Curious what to do…
My husband and I live out of state and are expecting our first baby in a couple months. We are unsure what to do about out of state visitors postpartum.
For context- my family lives in the state we live in and my husbands family is out of state. Over the past five years we have visited them 3-4 times per year. Eventually we expressed that things were feeling one-sided and getting a bit expensive (and it took all our PTO) so his parents have begun visiting us and we split the visits each year. His sister has not visited in 4 years and never calls or checks in. When we did see her (from coming to her), it started to feel like she was always trying to compete (finances, jobs, house, etc) and one-up us. When my husband expressed to her that the relationship felt one-sided, it blew up into a big argument. Her points were mainly that since she has kids she doesn’t have time to visit or call, she didn’t choose his zip code and she has plenty of friendships that don’t connect but maybe once a year and they just pick up where they left off. So we accepted that maybe we won’t have that close a relationship with them and have dialed back our visits. We’re still close with his parents because they visit us as well but we’ve aren’t very close with his sister anymore.
Now we had discussed with my husband’s parents that they are welcome to come out when baby is born and either stay with us or in a hotel. I know his mom wants to come as soon as we are comfortable and we planned on inviting them out in the first few weeks after baby. Now his sister wants to come along to meet baby and we both don’t know if we’re comfortable with that as soon. She hasn’t been out here in 4 years and we barely talk. We aren’t as comfortable or close with her anymore as we are with his parents. We feel like having her here that early on will add a layer of tension and anxiety. We are worried we’re going to be just trying to figure everything out with a newborn and healing and she’s gonna make things feel like a competition and critique everything we do. We also just don’t feel close with her anymore to share such a vulnerable time. We aren’t sure what to do. Say just his parents can come right away, say they all can come but push it out a few more weeks to give us time to heal and figure things out a bit more with a newborn? We feel bad doing the latter and making his mom wait longer when we were perfectly comfortable with her coming right away.
Part of us wonders are we just being petty? Like we wanted her to visit all these years and now the one time she offers we actually don’t really want her to? Or maybe just not right away when his parents plan to come?