Dear Prudence,
My fiancée recently got in contact with her narcissistic mother. This woman is a grifter who sent her teenage daughter away in order to keep her rapist boyfriend. She has two other younger children whom she does not have custody of. But she is obsessed with the idea of us giving her a grandbaby.
She whines and cries and makes ludicrous promises about how she will support and take care of the baby while we finish school. We both work full-time and are finishing our degrees without loans, so it will be a few years. We want to start our married life without debt and potentially buy a house. The problem is that my fiancée is starting to repeat this nonsense.
It is like all her brains get scrambled after a talk with her mom. “People make do all the time. Love is all you need. God will provide.” I finally asked her how exactly she thought we could budget this. We can’t afford rent just on my salary, let alone paying for our degrees and child care, and her mother is a liar. The woman can’t take care of the children she already has, and my fiancée wants to gamble that it will be different for a grandkid? This is a constant fight between us. Frankly, this is giving me pause on our future together. We are only in our mid-20s here. While we were dating, my fiancée was in therapy to deal with her past trauma and firmly seemed to feel that her mother needed to be kept at a distance. Now it is the opposite. I love her and want kids. Just not now. How do I get through to her?