Mother-in-laws (MILs) get a bad rep sometimes. They are typically perceived as women with intense personalities, favoring their own opinion over their daughter-in-law’s, and in general have an evil stereotype.
While some MILs are perfect angels, some fit the bill of the stereotype. Today, we’re talking about a woman with a crazy MIL—at least, that’s how she describes her. In fact, she’s not even her MIL anymore—she’s her ex-MIL, as she and her husband split up over a year ago.
The two have two sons together, ages 3 and 6, and one daughter together, who is 10 months old. After a custody battle, Dad wound up with being able to see his sons one weekend a month and not getting custody over the daughter.
Well, the ex-MIL couldn’t bear to hear this. In fact, she did something that was so nuts that the mom decided to change the locks on her home to prevent her MIL from entering inside.
“Two months ago, I found my ex’s mother in my living room, playing with my daughter,” the mom posted in the “Am I the A**hole?” (AITA?) Reddit group. “I asked her how she got in, and she said that ex had given her his key so she could pick up the boys for him.”
She explained to the ex-MIL that the ex-husband was the only person who was supposed to be getting the sons. “She said she understood and would relay my message, then took the boys to ex, and all was fine,” the mom wrote.
Well, low and behold, that didn’t happen. “A month later, she just let herself into my home to pick up the boys again,” the mom wrote. “I was a lot sterner this time, saying this was my home and she couldn’t just let herself in. She responded that this wasn’t just my home, but also the home of her grandchildren and it used to be her son’s home, too, and she has a key, so she shouldn’t need to request my permission to enter.”
She decided to go ahead and change the locks without informing her MIL. And when she came frantically knocking on the door and was told the locks were changed, she was not very happy about it. In fact, she informed her that she HAD to give her (or at the very least, her son, the woman’s ex-husband) a key.
“I refused, saying that clearly my ex can’t be trusted with my key so he won’t be getting one either,” she wrote. “Since this conversation, I have had nonstop calls/messages from both my ex and his mother, saying I need to give one of them a key because them not having access to the house means having to rely on me to give them access, and that I am making things extraordinarily difficult for the both of them.”
So what’s the general consensus—is she the jerk or is the ex-MIL out of line?
The Reddit world is pretty unanimous in their answers…most agree that the MIL is acting in the wrong, and the original poster is not the jerk here. We’d have to agree! Who barges in on someone’s house, anyway?
Who do you think is being the jerk here?