When MEM does get married and starts a family, the mother is often over involved in it all. My friend's MEM mother called and had names all picked out for her little baby. MEMs do not want to offend, they will back off and discuss the baby names with their mother instead of the wife.
MEM mothers will come in and tell their daughter in law, who is basically just the means to bring “her” child to earth, how to decorate, how to get ready, what to eat, how to exercise, what doctor to use, what hospital to go to and so on. The real mother has little to say. If the real mother has the courage to stand up to the abuse and puts down boundaries, the MEM mother will pout. She will be upset and tell her enmeshed son all about it, making the gap between husband and wife even bigger. It is hard to get excited about a little one when the little one becomes a source of such distress for the mother of the baby, the wife of the father of the baby.
A MEM can be excited to have a baby and to show the baby off to mom. Finally something they did right, will mom love them now?
When we expected our first we went through all of it. When baby was finally born, my way as I insisted on a homebirth, the first thing MEM did was to call mother, then arrange for her to immediately come and see his baby. It took a lot of arranging for him to find a ride for her but he succeeded and beamed as he was able to show off her grand baby. She immediately knew what baby needed and what she did with hers and what I needed to do in order to raise her granddaughter. Anything I said didn't cut it. I wasn't fit to be a mother, at least not without proper training.
It became a thing for her to tell her son what baby needs because I didn't agree. Sometimes she would tell him to put his foot down, it is best for her grand baby.
Mother and son want to raise the baby together basically. Once we started having children the relationship between me and my MEM's mother became more and more strained. I wasn't supporting her in her role as mother to her grand child and I was doing my own raising without listening to her. She complained to the family, they all reprimanded me for not including the child's grandma in raising the child. MEM mothers are always victims. The victim of a mean daughter in law when in reality it was the mean mother in law who needs the boundaries and in a healthy family the daughter in law would get all the support needed to know she is doing well and welcomed in the family. Something a spouse of a MEM will never know. There is no welcoming into the family ever. You are always doing something wrong.