I am 23 and I have been with my 25 year old boyfriend for 2 years. I love him dearly and we have a great relationship for the most part, the only area where we seem to have a bit of, albeit, unspoken conflict is in issues surrounding his mother. My boyfriend and I plan to move in together next year and I anticipate that she is going to play a larger role in my life, I have some concerns and so I'm hoping to gain some insight into her behaviours, something I hope you guys can help me with.
My boyfriend's mother has a very strong personality and she seems to have a lot of influence over the whole family dynamic. She likes to make herself heard, and considers herself to have a brilliant sense of humour, with which she makes fun of people's short comings, and seems to find it hilarious to humiliate others. Sometimes it feels as though she has some kind of sonar tracking system for people's vulnerabilities.
She plays a very strong mothering role and seems to discourage acts of age-appropriate independance from her children with the afforementioned ridiculing. Which may or may not be why her two sons are not terribly independant. When I made it into the fortress which is their family home, I was suprised to observe that my then 23 year old boyfriend and his 29 year old brother had literally no domestic responsibilities. My would-be mother in law did all cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing - perhaps not SO unusual, but she continued to tidy their bedrooms, picking their dirty washing up off the floor - packed their work lunches, woke up an hour early on a morning to make sure they were both up for work. At first I thought that this was just my boyfriend being lazy and having his mother do all the work, so when he was talking about what he wanted in his lunch the next day, I chipped in - "hey, your mum's not very well - why don't you pack your own lunch for tomorrow?" Never again. She came down on me like a ton of bricks - why on earth would he pack his own lunch?
Neither of the boys had ever considered moving out of home despite being in well paid employment for many years. When I asked my boyfriend if he'd ever considered moving out before, he couldn't understand why he might have even considered it. His brother agreed to move in with his own girlfriend last year but seemed to spend all of his free time round at mum's, which I gather was a source of contention. It didn't last very long, they had a small argument and he smashed up all her things and returned home to mum for the night. As she told it to me, she realised him "throwing tantrums" and "running home to mum" had come to typify their relationship in a tight spot, so she locked the door.
Their sister, however, the middle of the three kids is much different - apparently she had a bit of a tumultuous relationship with her mother as a teenager and she moved out when she was 17 and has a lot of lifeskills. She often comments of how her brothers are mollycoddled.
My would-be mother in law makes a great song and dance of being supportive of her son's relationships, but her actions aren't really congruant. She refuses any offer to meet the parents of her children's partners, because, as she says it she "doesn't need to meet them". She met his brother's girlfriend's parents by accident when she was helping them move in together after 6 years. She met his sister's partner's parents at the birth of her grandchild. She criticises his parents in relationtion to how they look after the baby and otherwise refuses any offer on their part to forge relations between the two families. I think the message here is "you can be in my family but I'm never going to be in your's".
I think all of this effects my boyfriend in ways that he doesn't really let on. I had the best insight into this when we first met and we were in the haze of new-found intimacy. He revealed that when we first started seeing each other he begun having reoccurring "waking" dreams in which his mother entered the room in the dark and he couldn't find her. He found these quite upsetting at the time, but when I've mentioned it since he's denied ever having them. He also expressed having frequent and compulsive thoughts about her when he was away from her - that she might come to some harm or be upset. I remember at the time thinking that his image of his mother was very idealistic. He denies ever having these also.
This is another peculiar thing - the closer I got to the family, the more I was shut out to his thoughts and feelings about them. He will never discuss with me if so-and-so had been annoying him that day, like you do. He is extremely hypersensitive about his family and he will take the slightest thing as a huge insult, and responds by cutting me off from them until I mention I haven't been round in a while, at which point he'll reveal the oft innocuous comment that dropped me in it. It's not that he does this to be cruel he's just extremely sensitive. Though he is quite critical of my family and thinks nothing of this.
His mum has become more and more insulting towards me as the relationship's gone on. She says very cutting and humiliating things - usually my boyfriend will remove me from the room and apologise, but then qualifies this be saying he doesn't actually think there's anything wrong with it because it's just her humour. Therefore I'm confused as to why he apologised.
I really do love my boyfriend but since we're talking about setting up home I worry that his mum might try and come between us, or that she'll prove controlling/invasive in ways that'll negatively effect the relationship. Should I be worried? How can I best deal with this situation to keep his mother on side? How can I let my boyfriend know we're on the same side when it comes to his family? Afterall, I love him and I love them by extention.