Hello!
I'm new here. As my name indicates, I am a normie from a family of normies. I learned what a normie is from these forums, along with all kinds of key and useful stories about what my ACoA husband lived through with his AM, bio SAF, and a long string of stepfathers.
I need some advice from ACoAs on how to get on the same page as my ACoA husband regarding setting boundaries for alcoholic grandparents together. Here's the incident that made me realize that we're not on the same page:
We live in a different state than my AMIL, and she is too poor to pay for plane tickets. We paid for her to come visit us when our now 3-year-old was about 18 months or so, and discussed what boundaries to set with her with the baby, and agreed on that if she had had anything to drink that she could not hold the baby. When MIL kept asking for wine, my husband wanted to buy her wine to prevent a dangerous situation for her, because he had seen her do dangerous things to get alcohol when denied in the past and was worried she might just leave our house and live on the streets until her flight home.
Well, we set that boundary and stuck to it after she got her wine, but AMIL reacted badly. Even thought my ACoA husband told me very matter-of-fact when we were getting together that his mother was an alcoholic and his dad a drug abuser, it turned out during a previous, pre-baby visit that my MIL is not aware that she is an alcoholic, or won't admit it publicly. When told that she could not hold the baby, she took a sedative and zonked out for the next day in the master bedroom where my husband had kindly offered for her to sleep while we slept on a mattress on the floor, leaving us to take care of both our baby and my husband's tween nephew that she had custody of (long story). Instead of dealing with the situation like an adult, she mentally and physically checked out of an unpleasant, threatening situation!
The rest of the visit was a complete nightmare (at least to my normie standards, much worse stories can be found in just about every post here, I think). The poor nephew announced in a shockingly blasé tone that AMIL has taken a Xanax and wouldn't wake up until in 8 hours or whatever it was. This clearly wasn't the first time. (I had to google what a Xanax was and in the process discovered that it's incredibly likely that she abuses sedatives together with the alcohol.) AMIL asked for a fancy dinner which we cooked but then declined to eat it, saying she wasn't hungry. The tween clung to us like we were their last drop of water, but since their social skills were somewhat undeveloped it was very demanding. (And, of course, so was the baby.) I could see that my husband was thrown for a loop too - I saw some of the same deer-in-the-headlights look in his face that was all over mine - and he was saying things like that he thought she had mellowed but she hadn't, that this was his childhood all over again, and that he couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't shower for three days because she locked us out of our own bathroom. When we got back in after she left, I could see she went through our things and left white powder on a table. I felt like a criminal for it even being in our house.
With a lot less anger than surprise, I knew before she had even left that she can never come back again, or to be precise that we can only see her if we can leave the situation. I knew it so deep in my bones that I didn't even need to announce it, because it is not up for negotiation, and "your mother can never visit again while she's in active addiction" translates to "your mother can't visit for years, or possibly ever" since we live so far away that we would need to see a years-long shift in behavior as reported by relatives living in town, and saying that could lead to a number of not-core-to-the-issue fights. I thought that he would realize the same thing on his own and obviate the need to officially ban my MIL.
But right after she had left, my husband started saying that the visit hadn't been that bad. So I guess his "not that bad" is my "flaming bag of s***". I was still shell-shocked and needed to talk through my shock at what had just happened - it was like the stories on these forums come alive in my house! The ungratefulness, the complete inability to care about anything but the addiction, the drama whirlwind... And when he said "not that bad" for the third time I snapped and said "if this is not that bad, what
is bad??? The cops showing up, someone going to the ER??" He thought about it and said "yes". I told him that the more he keeps saying that it wasn't that bad, the more scared I was getting, and he promptly stopped. I pointed out that she could have died in our bed and we would have had to explain to our child later that their grandma died in our bed of respiratory suppression due to her addiction! "I didn't think about that", was the reply.
After my parents visited last time (they visit several times a year for a week or two each time), he mentioned how unfair it was that my parents come visit often and his don't. The, he started talking to his mom about visiting. How can I most effectively address the problem with this with my husband?