articles
China Elevator Stories
my mother-in-law stole my children
A mother’s custodial rights are not sufficiently protected in China.
24/07/2023
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
In 2019, I found myself sitting in my living room in Siping, googling every personality disorder I could find. I had been exposed to years of strange behavior from my then-husband—behavior I couldn’t make sense of because, from my perspective, it defied any definition of normal. His mother’s behavior was just as baffling.
While it was relatively easy to identify my husband’s personality disorder, his mother’s behavior didn’t fit the same mold.
More often than not, she took on my identity, which, needless to say, I found very creepy.
I had a pink rain jacket, and one summer, she asked my husband to buy her a pink jacket identical to mine. As far as I could tell, she wanted to look more like me.
To make matters worse, she was pathologically jealous of me. Over a short period, she tried to control every aspect of my life and my children’s lives. This included dictating what we were allowed to eat, how much we had to eat, who was allowed to cook, how much I could spend on household expenses, how or if we could celebrate holidays, who we had to celebrate with, and even what we could or couldn’t wear.
Despite my requests to my husband for privacy at home, she continued showing up unannounced each morning. There was basically no privacy left by that time. The first thing she would do was walk through every room, including the bedroom, to check if anything was different from the day before.
She’d ask me if my son had eaten congee and how much. I swear, she almost forced me to count the grains of rice he’d eaten to ensure he’d had the amount she deemed sufficient. I told her he preferred bread for breakfast, but she didn’t like that answer.
When she finished her visit, she’d often take out the trash for us. But before doing so, she’d inspect exactly what was in it. Sometimes she’d make hurtful, snide remarks about how I spent too much on certain items and threw things away carelessly.
When I dressed my children, she’d take them to her home and change them into clothes she’d bought instead. In her eyes, the clothes I bought were never good enough; and she seemed to believe only she knew how to dress, parent, and feed my children. She’d often take my children from my home to hers without prior notice. Her jealousy was so extreme that she even forbade me to talk to my children.
I constantly argued with her because she interfered with my parenting, positioning herself as the parent rather than the grandparent of my children. My husband, who was very close to his mother, soon took her side. By then, she had already pushed me out of my marriage and was so enmeshed with my husband that she could easily be mistaken for his wife, except for the fact that she was much older and his mother.
As I sat in my living room in Siping in 2019, I had to research a little more than just narcissism before I found a term that fit her behavior perfectly: Machiavellianism.
Had I known back then that she would not only destroy my marriage (along with my husband, who contributed his share) but would also sever my relationship with my children and help my husband plan to separate my children from me forever, I would never have left my kids in China with him.
Legally, there is no clause that would allow a mother to sue a grandmother for taking her children in a case where the grandmother now raises the children instead of the mother, without the mother’s consent.
It can be extremely difficult to regain physical custody in such cases, even when the mother has joint legal custody with the father.
This tragic reality is playing out in my life and in the lives of many Chinese women, where the husband’s family commonly takes children from their birth mother, alienates them from her, and collaborates to strip her of the right to have a relationship with and raise her own children.
When things reach the worst possible outcome, as they did in my case, children are not only taken from their mother but are also hidden, and all contact is cut off, leaving the mother unable to see her children or even find out where they are.
Do you know anybody who has experienced this?