Dear Bess: My Wife Expects Me to Pay for Everything for Her Mother. Am I Allowed to Say Something?

Dear Bess,

My mother-in-law lives with us. My wife expects us to pay for everything for her, meals out, holidays, even the odd coffee. My own mum, when she was alive, always wanted to pay her own way, or shout us, whenever we dined out. Do I just put up with having a new 80-year-old dependant, or do I actually say something? What are your thoughts, Bess?

Signed, Quietly Doing the Sums

Here’s the thing I want to say first, before anything else: you’re allowed to have feelings about this. I get the sense from your letter that you’ve been quietly totting up cups of coffee for a while now, wondering if you’re allowed to mind, and the answer is yes. You’re allowed to mind. Noticing a pattern in your household finances isn’t unkind. It’s just noticing.

But I also want to gently separate two things that have got tangled together in your letter, because I think untangling them is where the real answer lives.

The first thing is your mother-in-law’s finances, and whether it’s reasonable for her to contribute. The second thing, and I suspect the one actually keeping you up at night, is that your own mother did it differently, and some part of you is quietly grieving that difference every time the bill comes.

Let’s take the money question first, because it’s the more straightforward of the two.

There are a lot of entirely legitimate reasons an 80-year-old living with family might not be reaching for her purse. She may genuinely be on a fixed income that doesn’t stretch to shouting a family of however-many at dinner. She may have already contributed significantly, financially or otherwise, in ways that aren’t visible over a coffee, helping with the mortgage, minding grandchildren, covering bills you don’t see. Or she may simply have never been the generation, or the personality, that reached for the bill first, the way your own mother apparently was.

None of those things are a character flaw. They’re just different people, with different relationships to money and generosity, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one is actually true in your situation, rather than assuming the least generous explanation by default.

Now, the harder thing.

I think a good portion of what you’re feeling isn’t really about the coffees at all. It’s about missing a version of family generosity that felt familiar to you, one your own mother modelled, and finding yourself instead in a household where the rhythm is different, and where your wife appears to have simply decided, on her mother’s behalf and yours, that this is how it will work.

That second part is worth naming directly, because I don’t think this is actually a conversation about money. I think it’s a conversation about you and your wife, and whether the two of you have genuinely agreed on how this arrangement works, or whether it’s simply happened, unspoken, in the direction your wife was already inclined to take it.

So here’s what I’d actually suggest.

Don’t have this conversation with your mother-in-law. Have it with your wife. Something like: “I’ve noticed we’re covering everything when your mum’s with us, meals, holidays, coffees, and I don’t think we’ve ever actually sat down and agreed that’s how we want it to work. Can we talk about it properly?”

That’s a genuinely different conversation to “your mother should pay her way,” which will land as an attack on her and, by extension, on your wife’s love for her mother. The first version is about you and your wife making a shared decision together. The second version is about relitigating your mother-in-law’s character, and you will not win that fight, nor should you particularly want to.

It’s also worth asking yourself honestly what outcome you’re actually after. Do you want your mother-in-law to contribute financially? Or do you simply want to feel like this was a decision the two of you made together, rather than one that happened around you? Those call for very different conversations, and I suspect it’s genuinely the second one, dressed up as the first.

One last thing, Quietly Doing the Sums.

You’re not required to pretend you don’t notice patterns in your own household. But you are, I think, required to have this conversation with the person you married, not the person who moved in with you. Start there, and see where it actually leads. My guess is it leads somewhere considerably gentler than the resentment currently doing the sums in your head every time the bill arrives.

Have a question for Bess? Write to her at [email protected] with “Dear Bess” in the subject line.