Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
Throughout my engagement, people joked about how I’d lucked out in the mother-in-law department because my husband’s mother was extremely chill and not obsessed with the idea of grandkids. My husband and I are dedicated to being child-free (he got the snip in college), and it was a relief to us both that his mother was fine with that.
I never expected that the problem would be with my (younger) sisters-in-law!
They constantly bring up the subject! I have deflected, defended, and tried to change the subject, but I finally lost my cool when the youngest called me “unnatural” and said her brother would regret marrying me and not a woman who would give him kids. I told her the only thing unnatural was her sick obsession with her brother’s vasectomy. She started to cry, and now my in-laws are acting like I am a movie villain who just attacked their daughter out of nowhere.
She is 18 and her sister is 20. I understand that they are the babies of the bunch (my husband has two older brothers as well) and are used to being coddled and getting their way, but this fixation is bizarre. I told my husband that he needs to stop slacking when it comes to their harassment. These are his sisters, after all. It’s his job to tell them to back off.
What I’d really like is not to be around them at all. But that’s impossible because my husband works for the family business, which is run out of his parents’ house, where his sisters live. What are my other options here?
—Kid-Obsessed
Dear Obsessed,
I’d say your only option is to grow a thicker skin. That is, assuming that your husband’s job working for his family means that you, too, have to spend time at his workplace (though I’m not sure why), and that he has no interest in not working for the family business but instead striking out on his own—and that you don’t feel you can wait out his sisters (either to outgrow this fixation or to move out and move on with their lives).
Who cares what they say? Tune them out. Change the subject when they bring it up (“You’re the wrong wife for our wonderful brother! If not for you, he’d have half a dozen beautiful kids for us to fuss over!” can be met with, “The new season of Love is Blind is bonkers, isn’t it?” or “So: The Life of A Showgirl: yea or nay?”) or dismiss what they say with a friendly, “Well, that’s not how we see it,” and refuse to engage in a debate about this subject that is none of their business. Let them talk themselves blue in the face—what do you care?
If you’re going to keep seeing these obnoxious kids (because that’s what they are, clearly), you’re going to have to learn not to let them get under your skin. So even if what they say upsets or enrages you, try pretending it doesn’t: Fake it till you make it. (You will make it, eventually. Or they’ll see they can’t get a rise out of you, and they’ll stop.)
As to their parents, who turned on a dime and are no longer chill, live-and-let-live in-laws (or at least they have no chill when it comes to their doted-on daughters), either things will get better or they won’t. Work on your own chill—it’s the only part of this you have any control over.
—Michelle
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