Why my husband's mother and I had a fight? Because she is a very cunning person who has an incredible acrobatic ability to change shoes in the air, i.e. she changes her mind at the speed of light.

From real life. "We renovated a summer house that my mother-in-law wanted to give us": Now she's selling it because my brother-in-law decided to get married

This time she did it at our expense. We spent all of last year renovating the summerhouse that my mother-in-law had promised to give to her oldest son, my husband, many times. But this year, there was no talk of it, because the younger son decided to get married, and his loving mother wants to give him money for the wedding.

To do this, we have to sell the cottage in the country. Then it turned out that she didn't promise us anything. I try to communicate with Grażyna as little as possible. I don't like her because of her constant complaining. Something hurts, something itches, she's not appreciated at work, she has little money, it's too hot or too cold – generally, there's always something wrong.

My husband is the complete opposite, he doesn't talk to his mother very often either, but there's another reason. My mother-in-law has a favorite son, the younger one. The older one was always sidelined. A typical unloved child. However, he maintains a relationship with his mother, claiming that after his father's death he feels obliged to help her.

His younger brother, Staś, is friends and communicates with everyone. He's the life of the party, he holds no grudges and holds no grudges. He's a good guy, but he's a lazy bastard, down to his bones. He and his husband are seven years apart. None of his friends call him anything but Staś. Only his mother calls him Stasieńko, but that's no better.

My mother-in-law didn't visit the cottage in the country, she didn't have the desire to take care of it regularly. But we had to pay for it or sell it so that it wouldn't stand idle and be an eyesore. Grażyna decided otherwise: she offered to give it to us. “I've never been a gardener, and Staś won't go there either, you know his brother. It'll fall apart completely. And we have to pay for it every year.” – my mother-in-law began the conversation.

Then she suggested that if we wanted, we could use the cottage, but then we would have to pay the fees ourselves. My husband and I looked at each other and went to see what they wanted to give us. I had never been there, and my husband couldn't remember the last time he had been there. The image that greeted us was not pleasant to the eye. The fence was rotting in the bushes. The house with a rotten porch and broken windows, a large plot of land overgrown with overgrown plants, on which it was no longer known what and when had been planted, and even the paths were no longer visible. A large water tank, which was already rusty. The picture was striking.

However, my husband and I checked out the property, looked at it, and decided it had promise. We talked to the neighbors about electricity and water. We were pleased with their answers. My husband and I spent all of last year doing this fascinating task, stopping only for the winter. Last fall, we had already cut all the weeds, put up a good fence, taken down everything old in the house, replaced the windows, painted everything that needed updating, and re-roofed.

We also installed electricity and water in the house. This year we wanted to plant fruit trees and bushes. My mother-in-law was at the cottage with Staś when we closed the last autumn season. They asked for it because they were very curious what we had been doing there for so long.

My mother-in-law was impressed, and we reminded her that it would be a good idea to re-register the property documents. It turned out that my mother-in-law had already started doing this, but there were some problems with land management and something else, so it was not as fast as we would have liked. But she remembers everything and will keep her promise.

She didn't have time to take care of it before winter, and then it turned out that she had to work on site, call an engineer, in short, a bit of bureaucracy that I didn't understand. The only thing I understood was that everything would be sorted out in the spring. Somehow I put all this fuss out of my head until my husband came home angry and shaken recently.

It turned out that he was at his mother's because she wanted to tell him something important. That “something” was the news that Staś had decided to get married. There would be a wedding, which my husband and I used to “skimp on”. My husband asked where the money for all the festivities would come from, because Staś didn't get much, nor did his mother, so was the bride really that rich? Grażyna explained that the bride was just like Staś, and the money would come when her mother-in-law sold the same house that we had renovated and invested so much effort and money in. What a plot twist!

I was shocked, and my husband wasn't happy either. He reminded my mother that she had actually promised to give it to us, and we had invested a lot of money because we had made it to suit us. My husband and I are furious about this behavior. We fell for it ourselves, we should have re-registered the documents first, but who knows, we never noticed the mother-in-law's fraud before.

My husband told my mother that if she did that, she could no longer count on his help. Let Staś help her, for whom she would even spit on her conscience. Now Grażyna has a new reason to complain – her son is blackmailing her. And I agree with my husband, my mother-in-law is completely exaggerating.

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Natasha Kumar

By Natasha Kumar

Natasha Kumar has been a reporter on the news desk since 2018. Before that she wrote about young adolescence and family dynamics for Styles and was the legal affairs correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining The Times Hub, Natasha Kumar worked as a staff writer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Mirabella. To get in touch, contact me through my natasha@thetimeshub.in 1-800-268-7116