Now that our daughter is almost 1 and can understand what they’re saying, I asked my husband to talk to his parents and ask them not to fight in front of our her. He made the request, and they’re really mad at me. They called me a snowflake and said it didn’t hurt their kids and it won’t hurt our daughter.
I can tell it upsets her, and it will get worse as she grows up. My plan now, when they start, is to take our daughter and leave whatever situation we’re in, even if it means calling an Uber. My husband thinks I’m making too big a deal out of this. Am I being unreasonable?
Anonymous: Oh, no, you’re not.
But as always, an in-law problem is to a large degree a spouse problem. That’s because the biggest part of an in-law problem goes away when you have your spouse’s support in addressing it.
Your spouse problem here is significant. You asked him to talk to his parents about not fighting around your baby because it upsets her — and he turned you in. He could easily have taken responsibility and said, “Hey, it upsets my kid when you yell at each other, please stop.” Instead he told them you didn’t like it. He made you the bad guy knowing he was siccing them on you.
Even if he didn’t — even if they jumped to that conclusion themselves — he had an easy pathway to do the right thing: “Nope: You do not blame this conversation on anyone but me. I am the one asking you to watch your mouths around our child.”
But he didn’t. He sold you out. And that is exactly the type of marital alienation you would expect him to learn from the two connoisseurs of profane public bickering who raised him. His example of family values is a couple who defend their right to yell-fight in front of a child, pollute the atmosphere for fellow diners wherever they go and throw around “snowflake” when it isn’t snowing because nothing can ever be their fault.
Get your girl as far as you reasonably can from their befouling influence. The leave-when-the-yelling-starts strategy has you off to a solid start, good for you. Now be ready to scale up as needed — like not being in any room, Zip code or area code, respectively, that they happen to occupy. And pack your husband off to couples counseling with you. Please.
I say this knowing their son may have absorbed too much of their ethos to agree to that, but do try. Go solo if he refuses. If money and access stand in the way, then try Open Path Collective.
And humor me: Keep your own financial feet planted. If your husband decides it’s “just his way,” too, to yell and swear at you in public, then you’ll thank yourself for every step you took to prepare yourself to leave the marriage and stand on your own.
