I just got off the phone with a woman I interviewed for It’s Either Her or Me. At the time of the interview, she hadn’t seen her grandchildren in more than two years. After years of hurtful exchanges between her and her daughter-in-law, she was effectively cut out of her grandchildren’s lives. Guess where she’s heading next weekend?
She’s flying north to New England to spend a long weekend with her son, his wife, and her two grandchildren. So what changed?
“I apologized. I apologized for everything. Even things I didn’t do,” she tells me with an ironic laugh. “It’s been great. I’ve been in touch with my family and my grandkids and now I’m spending the weekend with them.”
How difficult was it for this mom – let’s call her Jill – to apologize for some missteps and misunderstandings? “I thought it would be hard to do but it really wasn’t, and I’m certainly happy with the outcome.”
Flashback to when her daughter-in-law was pregnant. Jill couldn’t resist criticizing her for quitting her job long before her due date. That put so much pressure on my son! If it did, then that was up to the couple to decide. And then came the birth of the baby and Jill mustered up her inner Dr. Spock and freely offered parenting advice. So what’s wrong with that? New moms don’t want advice unless they ask for it. A lot of what we do as new moms is instinctive, anyway. We don’t want to hear what may have been the popular thinking 30 years earlier. Gad, we’d still be washing diapers!
When Jill says she apologized for “everything” even though, between you and me and her, she didn’t really think she had done anything so egregious, she learned a valuable lesson. New moms may be novices but they’re well-informed; they may be sleep-deprived but they’re euphoric; they may be emotionally fraught but they’re madly in love with their new baby. The last thing they want to hear from another person – ESPECIALLY the mother –in-law – is that they are bad moms. Although a mother-in-law offers advice out of love for her grandchild, such un-asked-for advice is usually viewed as critique.
Even if you’re the mother-in-law who feels you haven’t done anything to warrant the cold shoulder, consider the effect of swallowing your pride, doing a couple mea culpas, and reaching out.
Look what’s waiting for you on the other end.
