@BDinVA1 Our stories are so similar.
My parents were neuro diverse with bipolar, its a large family, I also have two bipolar siblings. Nobody in my family even believed me that things in our family were wildly wrong until one of my siblings had a severe manic episode threatening to kill his boss and his boss’ children and ended up diagnosed with bipolar. I grew up in the middle of constant storms and the storms in my original family have never stopped.
My husband’s mom was neuro diverse with schizophrenia and like my family, there was no label in place. I thought my MIL was simply an extreme alcoholic who said and did ridiculously mean things. They thought their family was normal and my husband and I did disagree about his parents and boundaries. I hated visiting my inlaws and I really hated having my children exposed to them.
It makes sense that my husband and I found each other at a young age, neither of us ever wanted to go home. We got married, moved to a town nearby and set up our own lives away from our families. His family didn’t seem to notice he was missing until our children arrived. At that point they demanded we spend part of holidays with them. We were already heavily limiting the exposure my family had to our kids.
I was fortunate, my husband agreed that we needed to get away from both families and give our children a different life. We moved across the country and loved it. Trips back to see family were rare and very messy. A lot of anger was always directed our way from his mother and my husband asked that I endure the abuse.
We are still glad we moved our children away from our families. It was probably the best decision we made in our lives.
At a certain point, I grew stronger and I refused to endure anymore personal verbal attacks from my MIL. My husband would go by himself to see them. The children were jr high age and initially went with him for short visits. After a couple of visits, both refused to join him on the visits.
I kept my children further away from my family. My husband was far more sympathetic to his parents than I was towards my parents and siblings.
Of course, as neurodiversity is genetic, we discovered you can run, but you cannot hide. Our son developed schizophrenia while he was in college. When I was young I wanted to have lots of children, that would have been a mistake.
I treated my MIL quite differently late in her life. She developed vascular dementia and an entirely different personality. She even called herself by a different name. My husband ended up her guardian and we made sure she had good care.
