Dear curiousknowledgeseeker:

If I understand correctly, the plan is to not have your sister in law in your house at all- I suggested the same in your previous thread- congratulations to you and your husband making the correct choice as a team!

How to explain it to your in-laws? Tell them it is the right thing for your health, and the health of your husband.. and the health of your baby to not have  your SIL in your home. If they ask why it is so, tell them it is bad for your health to talk about it, that it makes you distressed. Tell them that you will appreciate it  if they don’t ask you about her, or talk about her in your home.

I hope they will care about the health of their hosts (you and your husband) and respect their hosts’ wishes. Otherwise, they will be very rude guests…

anita

Hi CuriousKnowledgeSeeker,

I think also think you are doing the right thing by not inviting your SIL over to your house, and thank goodness your husband agrees that this is the best way to go!

Like Anita says, it’s bad for you and the baby and the whole atmosphere of the house if she comes over and disrupts everyone.

It’s also very bad for you, at this late stage of your pregnancy, to be dwelling on things like this.

This has happened to me over the past few years as well.  I have spent many sleepless nights trying to get things straight in my mind concerning family issues. You do tend to over-dwell on the issues, and try to come up with answers to problems. Remember no-one can fix everything for everyone else. You can’t fix your SIL, so you have done, quite rightly, the next best thing, which is to fix the situation so that the same thing doesn’t happen again.

It’s not you causing these issues. It’s your SIL. Relax, you have come up with an arrangement that you think will work out best for everyone now. Whether this happens or not is in the future, and no-one can control the future, or know how things are going to turn out, as the future hasn’t happened yet.

Dear curiousknowledgeseeker:

Both SILs want you to have your parents in law living with you. So they want you to do what they don’t want to do, or can’t do; they want you to free them from their sense of obligation by taking it on yourself. That’s quite selfish, self serving. “they are traditional”- a lot of family tradition is indeed selfish and self serving, one family member burdening another unfairly.

“I respected them their joint family values”- well, the value underneath your SILs’ pressure is to burden you unfairly so to free themselves to live without their parents in their homes, now or in the future. That is their value. I don’t see anything respectable about it.

“what exactly are the obligations of a daughter-in-law to her in laws or are there any?”- not anything beyond our human social obligation to others- if we see a person hungry, help them get the food they need, if we see a person cold at night, help him or her reach shelter. If we see a person being abused by another, if it’s more than we can handle, call the police or social services or a community resource to step in.

“At marriage, I believed I married my husband & not everyone in his family”- I would hope so. In a traditional society before social services were available, before retirement benefits and such, I suppose aging parents did depend on their adult children. But if such dependence is not the case, and if parents do have options such as living in a retirement community, the long ago way of living needs not continue, in other words, parents living with their adult children is a way of the past, no longer relevant to modern times.

Of course you shouldn’t “succumb to emotional blackmails”- not when the ones doing the blackmail are strangers and not when they are family.

Family is a fine word only if there is love there, safety, kindness; it is a foul word, really,  when there is hostility there, unfair pressure, blackmailing, misery.

anita

* Dear curiousknowledgeseeker: double posting- look for my most recent post to you right before you submitted your post above.

anita

Dear curiousknowledgeseeker:

You are welcome. It helps to simplify matter, see things simply. For example, instead of studying family cultural customs and values, better see the basics of things, selfishness where it is, one family member trying to unburden herself by passing the burden to you. Better see mistreatment where it is instead of calling it tradition or value- these words have a positive connotation that confuse the issue- mistreatment is always negative. So stick to the basics.

anita