10 Years Later, They Have Decided They Want Us to Be Friends Again??

Having gone without speaking to one of my best friends for over a decade after a misunderstanding that happened because I didn't know she was going through a major crisis at the time, and finally reuniting with her, I say give them another chance.

At the end of your post, you spoke the "tell"....
"They think we can keep our relationship secret but I don't want to fool with it."

Soo... they want to renew your relationship (as if nothing ever happened) BUT only if the MIL/FIL don't know?? Umm.. NO.
Sorry.
I would not be inviting that crazy back into my house or my life.

I'm with you. Hubby would be entertaining them on his own. Before they could come back into my space, they would need to offer to ME some explanation and some assurances of it not happening again. And then, I would tread lightly. That's crazy.

PS. I don't think that not welcoming them back equates to a grudge on your part. I don't think that you are deeming them unfit or unwell. It just means that you don't want to deal directly with people who were unable to stand up to the madness and maintain a relationship with you. If they chose to sacrifice their relationship with you in order to appease someone else, then you have the right to write them off. It doesn't mean that you are still bitter or hurt by it. See them if you want to, but ti is perfectly all right if you don't want to, if you're not up for it. Yea for their lessons learned and newfound maturity, but you do not owe them a wide open door to your life/heart, especially without acknowledgment of the prior relationship and the hurtful demise of that relationship. There are (natural) consequences for everything, and we don't always get to decide how someone else will/should repond to our behaviors. Don't be bullied into a dysfunctional relationship just because they are blood.

"Now, after 10 years, the cousins want to come to our house and stay as if nothing happened. They and my husband feel they can keep it discreet and my MIL won't find out and cause trouble. "

Call me cynical, but I think the real story is that your cousins want a free place to stay while they travel. You can test the theory by saying you'll be happy to meet up with them for dinner somewhere and catch up, but you're not prepared for having overnight guests and offer to get them a list of hotels.

Sorry, she did not force a relationship with them. They willingly had a relationship with her.

Curious, do you and your family have a relationship with FIL and MIL?

Now, to the issue at hand. No, I would not have a relationship with them. They are not people I would want to be around. When they come, I would be polite, but not friendly. I wouldn't be out right rude but again, I would be polite. I would NOT engage in any conversation regarding MIL and FIL. If they bring it up, I would politely say "I'm not going there" and say "how about those Diamondbacks?"

That being said, I would let them know how their treatment of your family hurt your children. Hurt me, fine, but my kids? NO!

Again, this really has nothing to do with MIL and FIL. If these cousins didn't have the balls to stand up to crazy before what makes you think they will this time. Keep your friendship in secret? What are you 12? When do you get your decoder ring?

Why would you invite all of that drama and aggravation back into your life?

I would have to ask them why after a decade are you suddenly so interested in resuming a relationship with us? Sometimes being frank and straight forward is the only way to go. And your MIL (or her possible reaction) to any decisions you make should not dictate what you do in your own home. That's too much like she's holding you hostage to her emotions.You should not have to hide your relationships to keep his mom from tipping over the edge. You all have allowed her to dictate the boundaries of our actions, which is ridiculous. I know you want to keep the peace with her, but you can't live to please and appease her.

I wouldn't let the cousins come stay. It's all too weird. Suggest a great nearby hotel and then you can meet them for a quick lunch to test the waters and see what they are up to, if anything.

Sometimes, people will seemingly "side" with someone, because... it is just easier that way... to give in, to them (that toxic person).
But that does not automatically mean, they are also, awful.
Some people are emotional "hostages" to a toxic person. In this case, your MIL is that toxic person.

I have a toxic relative. And many times, just to avoid hassles with her, people will just go around "agreeing" with her. Because to go against her, is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO full of more, problems. But it does not mean they ACTUALLY "agree" with her. But toxic people are often very, manipulative AND they lie.
And those problems my relative causes, will go on for YEARS. And she is also vindictive and resentful. So, others just fake it and "agree" with her.
Just to AVOID, other problems she causes. Even if it is, irrational.

Tori H. below, makes some good points.

But per me and my situation and my toxic relative, I choose not to interact with her if I can. I don't expect my Husband to interact with her either.
In the end, you make a choice.
And it needs to be, known.
And my kids also know full well, how their relative is.
I speak to them about it, honestly in an unbiased manner.

With you and your relatives, you cannot trust, them.
Either.

no way.
if they want to re-open a relationship with you, it needs to start with coffee or a hike, not coming to mooch at your house, and under no circumstances under some pact of secrecy.
blick.
khairete
S.

I'm not a mental health professional. But I do have a mentally ill person now on the fringes of my life, my mil. I don't believe your mil is bipolar. I believe it's what we deal with, look up the symptoms here: BPDFamily.com.

The last three and a half years have been excruciating. Really, the last two we have pretty perminatly went LC (low contact) because she is so toxic we had to set boundaries for our own emotional health. Not to punish her, to protect our family. Most people go LC or NC (no contact).

Before our boundaries were in place, she convince a lot of her relatives that her kids were aweful. They were lied to and ended up being horrible to the kids(50 yr olds!) and believing they were helping a poor helpless widow.
They finally saw the light and understood her lies. They are very sorry and I know they are just too ashamed and embarrassed to be close to us now.
I really don't know what kind of relationship would be possible with them. I know that they were duped but the cruel things they did were not something I would do to an enemy. So we are just speaking if we have to see each other.

You have to make your own decisions but if you could heal that relationship, it would go along way to healing your family too. I understand the scars you bear. Read Walking on Eggshells and understanding the borderline mother. If you don't arm yourself with more understanding than you have, you are in for more hurt. Go to the website and the board there. Ther are great lessons and workshops and articles.

Most of the time psychiatrists won't diagnose borderline because there is no med for it. Sometimes therapy will help but they rarely go because the counselor won't agree with everything they say.

May you find peace and sanity. Oh yeah, Never share personal information with a borderline. They use it against you.

I have been through almost the same thing, except it was my own father that lied to my stepbrother and his wife about my husband and I.
Having been faced with this, my advice is to give them a chance to right their wrongs. You deserve that. Also, it's good to show your kids especially that it's important to be the better person in situations like this, and to give people that have wronged you a chance at forgiveness. Now, I'm not saying open your arms wide or anything, and I'm definitely not saying forget what happened, but try to be open-minded. I'm glad now that I was able to move past it all.

This is kind of hard for me to understand, what you've written here. If I'm understanding what you're saying, then it sounds like your husband wants a relationship regardless of them dumping you both as godparents. I think you need to talk to your husband about this and ask him point blank what his end game here is. Does he want to let bygones be bygones? Does he expect you to just pretend like they did nothing wrong when they show up?

I think that you have to have a hard conversation with your husband. If you two can't come to terms with expectations before they show up, and if you aren't willing to accept a relationship with these people without them admitting to being wrong, perhaps you should just be elsewhere and let them visit with your husband. If they ask where you are, hopefully your husband will be honest and tell them that their past behavior hurt you too much for you to pretend that things are normal between you. Or you could stay and see if they are going to offer apologies and if they are going to try to mend fences.

If you DO decide to allow them back into your life, you would be foolish to do this "hiding the relationship" thing. And if you don't point blank say it to them and discuss the bipolar stuff you have put up with for all these years and the lies she tells that you put with, then all this is just going to start over again. I also think that if you don't clear the air about what they did in terms of the other sets of cousins, that you will ALWAYS feel hard at them and it will be too hard to have a relationship.

Maybe your husband just wants to "make nice" no matter what, but if I were in your place, that just wouldn't fly. I'd stay and listen to what they say unless your husband doesn't want to have the conversation. And if they don't bring it up, I would.

To be honest, I don't know how I could let these people back into my life if I were you, especially if they want to "hide" their relationship with you. But that's just me.

And like I said, I don't know if I am really understanding everything you're saying here. If I am, then I will say that you have been extremely gracious to keep your inlaws in your lives with your MIL and SIL lying about you. If that church lady had come to me and said that, I would have asked her if she was aware that my MIL is bipolar. If the church doesn't know that, they should.

This is a hard one. After dealing very closely with a family member who had bipolar, I know how exhausting/frustrating/depressing it can be. I think maybe you should give them another chance and welcome them openly…BUT…I think you need to have a very real discussion about your MIL and how they feel about it, you feel about it, how you deal with her, what your expectations are in the relationship with them, etc. I think that's fair, especially given the history between you guys. They hurt you, it's okay to tell them that and to give them a chance to explain where their heads were/are at.

Sometimes bipolar people have a way of reeling you in with their charm and then end up hurting you again and again, which I'm sure you already know…but maybe they are just trying to figure it all out, especially if their parents died, maybe they needed your MIL to help fill a void.

If you can manage all that and you feel that they are being honest and realistic, then I'd say continue trying for a relationship. If not…then I think maybe it's time to cut ties.

So you are willing to let MIL's behavior, 10 years ago AND now, dictate your life choices? That's what you're doing here by rejecting these cousins without so much as talking to them about this. Yes, it was less than courageous for all those cousins to dump you after her lies way back when, but it IS courageous of this one family to try to rekindle your relationship now. Why punish them for making an effort? For all you know they may have some deeper reason to want to see you and know you again. The last time someone from my long-ago past got in touch out of the blue (though we had not fallen out as you and these folks have), it was because she had found out she had terminal cancer and she wanted to touch base with her past. These cousins may not be dying but they may have reasons to want to step up, apologize and see you again. Maybe they just MISS your family and now are mature enough to realize they should never have let MIL get between you.

People do change. They seem to be trying. Why can't you try too?

I would not agree to keeping things secret. But neither do you have to broadcast to MIL that you're seeing them. It sounds like MIL lives close enough that she's going to figure it out anyway. But I would tell them you are done tiptoeing around MIL's obvious illness. Still -- no need to announce to MIL that you and they are seeing each other. If she finds out and blows up, your husband (not you, him!) should deal with her but not by rejecting these overtures from the cousins. If he does that he's letting her illness run his life for him.

It sounds as if you and your family live geographically close to MIL, if people from her church walk up to you and if you're spending five days at a time with her....Distance would be great, but if you don't literally have distance, why are you not putting some distance between you by NOT being with her "Saturday and Thursday and they spent five nights at our house before that"? Why is that much togetherness happening with someone who lies and lies about you? Why? This is on your husband and you for letting that level of contact continue. It's way past time to be too busy with your own lives to spend that much time with a relative who destroyed your relationships with FOUR other families and who spreads lies as easily as she draws a breath. Maybe your husband is being a dutiful son and sees her as sick (which she is), but I dont' see why he tolerates his mother being in your family's life that often. See her, yes, but control the amount of time.

You have kids. Kids have activities. Time to be too busy to see her this much. Husband can go see her on his own if he feels he must and you can limit your exposure to her to just seeing her at group events where other people are around.

I wouldn't host or be hosted by someone who lies about me all over town, even if she is a relative. We have one relative who is unpredictable due to mental illness (like your MIL, except she's very paranoid and diagnosed as such, but wont' get treatment). She can be just lovely and sweet, or she can be in one of her periods when various relatives including us are "the enemy" and "out to get her." But we know better than to ever go to her home or have her to ours -- we meet on neutral territory for limited periods of time, just a lunch out and a walk around etc., with a definite meeting time and a definite departure time, since we never know if she'll be Nice Aunt or Accusing Aunt. Time for you to limit how and when you see MIL as well.

Do you like these cousins? If there were no MIL, and had there been no drama, would these cousins be people you enjoyed being with?

It sounds like 7 years ago, your MIL wore them down, and after the deaths of their parents, they just gave in, unable to handle one more problem.

If they're basically not bad people, I'd be pretty honest. I'd say "what happened 7 years ago, when you had suffered such a loss, it really hurt to know that you were choosing MIL over us, even though you knew what she was doing was painful. Just like you lost your parents, we lost family members too, and not because of death, but because of lies and weakness. But family is important to us, and we are all family. We can't just pretend this didn't happen, but we don't have to dig it up over and over. But we need to start a new relationship that is honest and that won't blow whichever way the wind is blowing."

If they're willing to be honest and want to start a new relationship with you, and if they're now strong enough to resist lies and attacks, no matter what the reason (bipolar, jealousy, resentment), then I think this is a great opportunity to show your kids the power of forgiveness within the bounds of responsibility and accountability. You're not being a doormat, you're demonstrating that forgiveness, with truth, can be a powerful thing.

I've never heard if anyone being "fired" as godparents. That's a first.
IF they were coming to my house, I would certainly (before the visit) be speaking with them about how much it hurt me & my family that, instead of contacting us about the lies and schemes, they blindly believed my bipolar MIL, I would state clearly that she is mentally ill, unstable and engages in lies and toxic behavior. And I'd make sure they understand that.
Is also never NOT acknowledge a family relationship to ANYONE.
Can't you see that trying to be "secret" is only setting up future drama.
So...yeah....wouldn't invite secrets into my life like that.

I believe people grow and mature and move on from bad decisions in the past. You can choose to allow it and to change and grow, too, or you can hold a grudge and keep up the wall. That being said, a "secret" relationship is hardly mature. That's dumb

Eta - why did you change it from 7 years to 10?

I know you're venting here.

I don't know if you all can keep a restored relationship secret. But that's not the point.

The point is whether you would like to try to restore a relationship with your cousins - a relationship that was damaged not by them but by your MIL. You write that dealing with her, not with you, was too stressful for them. Should they not have found it too stressful? If they are contacting you again after seven years, there are things you don't know that you might want to find out.

If you want to remain bitter, you can, but you won't be hurting your cousins. You'll be hurting yourself, your husband, and your children. This is probably a golden opportunity to teach your children a little about trying to take a mess and make something good out of it. But it's up to you.

If this is your husband's mother, then I think even if you don't want to fool with it in all seriousness let her visit for a bit and let him love his mother once again.There are a lot of people on earth who seem crazy that aren't related and we work with them, shop with them, befriend them. My son is bipolar, it isn't a choice, it is a condition, forgive them. Live has no guarantees and your husband might need you to back his decision to be with them.