My struggles with my father-in-law

By Ila Narayanan
How do you deal with a father-in-law who is old, irritable, demanding and treats you like trash? Live with it? Reason it out? Wilt before his bullying? Fight it out?

I have done all of these but I am none the wiser. My struggles leave me in tears at times, and in utter frustration most of the times.

What is worse is that my husband prefers to suffer the high-handedness and sometimes unacceptable behaviour of my father-in-law. He wants me to listen to his Dad, and avoid hurting him. “He is not normal,” he tells me. “We should therefore be more patient and avoid confrontations.”

I keep telling him that he must make his father see reason. It may be unpleasant, but maybe he will change. But no. My husband wants me to exercise utmost patience, to stay calm even when his Dad goes on a rampage.

It is bad enough to suffer his mood swings when I am alone. But it is worse when he goes on a complaining spree against me to visitors. They believe that we are torturing an old man.

It was not that my father-in-law was always like this. His decline started with the passing away of my mother-in-law. First, he went into a shell. He stopped interacting with people, and started spending more time in his room.

Gradually, negativity overcame him. He would reject anything that I or my husband would suggest. He also became obsessed with his “stomach” problems. He would constantly complain of burning sensation and pain in the stomach.

No amounts of medicine helped him. The doctors diagnosed it as irritable bowel syndrome, where food movement gets affected in the intestine. This leads to constipation and acidity.

Things worsened when he took a nasty fall in the bathroom. Though nothing was broken, his confidence took a bad hit. We bought him a walking stick but when he fell again the doctors asked him to start using a walker.

It was after this that depression set in. He became very demanding and very unreasonable. Everything had to be done instantly. Even the slightest delay would make him angry. He started nitpicking. Nothing seemed to make him happy. He would complain against food, against the maid, against the helper we had hired.

He would want to be assisted out of bed even though we knew he could get up on his own. The helper, we had hired, was at his wits end. He was constantly at the receiving end of my father-in-law’s anger.

My frustration would see no end when he refused to have food on time. He insisted that I make the food for him. When I would make a chapati he would insist he would have it later, and that I should make it again.

He would demand that he wants potato. When I made potato, he would reject it and ask that bottle gourd be made.

It is now almost three years that I have been suffering. We don’t want to send him to an old age home, and there’s no other place where he can go.

He throws a fit whenever I and my husband want to go out. “How will I live alone? I am scared. Please don’t go,” he would whine.

We are virtually his prisoners, and we don’t know how to break the shackles without being inhuman.

Please share any ideas / suggestions that can reduce my suffering. You can leave them in the comment box below.

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