I am married for 18 year and MIL stays with us after our 1st year of marriage. She is okay, doesn’t bother us. We move to a bigger home a couple of years after she moved in as her room was really small then. She now has regular sized room and an ensuite bathroom. The problem now is - she is home every day. She is in the living room every day - from morning until night. Not leaving the sofa unless she needs the toilet. This has been going on since COVID. My mood is badly affected, i feel like returning to HER house instead of mine. All i do now is going back to the room when i get home. She has turned the living room to her comfort zone - adding table accessories, putting flora sofa cover which i really hate the design, laying the lace table cover, etc. I really hate all of it. I hate her presence, it’s suffocating and I am unhappy going home every day. Had seen a counselor but I don’t see it’s helping my situation. I feel helpless and can’t find anyone to talk about this.
Hey @diligentdove8821,
I hear you, and the weight of feeling like a guest in your own home is genuinely exhausting.
I’m wondering, have you talked to your husband about this before?
That’s really the most important conversation here, and everything else kind of hinges on it. Your husband needs to understand not just that you’re unhappy, but the depth of it, and that it’s affecting your mood daily, that you dread coming home, that you feel like the living space no longer feels like yours. Sometimes spouses underestimate how serious things have gotten, especially if the day-to-day tension isn’t visibly explosive.
I’m also wondering, could it be possible that the counsellor isn’t helping because the core issue hasn’t actually been addressed? If your husband doesn’t fully understand or acknowledge what you’re going through, then counselling can only do so much… It can help you cope, but it can’t fix a dynamic that the other people involved aren’t part of changing. That might be why it feels like you’re processing in circles without anything actually shifting at home.
What do you think? Has he really understood the full weight of what you’ve been feeling?
Hubby is another problem to tell which i may have to open a new thread. Anyways…
Years ago i did tell hubby to encourage is mum to go out, join activities, etc. He tried, she went but stopped shortly after. When we past by those houses mid-construction, I told him his mother can apply here, he said, “no la”. As for the home deco, i also told hubby I dislike them, he just shunned and kept quiet. I stop telling him now, it sounds like I am bad mouthing his mother.
I give up, knowing nothing will change whatever I say. There are days i feel okay - thinking i can live with it. There are days i feel angry, frustrated, suffocated. I am literally a tenant in my own home. You know, others think i am lucky to have such a nice MIL, she doesn’t interfere our lives, doesn’t nag, doesn’t instruct me what to do how to do. BUT they do not know, the hidden stress i am in all these years.
It really does sound like one of those invisible struggles that others just can’t see. From the outside, everything looks fine, nice MIL, no conflict, no drama. But you’re the one living it every single day, and this kind of stress can be just as draining as the loud kind. In fact, sometimes even more so, since there’s no obvious “problem” you can point to that others will validate.
I also think that that is exactly what makes it so isolating. You can’t really vent to friends without sounding like you’re complaining about someone who, by all accounts, is perfectly pleasant. So you end up carrying it alone.
The fact that you’ve already tried raising it with your husband, suggesting activities for your MIL and kept hitting a wall each time, that’s years of effort that went unacknowledged. It makes sense that you eventually stopped… When bringing something up stops feeling worth it, and starts feeling like it makes you look like the difficult one, staying quiet becomes the only option that doesn’t cost you something.
I think I just want to say that feeling suffocated doesn’t make you a bad person, and it doesn’t make you ungrateful. You’re simply someone who wants to feel at home in your own home, and that’s one of the most basic things anyone deserves.