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My father-in-law play favorites

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  • #58080
    Dailymouse
    Participant

    After dating for five years, my husband and I got married last summer and we couldn’t be happier. He’s a wonderful, kind man and I’m lucky to have him. Over the years, I have gotten to know his parents and two siblings as well. Sadly, his mother is in the advanced stages of MS and struggles with even basic tasks so it’s difficult to build a real bond with her but what little exists is very positive and I get along very well with her two elderly sisters. My struggle is with my husband’s father. It is abundantly clear that my father-in-law favors my husband’s younger sister (by two years) and brother (by ten years) over my husband. Apparently, this has always been the case and, perhaps as a result, my husband grew up fiercely independent (though struggles with self-esteem issues) and distant from his father.

    His father’s behavior cannot be explained by anything in the contents of my husband’s and his siblings’ character. All family members (including spouses) are wonderful people but, for whatever reason, my father-in-law treats the others better and is more loving and positive towards them. Oftentimes, he will be overly effuse in his praise of other family members, sometimes even blatantly giving them credit for things my husband (or I) did. When people try to correct him, he just doesn’t hear it. He constantly showers the other siblings with generous gifts while ignoring my husband’s 40th birthday entirely (not even a phone call). I won’t even start about his impromptu speech at our wedding, suffice it to say it wasn’t about us. The kicker is that his father is an accomplished psychiatrist, so he should really know better!

    His father’s overt favoritism also extends to the spouses (me) and even his grandkids. My husband has two beautiful children from a prior marriage (seven and 11) and my father-in-law was always a bit standoff-ish towards them but I assumed that was just the way he was until his daughter had a baby girl three years ago and his son had a boy three months ago. His behavior towards his other grandkids is night and day compared to how he treats my stepchildren. He is overflowing with love, attention, and praise for them in ways he has never been with my husband’s children. He has DOZENS of framed photograph’s hanging throughout his house of his younger grandchildren and literally only ONE picture of my stepchildren who are much, much older. The pictures we send him remain tucked away in stacks of mail. There is simply no interest. I think it is utterly bizarre. The other day when we were visiting him, I compelled him to dig up the (recent) pictures we sent him of the kids at our wedding. His response to seeing their picture was to set off on an elaborate tangent about how terrific my sister-in-law (his other daughter-in-law) is around my stepchildren and what a wonderful mother she is. While she’s a great person and gets on well with everybody (including my stepchildren), I felt his exaggerated praise of her at that time was a backhanded put down of me. It’s a subtle manipulation that leaves me voiceless in its face as I obviously don’t want to take away praise from others, even if I don’t believe it comes from a genuine place.

    My husband is aware of his father’s behavior and simply claims it is the way it has always been. I sense he doesn’t like to talk about it and pointing out the crazy inequities feels like pouring salt in his wounds so I keep my mouth shut. I’m just not sure how I am supposed to react. By spending time with his father, I feel like I’m somehow endorsing his behavior and making myself complicit in his backdoor putdowns. That said, most of the time he’s perfectly pleasant. My husband chooses to ignore the problem and my stepchildren seem unaware of it. How do I shield myself and the people I love from this toxic old man?

    #58088
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    First off, I’m sorry this is happening to you. NO ONE SHOULD PLAY FAVORITES WITH THEIR CHILDREN, let alone their in laws. Normally I don’t give advice to others because I’m a young person. You could talk to your father in law about his issues. If that doesn’t work, you two, yourself and your father in law can see a professional counselor to discover the roots behind his favoritism. Hope that helps.

    #58089
    Inky
    Participant

    My first thoughts were: Is DH a product of a first marriage and the other two from a second? This is bizarre ~ is there any reason for FIL to think he’s not his biological son? Was there an ancient fallout that one or both of them are suppressing/denying? Did FIL finally grow up late in life and *now* more naturally bonds with those under 40 and small children? Was there any weirdness concerning DH’s first wife and that family?

    Ironically, because he’s a shrink, you would think you could openly talk about this. Could you go have one of his colleagues over and bring this family stuff up? What will happen is the men will put on their professional therapist hats, but you *might* get somewhere!

    Sometimes certain family members rub each other the wrong way. Or maybe FIL is waiting for *you and DH* to praise *him*!

    Why don’t you bring a framed pic over every holiday as a present so he eventually has a collection? It’s hard to feel distant towards photos you see everyday. If you find he’s ferreted them away, then I would bring it up directly (which some would say you should do anyway). Good Luck!!

    • This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by Inky.
    #58096
    Dailymouse
    Participant

    Hi Aiyana and Inky – thank you both for your thoughtful and caring responses. Interestingly, you both advise some form of engagement with my father-in-law. I will need to give that some further thought. To answer a few of Inky’s questions, my husband is definitely his father’s biological child (the three siblings are spitting images of each other). As I’m a relatively late entrant into their complex relationship, it is very hard for me to separate cause from effect. My husband was the apple of his mother’s eye (perhaps he was *her* favorite prior to the onset of MS?). His sister is functional but has a low IQ and struggles with social interactions/friendships (she needs her father more?). His brother is 10 years younger and really never experienced his mother when she was healthy (perhaps he feels closer to his youngest son because of this?). My husband’s ex-wife HATES his family and made no effort to hide this fact. All these and other factors combined may contribute to his father’s favoritism but I still don’t buy it.

    My relationship with my stepchildren is very loving and strong but this did not happen overnight. The love and bond with each of his children grew at very different speeds and in very different ways. In a step-parent situation, there’s not that instant deep bond that exists between biological parents and their children. The trust and love needs to be earned and it’s not always easy, which made me doubly cautious to never, ever show any outward signs of favoritism. You have an obligation as a parent to be fair and equitable even if sometimes you feel a bit closer to one child than you do to another. In this respect, my father-in-law has failed in his role. No matter what the circumstances, he should have found a way to rise above it.

    I’m reluctant to bring these issues up with him directly. First of all, my complaints would all sound a bit self-serving and petty (you don’t praise us the way you do others/you don’t send us presents/you don’t have our pictures up in your home/you don’t acknowledge our accomplishments etc.), even though in totality they paint a pretty clear picture. Secondly, my husband wouldn’t want me to. I don’t think he would want to emotionally engage a man who, at the end of the day, has hurt him time and time again. It’s easier for him to have low expectations and be in a constant state of irritability when he’s around his dad.

    Thank you once more for taking the time to respond. We will keep sending him (framed!) pictures and hope one day he sees in his grandchildren that what’s so obvious to me.

    Thanks,

    Hester

    #58097
    Inky
    Participant

    Here’s another thought ~ Could FIL be (even subconsciously) angry that DH (as a teenager/young adult) didn’t help out more when MIL’s MS got to be an issue?

    I wish I had words of wisdom, but without confronting it directly (or even by family and friends asking “FIL (Phil? LOL) what’s going on here?”), you are resigning yourself to this dynamic ~ with no answers.

    Don’t know your belief system but:

    Prayer work?

    Mantras? (Can anyone reading this suggest a good one?)

    I’ve had something like this (Who am I kidding, I HAVE this!). The family lawyer (who has known 4 generations of the fam!) was so puzzled by my Dad’s non-involvement that I think he ambushed us! We both found ourselves over to his house for dinner. Lawyer and his wife were looking at me and Dad’s interactions like we were exotic jaguars who had never met before. “So much alike! Yet so much not alike!” At the end it’s just one of those mysteries that you just have to write off with a shoulder shrug.

    #58098
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Hi, Hester. It’s Aiyana again. Can I just say that you have one of the most craziest family stories I ever read in my lifetime? I swear to God, I’m not judging you. But usually this happens to me. When I have a bad day, and I get into one of my moods, I usually think I have all these problems on how I’ll never have a boyfriend, no one will accept me for who I am, yadda yadda yadda. Please understand that I do have great self-esteem: I go to the museum and library in my hometown more often, I have made more friends ( I still have one or two close friends in my life, but that could be due to me being an introvert), and I’ve never been happier. What I’m trying to tell you is that once I hear or read about someone else’s problems, then I say to myself, “Okay, this person is more off the deep end than I am.” “Deep end” is my own way of saying that they’re going crazy with their issues, or their issues are more bad than my own. I’m not putting in any implications that you’re mentally ill. That is NOT the case at all.

    Aside from that, I hope you can get along better with your father in law. If it makes you feel any better, my own relationship with my father was and is complicated. Sometimes we get along, sometimes we don’t. On top of that, Father’s Day is in two weeks and I still haven’t gotten a card not only for him, but my mother’s boyfriend, my grandfather, and my uncle. I can get along with them. Which leads me to this piece of advice: Try spending more time with people who bring you up than bring you down. Same thing to your husband. Maybe he needs to go out more with his buddies and do things that guys usually do: go to sports bars, play basketball together, watch action movies, whatever guys do these days.

    To Inky: THANK YOU! Your advice completely blew me out of the water. I agree with you when I say that maybe Hester should go to a higher power, whether it’s meditation, prayer, or even psychotherapy. Who knows? And Hester, your name reminds me of the woman from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She has the same name as you, only she’s fictional, and her name is Hester Prynne. I’m positive that you get this reference a lot from random strangers a heh. So I guess that’s all I have to say. Live, laugh, love. Aiyana.

    #58099
    Inky
    Participant

    Aiyana, if you’re ever having a bad day, read one of the Posts I started when I first joined Tiny Buddha! You will feel amazing! 🙂

    Now my family? Crazy. I chalk it up to ancient curses, epic past life fails and someone needs a real therapist (and it’s not me!!).

    🙂

    #58175
    Dailymouse
    Participant

    Hello to you both again! Thank you for the additional feedback. Inky – I’m sorry to hear your relationship with your father is strained. Some men struggle to express their feelings, especially towards the ones they love. Also, I sometimes wonder whether some fathers in a father/son relationship perhaps don’t feel a little competitive with their child. It must be hard relinquishing the reigns to a younger male. I’m not sure. Just speculating. The issue I describe in this post came up because we happened to visit my in-laws last weekend. We only see them a two/three times a year so it’s all very manageable but when these instances of favoritisms do creep up, I become enraged/perplexed and have to work through those feelings. I’ve tried to resist psychoanalyzing the situation because doing so presupposes that there may be some legitimate reason why his father behaves the way he does. Perhaps it’s all more about understanding why he does what he does while still remaining critical of these patterns of behavior. Anyway, thanks once more.

    Aiyana – your post made me smile! 🙂 Thank you for your suggestions. Perhaps my efforts to encapsulate family dynamics across four decades and three generations made it all seem a bit more dramatic than it is day to day. I wish you good luck with your father’s day efforts.

    Take care,

    Hester

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