Dear Prudence,
My husband and I are considering having his mom move across the country to live across the street from us. How can we set ourselves up for success, knowing how fraught this can be?
We are planning on having a kid next year (IUD removal is scheduled; we’ll go with the flow on fertility). We both like the idea of having her close by for a grandchild, especially since she’s fluent in Spanish and could provide a meaningful connection to my husband’s culture. We haven’t asked her yet, but she’s talked to me about this idea before and how she’d love to be closer to us. She’s quite lonely where she is now. Conveniently, there is a lovely 55-plus community across the street from our neighborhood that we could walk to in under 10 minutes.
Currently, I have a distant but friendly relationship with her. She has phone calls with my husband a couple of times a month and will sometimes speak with me during these calls, and we send each other texts on special occasions. We’ve never had any disagreements, but we also haven’t had much reason to ever disagree. She does speak English quite well, but haltingly and heavily accented; I do sometimes misunderstand her (I’m on a 260-day DuoLingo streak with Spanish, but realistically, I am never going to be able to hold down a conversation). Right now, we are aiming more for a grandma/grandchild relationship than asking her to provide consistent child care. But I could definitely see her babysitting or being a backup to daycare.
She immigrated to the U.S. as an adult, and there are obviously going to be different cultural opinions. I do know we will have differences ideologically (e.g., she hopes we will return to Catholicism one day—we’re agnostics) and parenting decisions (my husband was smacked with a stereotypical chancla). So we will need to talk with her about our parenting expectations (no secretly taking our child to be baptized, no corporeal punishment, etc.) and whether she’d be comfortable following those. Anything else we should consider so we don’t end up emulating that Everybody Loves Raymond life?
—From 3,000 Miles to 0.3 Miles