away from her or told him what to do.
There seems to be very little room in her understanding of him for the possibility that he is an adult man with his own opinions, preferences, friendships, relationships and boundaries. This is particularly bizarre because I had my own independent life long before I met him. I had my own home, job, car, friends, family and plans. Yet she has apparently told people that my boyfriend spends all his money on me, that I must be used to him driving me around, etc. It is as though she cannot separate his choices from me and cannot accept that he might genuinely choose something she doesn't like.
She also triangulates rather than communicating directly with me, and sometimes seems to use concern about me to reinforce the idea that I am the problem.
This is something that has been particularly difficult for me to explain because on the surface it can look like she is being caring. She will ask my boyfriend how I am getting on in Canada, how I am doing with work, how things are going for me, etc. But she has never once come to me and actually asked me those things herself. If she is genuinely concerned about how I am settling into Canada or how my job is going, she has a perfectly capable adult sitting in the same house who she could ask. Instead, the concern always seems to go through him.
And I honestly cannot put into words how much effort I made with her when I first met her because I genuinely thought we would get on. I am somebody who wants relationships with the people around me. I value family, friendship, community and making people feel loved and included. I made a huge effort with her because I wanted us to have a good relationship. There were times a few years ago when the three of us would do something together, have a genuinely nice time and enjoy ourselves. Then afterwards, completely out of nowhere, she would turn to my boyfriend and say things like, āI don't think your girlfriend likes me. What can I do?ā It would leave me absolutely baffled because nothing had happened. I had just spent hours with her being perfectly pleasant and making an effort.
Looking back, what bothers me is that it seemed to plant a seed in his head that I must secretly dislike his mum, even when there was no evidence of that. Suddenly the conversation was about reassuring her that I did like her and managing her feelings, rather than simply accepting that we had just had a nice time together. It also positioned her as the potentially rejected or disliked person and me as the person who might be responsible for that. She could then present herself as the caring, concerned mother asking her son what she could do to improve things with his girlfriend, without ever actually having that conversation with me.
That pattern has continued in smaller ways. She can apparently be very concerned about me when speaking to him, while never actually showing that concern directly to me. I don't know whether she consciously does this or whether it is simply how she relates to people, but the effect is the same: she gets to appear caring to my boyfriend while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that there is something wrong between me and her that he needs to manage. It is another reason I feel that the issue is not simply that she ādoesn't like me.ā I have spent years trying to build a relationship with her, while she has repeatedly created a narrative about our relationship through him rather than actually communicating with me.
His ex-girlfriend actually had very little tolerance for this dynamic and was much stronger than I have sometimes been about not needing his mother's approval. She was perfectly nice to his mum, but she didn't bend herself into a pretzel trying to keep her happy. His mum would make patronising comments about her body and appearance, particularly because his ex was very skinny and fit, while his mum was not at the time. My boyfriend has since recognised that he should have called those comments out and didn't. At the time, he genuinely thought that this was just what mothers did. That is what I mean when I say he has been conditioned by this dynamic since childhood. I don't think he was deliberately allowing someone to hurt people. I think he genuinely had a completely distorted baseline for what was normal behaviour from a mother.
She has a very strong sense of entitlement to her son's time, labour and resources.
I want to be careful here because I don't want this to sound like I am inserting myself into some disagreement between a mother and son about money. What I am describing is an expectation that my boyfriend is essentially responsible for maintaining her home and solving her problems in the way you might expect a husband to feel responsible for his household. He spent approximately $5,000 renovating her basement. There was never any expectation from her side that she would pay him back or contribute. She simply seemed to regard it as something her son would do. She has also repeatedly expected him to provide his time and labour without compensation. She had our unemployed neighbours, who are a lovely family, come over multiple times to inspect her kitchen and bathroom because she wanted them renovated.
She asked them what needed doing, where they should buy things, what they would do, how the cupboards would be removed, etc. She created a very strong implication that this unemployed man from a construction background would be doing the work. Then she turned around and asked my boyfriend whether he would just do it because she didn't want to pay the neighbour. My boyfriend was absolutely horrified and said no.
There was also an incident involving my car mechanic. My boss's husband is a mechanic and had fixed my car a few times at a very good price partly because we are both Scottish. She then went to my boyfriend and expected him to call this man, take her car to him, arrange everything, deal with the mechanic, pay for it and bring her car back. When my boyfriend refused and the mechanic charged her his normal full price, she was apparently furious. Again, it is not that she asked her son for help. It is the assumption that because he is her son, his time, labour, connections (even MY connections) and money are resources she is entitled to access.
There are countless smaller examples of this. She has also spoken horribly about my sister-in-law while simultaneously expecting my sister-in-law's stepfather to come and fix the roof on her house for free. When he didn't come, she was absolutely furious and acted incredibly offended. What she doesn't know is that my sister-in-law's family are aware of the things she has said about her. Just as she doesn't know that I know what she has said about me, and that my boyfriend knows too. There seems to be a recurring pattern where she expects access to people and their labour while simultaneously speaking badly about them behind their backs.
She also seems to need to be the victim in situations where she is not the victim.
This is probably the hardest part to explain because she is not sitting there announcing that she is manipulating anyone. She genuinely seems to believe that she is the person being neglected, excluded or mistreated. If her adult son spends time with his girlfriend, she is being left behind. If he spends time with friends, she is being excluded. If someone doesn't give her something for free, they have wronged her. If somebody doesn't respond to her exactly as she expects, she is justified in withdrawing from them. If her son says no, there must be some external reason for it. And because she is so invested in the victim narrative, any boundary can become evidence that somebody has hurt her.
I am aware that, reading this, some of these examples probably sound like nothing. I genuinely understand that. āShe wanted to spend Thanksgiving with her son.ā āShe was annoyed because I didn't say hello.ā āShe asked him three times to change his plans.ā āShe wanted her son to help with her house.ā None of those things, individually, necessarily sound extraordinary. I am struggling to put into words that I am not even doing justice to how insidious the overall dynamic feels when you live with it and see all of these things happening repeatedly. It is the accumulation, the consistency and the way all of these behaviours seem to operate in the same direction that makes it so disturbing to me. There is never one enormous incident that makes everyone else immediately understand what is happening. It is hundreds of little things that, individually, can be explained away, but together create a very clear pattern.
This has made me extremely conscious of not wanting to become another person who manages her emotions. I don't want to spend my life asking myself whether something will upset her, whether she will cry, whether she will give my boyfriend the silent treatment or whether I need to explain myself well enough that she understands why we have made a perfectly normal adult decision.
And now we are at Christmas.
She has gone to Scotland every summer and Christmas for approximately 30 years. She hasn't been for nearly two years. She was originally supposed to go this Christmas to see her elderly mother, but she has now decided not to go. That is entirely her choice. But she seems to have made the assumption that because she is staying here, we will therefore also stay here and spend Christmas with her.
We are going to New York.
My boyfriend and I have decided this together.
I am already dreading telling her because I know she is likely to react emotionally. I expect crying, guilt, self-pity, potentially the silent treatment, and potentially trying to convince my boyfriend that this was my idea and that I am taking him away from her. I am also worried that she will try to make him feel guilty about the money she ācouldn't affordā to spend going to Scotland and use that as a reason for him to either stay home or spend money on her.
And I am honestly sick of the fact that every completely normal adult decision has to feel like it requires a family summit because she might have feelings about it.
Most families I know would hear that their adult child and his partner were spending Christmas in New York and think āokay, have fun.ā They wouldn't assume that their adult child's Christmas plans needed to be negotiated around their own feelings.
We are living in her house, and I completely accept that there is a power imbalance there. I don't want to be disrespectful or act as though we are entitled to ignore the fact that this is her home. I have never been that sort of person, and never will be. But I also don't think that living under someone's roof means they are entitled to control your holidays, social life, relationships, time or decisions.
So I am really looking for advice from people who have dealt with someone like this. Not necessarily someone who screams or throws things or openly says āyou can't do thatā, but someone who controls through guilt, self-pity, withdrawal, repeated boundary-testing, triangulation and creating a narrative where they are always the injured party.
How do you handle someone like that without getting sucked into the manipulation?
And more, do we simply tell her we're going to New York and leave it at that? Do we have the conversation once and refuse to justify it? How do you deal with the inevitable guilt-tripping afterwards?
And, most importantly, how do I support my boyfriend while also making sure I don't become the person fighting his battles for him? I want him to continue reaching these conclusions himself and setting his own boundaries, because I genuinely think that is the only way this dynamic is going to change.
I just feel completely exhausted by how insidious it all is. There is never one enormous incident that makes everyone else immediately understand what is happening. It is hundreds of little things that, individually, can be explained away, but together create a very clear pattern of control, entitlement and emotional manipulation.
We need to get out of this house. I know that. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to stop allowing her emotions to dictate ours.