Forming a New Family: Living near In-Laws, Fighting for Time by Anonymous

Just over a year ago, my husband, our first child, and I moved to his hometown for his new job in the family business. My husband’s entire extended family — grandparents on both sides, aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides, their in-laws, great aunts and uncles, etc. — all live in this same area and see each other everywhere.

They work together, send their kids to the same schools, invest in the same projects, and meet up at church on Sunday.

When I was younger, it was just my parents and my siblings. We were independent, introverted, and happy to “do our own thing”. Living around so much family was completely foreign to me.

            My husband and I envisioned completely different ideas for what “our family” would look like.

I wanted to be my own separate family entity because that’s how I was raised, and I’m a very independent person. I felt like my husband should be home with me creating our own family unity and helping to raise our kids, just the two of us.

My husband wanted our little family to be an extension of his family, basically merged in with the rest of the family, because that’s how he was raised.

            I know it’s strange, but living surrounded by my husband’s entire family has been one of the biggest challenges of our marriage. My in-laws are wonderful and my husband is my best friend. I’m fully aware of how lucky I am to have so much love and support around me. But between family activities and gatherings, group meals, interactions at school, work, home, etc., I felt completely overwhelmed.

            My husband grew up with this lifestyle, and living near family is all he’s ever wanted, but it was a huge adjustment for me. I wanted to participate, but the constant family fun left me exhausted, grumpy and irritable.

I realized that I couldn’t live the lifestyle of one big family. I learned I was a better wife and mother when I was able to be a little more independent with my family and my choices. I didn’t want to attend all of the many family events, and I wanted to have more time to myself and just my family.

            Obviously, how we wanted our new and growing family to spend our time was a huge issue between us. I wanted my husband to spend most of his time with me and our child because that was “our family unit.”

I felt hurt and rejected when my husband wanted to spend time in another way. I felt like our family was the most important thing in my life right now, and when he was spending lots of time with his family rather than us I felt like he was demonstrating that we weren’t important to him.

            My husband felt like our family time should be spent with the entire family because we were now a part of one big family. That’s how he grew up. If we were doing anything by ourselves as a family it could easily, and more preferably, be done with the whole gang because it would be more fun that way. 

When I didn’t want to do things with his family, he felt like I was “saying” that he and his family weren’t important to me. These two conflicting ideas lead to me being home alone with our child a lot. Which totally sucks.

            That’s when my husband and I started fighting about it constantly. I’m not even understating it when I say constantly.

I would start to tell him that I didn’t want to attend this next activity or do some things the way his family was doing them. He would get offended and try to explain that this was the way his family did things or that I didn’t appreciate what his family was doing, etc. He would get mad and upset because he wanted to attend all of these family things and I couldn’t stand to go to another one, so we were never together and always mad about where the other person was.

            This continued for months. It got to the point that when his family unknowingly did something that hurt my feelings, or I was upset with how much time he was spending away from us, I felt like I couldn’t tell my husband because he would just get mad and defensive.

So, I just wouldn’t say anything, and all those feelings and thoughts would get bottled up and fester. Because those feelings were suppressed for so long, I would eventually lash out at him in anger about his family (which is awful) and how much I hated being around them (which wasn’t true, I just hated how much he was gone).

Because this disagreement involved close family members that my husband loves, it was so hard for us to talk about it in a calm and neutral way without getting intense feelings involved. This meant saying lots of hurtful things to each other and about family members that would be brought up again and again because this “same” fight would happen over and over because it never actually got “resolved.”

            After living here and fighting about this issue for a year, our second child was born. Shortly after that, there was a particular night when my husband went to spend time with his family, and I was home alone with our toddler and newborn baby.

I had just climbed into bed when our newborn woke up. I was frustrated and angry when I was finally climbing back into bed after our baby went to sleep, and of course that’s when our toddler woke up. After finally getting our toddler to go back to sleep, that’s when our newborn woke up to be fed.

At that point, I was exhausted and livid at my husband. I felt like he should have been home helping me instead of out playing with his family. I remember texting him quite angrily and he responded by saying that he was having a “heart to heart” with his sister. At first, I was so angry because I didn’t care about what he was doing somewhere else. I felt like his place here was with me and his “current” family, not his “old” one.

            But that conversation was when I finally realized that my husband is being “pulled” in many different directions while living here too. For the first time, I realized that he felt a lot of pressure and obligations from so many people to be present because he grew up in this city. He felt pressure from me to be home with me and our kids, pressure from his family to be at all the family event, pressure to help the family when they needed it, and the list goes on.

            I didn’t feel any of those pressures because my entire focus was simply on my little family, while my husband had to worry about every other member of his family, as well as people at work and church.

It was hard for me to understand why he felt like he needed to spend so much time away from us, and I translated that into us not being important to him. He didn’t understand why we couldn’t all just spend that time together, so when I would tell him I wasn’t going to attend another family event or I was having a hard time, he translated that into me saying that I didn’t want to spend time with his family and I didn’t like them.

            Once I was able to understand our situation from that new point of view, my perspective changed and I was able to approach my husband with an understanding of what he was feeling and experiencing. I approached the conversation by expressing to him that I understood a little bit better what it was like for him to live here, and for the first time in years, we were able to talk about this conflict without arguing like crazy.

My new perspective led to my husband also being more willing and open to try and understand my feelings, but more importantly, I was more willing to open up and trust him with them because it wasn’t going to immediately turn into a fight. Everything changed for us when I was willing to put in the effort to understand what my husband was experiencing rather than assuming the worst, and my husband was able to start trying to understand my feelings without immediately getting defensive.

            Coming from a place of understanding has helped us become better at communicating our wants and emotions towards each other in all aspects of our lives, not just this particular conflict. Honestly, I feel like once we were able to work towards fixing this continual big fight in our marriage, all of the little problems and issues we have seem to be resolved a little bit easier since we know how to try and come from a place of understanding and open communication.

            Obviously, our marriage is still far from perfect. We still disagree and argue about how our family time should be spent. I still think he spends too much time away from us and he feels like we don’t spend enough time with his family. We argue and fight about tons of other things too. But at least have opened up the conversation about where our new little family fits, and how we can really become one big happy family.