No interest at all!
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I agree with the above. Also it’s possible that she and your husband have a very blah relationship for a reason. Either that’s both of their baseline (not judging!) or your MIL is always kind of a brick wall and there’s no point to try to connect. As you can prob see it’s very exhausting to be the only one carrying a relationship along. I’ll add this - after reading some of the horror stories in here, this predicament is much better than the insane overbearing women trying to steal their grandchildren away from the mothers!! Haha. In all seriousness, I’m sorry that the relationship feels strange and that you feel awkwardly about it. I hope that you are doing alright. Have you talked to your husband about it?
Was there a change from her usual behavior? If not then this is probably just how she is. Some people won't change their way of doing things because of a new baby.
Thanks for the above ladies it confirms what I thought that the situation would unlikely change unless I was to instigate the change with her as I don’t think it’s in her nature to do so. Nothing wrong with that and by no means do I think my situation is bad I was just curious to see how other people have interacted with their MIL’s. I’m just very aware that I don’t want to seem that I am favouring my family to his but with the lack of engagement it’s a little hard not to. @Melissa yes we had a brief conversation today, I just asked if he thought she would be more involved once LO was here but he doesn’t seem sure. They have a distant relationship as she can be very difficult and so to maintain any relationship at all I think he finds it best to keep it that way. I’m sure it will all be fine, it’s just as I mentioned I don’t want it to appear like it’s all about my family if that makes sense x
My boyfriends mum was the same. They didn’t really have the best of relationships, it was always me that encouraged him to try more with her as my mum is my best friend and I couldn’t imagine not having a good relationship with her. She disappointed me multiple times in my pregnancy, and her partner was just a total jerk and we fell out with them big time in October, they only reconciled before Christmas and even then it was touchy. She had never apologised for ever upsetting me, only to my partner and turned it round to make it about her, “well sorry I’m such a shit mum”, things like that. When baby was born, she honestly wanted to be round all the time. We had hardly seen her (albeit because they fell out for part of it), and she also never really made an effort when we was pregnant. I don’t know if she was trying to prove that she could be there for us/proving a point or whether it was genuine to begin with, but we actually messaged her (1)
A couple weeks later as she was messaging every other day to see us and it was just annoying. She hadn’t been involved in the pregnancy at all and now wanted to be round all the time. We drew the line and told her to back off a bit when she asked if one of her mates could come round to meet baby even though I’d never met her before and my partner hardly knew her. We have a better relationship now with her as she only comes round when we message and invite her, although she does cry to people because we don’t ask her to come round as often as she would like. But we decide, we’re the parents. Like you, ours was the first grandchild, and you’d think that there would be some more excitement during pregnancy from them, but the lack of is upsetting when you know you try so hard to encourage your partner to have a good relationship with them, and feel like it must be you that’s the problem. She might surprise you when baby comes, ours went from hardly present to overbearing! (2)
My MIL has asked about me to her son when I was pregnant. She has my phone number and all but she never reached out directly to me, about how I was doing. Now that I have the baby, she basically implies that my baby is her son's and not mines lmao. She's always like my son is the father this, my son is the father that. Like shut up 🙄
My MIL didn’t check on me either. She made it pretty clear that I was just an incubator. Grandkids don’t really change a relationship like that-if anything, they can make it worse because of the demands for interaction, inconsideration, and power struggles that can ensue when the baby first arrives.
Do you have the sort of relationship where you’d chat and check in with one another before you were pregnant? Whatever your relationship was before, I wouldn’t expect pregnancy to change it. My MIL and I get along just fine but my husband leads the majority of the conversations. There’s a family group chat but otherwise we don’t message each other individually. It’d be odd for us to do that unless it’s a secret present for my husband for example. So she never messaged me separately to ask how I am and I wouldn’t have expected her to. She asks after me when she chats to my husband or we chat to her and my FIL together.