If your in-laws make you feel guilty every time you want to visit your parents, you may eventually start questioning yourself. You might wonder if you’re being selfish, if you should be spending more time with your husband’s family, or if wanting to go home means you aren’t adjusting properly. It doesn’t.
Getting married may mean becoming part of a new family, but it doesn’t mean leaving your own family behind.
Your parents are still your parents after marriage. You may want to visit them, spend time with them, call them, celebrate occasions together, or simply go home because you miss them.
You Are Still Your Parents’ Daughter
Marriage changes your life, but it doesn’t erase the relationships you had before it.
Your parents don’t stop being your family because you now have a husband and in-laws. Wanting to maintain a close relationship with them isn’t a rejection of your husband’s family.
You can care about your in-laws and still miss your parents. You can enjoy spending time with your husband’s family and still want to spend a weekend at your parents’ home. These things can exist together. Sometimes the pressure comes through small comments:
“You just went there recently.”
“Why do you need to go again?”
Hearing comments like these repeatedly can make you feel guilty about something that was never wrong in the first place. Someone being unhappy about your decision doesn’t automatically mean you have made a bad decision.
You Don’t Need a Special Reason to Visit Your Parents
You shouldn’t have to wait for a festival, family function, illness, or emergency to visit your parents.
Sometimes you may simply want to have lunch with your mother. Maybe you want to sit with your father and talk. Maybe you miss your childhood home.
Those are valid reasons too.
As parents get older, ordinary moments together can become increasingly valuable. Your relationship with them deserves space in your married life, just like your relationship with your husband’s family does.
What If You Feel Guilty Anyway?
Try separating guilt from responsibility. Ask yourself what you have actually done wrong.
Are you neglecting an important responsibility at home? Or are your in-laws simply unhappy because they don’t want you to go as often?
Those are two very different things. You don’t have to take responsibility for every emotion someone else experiences.
If you have responsibilities at home, you can communicate and plan around them. But that doesn’t mean your parents’ place in your life should disappear.
It may also help to stop over-explaining every visit. You don’t necessarily need to build a case for why you’re going home.
A simple, respectful conversation can be enough:
“I want to spend some time with my parents this weekend. I’ll be back on Sunday.”
You can be considerate without treating your relationship with your parents as something you need permission to maintain.
Your Husband’s Support Matters Too
Your husband doesn’t necessarily have to argue with his family every time there is a disagreement. But he should understand that staying connected with your parents is important to you.
Instead of making the conversation about who is right or wrong, explain how the situation makes you feel.
A healthy marriage should have room for both families without expecting one person to slowly give up theirs.
You Don’t Have to Choose
There is often an unspoken expectation that after marriage, a woman should gradually become less connected to her parents. But becoming a wife and daughter-in-law doesn’t mean becoming less of a daughter.
You can build a life with your husband while still having your own relationship with your parents.
You can love your new family without abandoning your old one. And you don’t have to feel guilty for wanting to go home. You are still their daughter. And you’re allowed to keep being one.
Marriage gave you another family. It didn’t take your family away.
–Here for every her–
