When my in-laws fell out with me and my husband got stuck in the middle

The pattern is the same in almost every version of this. The partner caught in the middle, usually the spouse or child of the in-law, becomes the unwilling messenger and often the unwilling judge. The healthiest move is to decouple the in-law relationship from the couple relationship. Each side handles their own direct relationship. The partner-in-the-middle is allowed not to mediate, not to take sides, and not to translate. Loyalty to a spouse does not require choosing a winner. Loyalty to a parent does not either. The conflict gets discussed in the marriage as a problem to solve, not as a test of allegiance.

The falling-out was about a parenting decision. The specifics matter less than the shape. My mother-in-law had a strong view. I had a different one. The first conversation got hot. The second one got cold, and stayed cold. By the third occasion when we were all in the same room, the air had a weight to it that everyone noticed and nobody named.

My husband, by the second week, had a position I could not stand. He was, in his head, trying to keep the peace. In practice, he was trying not to choose. Every time I asked him what he thought, he gave the answer that was carefully shaped to upset neither of us. I read it, correctly, as not being on my side. He read my reading of it, correctly, as a demand that he take sides. We were having two arguments now: one with his mother, and one with each other about her.

The first thing I got wrong was making it a loyalty test. I would set up situations where the only answer that would satisfy me was one that put him in direct opposition to his mother. He could not give that answer without losing something he was not willing to lose. So he kept giving the careful answer, and I kept reading it as evasion, and we kept getting further apart on a question that had nothing to do with us.

In a Solo Session with Meedi I tried to explain why I needed him to "back me up". She asked me a question that I did not have a clean answer to. What, specifically, did I want him to do? Did I want him to confront his mother? Did I want him to stop seeing her? Did I want her to apologise? When I tried to name the action I wanted from him, none of the actions I came up with were ones I actually thought were a good idea.

What I wanted, when I sat with it, was for him to tell me I was right. The being-right was the whole thing. The actions were a proxy.

Once I could name that, the conversation with him got simpler. I could ask him for what I actually wanted, which was acknowledgement, not action. He could give me that without picking a fight with his mother. The two relationships went back into separate boxes, where they belonged.

The thing with his mother is still not fully resolved. We are on speaking terms. We are not on warm terms. The repair of that is its own piece of work, and it is mostly mine to do, because she is not going to be the one to reach out first. I have not done it yet. I am preparing for it.

If you are in this version of the situation, the one thing I would say is: separate the two relationships in your own head before you ask your partner to do it. They cannot decouple something you are still couple-ing. The argument with the in-law is one piece of work. The argument with the partner is another. They get worse when you try to do them together. They get better when you don't.