I (32/F) want to politely but firmly explain to my husband (32/M) that I don’t want our daughter (2/F) to be left alone with my MIL (54/F) anymore.

His mother is set in her ways.

I never really saw it as a problem before, but now that we have a small child retaining everything around her, I don’t want his mother’s unending, “Close your legs. Learn to do it now when you’re still young or else ...” to be in our daughter’s ear. It’s weird and uncomfortable and my mother, who is older than her, isn’t like that at all, so it’s not just an age thing.

Our daughter likes to play, run around, etc. In a couple of weeks she’ll be 3, that’s old enough to know what adults are saying to you and to take in the energy that they’re giving off even if you don’t quite understand it. Maybe I’m overreacting but my MIL’s views on women are different at best, and incredibly damaging at worst. We’ve never really disagreed on anything until now. She was always good about keeping her opinions to herself in the past, but now that our daughter is getting a little bit older, my MIL feels the need to insert her views on how “girls should behave”.

My husband always laughs it off and tells his mother that she’s wasting her breath. But it’s not quite funny to me anymore. If she’s talking like this now, when our daughter isn’t even 3, I can’t imagine the bullshit that will come out of her mouth when our daughter enters high school.

We recently moved closer to the school that we want our daughter to attend when she’s old enough, which happens to be close to my MIL. For that reason, she’s been coming around a lot, finding any excuse to drop by unannounced and remind my daughter to not only close her legs, stand when someone older enters the room and to stay away from the neighbourhood boys (there are twin boys in the house across the street that my daughter plays with and whose parents are really nice and have done a lot for us since we moved in) she also warns my daughter that those boys will “want something” from her “one day”.

It’s really gross and not the sort of bullshit that I want around my daughter. Ever. Those boys are adorable, smaller than her, and their parents are the sweetest. If I happen to notice anything strange about that family, I’ll be the first person to point it out and distance us from them, but I haven’t noticed anything along those lines. And I don’t want my daughter to grow up living in fear of men or to go so far as to blaming herself for any unwanted attention she may receive from men. I get where my MIL is coming from, but reminding my daughter to close her legs or else when she’s still a small child, is only going to hurt her view of the world moving forward.

And I have a strong feeling my MIL is only doing this to get back at me for having short hair, working in sex therapy and essentially carrying myself differently from her and the type of woman she wanted for her son.

Most of the time MIL’s remarks are communicated in a joking way. But I know that look and that voice and I don’t like it. When my husband and I are around, it’s okay. But I would rather we just look for a daycare or hire a sitter to look after our daughter when we’re at work or busy. I think it would be easier to do that than to rely on his mother for help, to which I was reluctant in the first place. I can’t imagine the type of weirdness that comes out of her mouth when we’re not around.

I appreciate the help, but I’d rather pay for childcare. I’ve already found a daycare close by that I like. I just have to find a way to explain this to my husband. He obviously loves his mother, thinks she’s completely harmless. And she raised him, a mature and loving guy, so she’s obviously not completely terrible. But I don’t want her talking like that around our daughter, and I feel that putting her in daycare is easier and of course less awkward than asking his mother to stop saying those things. Even if we ask her to stop saying those things, it’ll come out in private, when we’re not there. We’ve all known older women who are like that and who get away with it because they “know better” and have “done this before” or something along those lines.

tl;dr His mother’s views on what it means to be a woman are troubling to me and I don’t want our daughter around that when I’m not there to guide her at such a young, but important age where she’s retaining everything around her and so curious about the world. How do I tell my husband without hurting him or making it awkward for us?

Submitted April 04, 2019 at 02:34PM by warmcupofc0ffee https://ift.tt/2uNuP0N