Help! Oversharing MIL!
My husband and I are facing a bit of a tricky issue, and could use some advice. I'm currently 30 weeks pregnant with our first, and on hospital bedrest. Long story short = at our 19 week ultrasound, the technicians noticed cervical shortening. I was prescribed a combination of medication and bed rest at home, then transitioned to hospital bed rest at week 23 once the baby reached viability. (We are very fortunate that in every other respect we are having a very healthy pregnancy with no other complications, and that the baby is developing very well.) We're continuing to hold on, with no surgical and/or IV interventions, and I'm able to work remotely and move around at will. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of little issues with my mother-in-law, who is an absolutely lovely woman that has been very problematic in some inconvenient and very unexpected ways. First, she put a lot of pressure on my husband and I to announce the pregnancy before our doctors suggested that was advisable. Pretty much as soon as we told both sets of parents around week 16. Next, she decided that she was going to throw a baby shower with only her friends in the town she lives in that is pretty much for her. I do not know and have not met many of the people she would be inviting. As for baby gifts for the shower, she wanted to ignore the Amazon registry my husband and I created and instead have us register at a boutique shop in her town. Once we began experiencing the cervical shortening, she began to tell all of her friends. My husband spoke with her at length on several occasions and explained why we were uncomfortable sharing this level of information with so many people. Unfortunately, she did not stop. Once we announced the pregnancy publicly a few weeks ago (week 27), her disclosures escalated. We asked her to keep the news of the hospitalization private, because we did not want to be swarmed with visitors at a time when I needed to be concentrating on resting, and also to have people know that we were not at home extended stretches of time during which we would be receiving shipments of baby items. She did not honor this request despite several conversations. This week we found out that the depth of information she has been sharing is much greater than we realized. In addition to telling an approximate list of 20 to 30 extended family members all the details of our situation, she has also let us know that several people now want to come visit me in the hospital. She is pushing us to allow that, in addition to pushing us to allow other family members to "help out"... which we do not need at this point, because nobody can take my place in this bed. She keeps telling us we have a whole village of people waiting for us to tell them what to do, but we are finding a very stressful to manage all these aggressive demands for information and unwelcome suggestions (such as the family member who wanted to paint little Celtic fairies all over our graffiti themed nursery, or the friend we have never met who is a doula that she keeps pushing on us even though we already have one and that almost showed up uninvited to my hospital room today.) She is kind of becoming something of a Grandmazilla, and my poor husband has had to have very tense, serious, direct conversations with her several times over the past few months. However, she is just not listening to anyone. We have made the hard decision to stop sharing information with her that we would not want the general public knowing, and are now debating having her in the hospital when the baby is born. My husband spoke with his father tonight, who also feels that my mother-in-law is out of control. My FIL advised my husband that our new family unit is the most important priority in his life, and he will back my husband up if we need to restrict or cutoff information to my MIL. Does anyone have any ideas or thoughts about the situation? Does it seem like we are acting prudently? Does anyone else feel that it is inappropriate for her to be sharing our private medical information like this when we have repeatedly asked her to stop? What would you do?
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