How to Say 'No' to Mother-in-law Moving In?

Although we could probably stay in our apartment for a few more years, my husband and I are financially ready to purchase a house. There is one person, however, that is preventing me from wanting to start looking - my mother-in-law. She and my husband have this idea that we are all going to live together where she will get her own section or floor of the house and it will be as if I don't even know she is there. :eek: I do not hate her, but I have absolutely no desire to live under the same roof as her. There are some issues I have with her that I do not feel like getting into but issues aside, I just want my own house. Every time my husband brings the idea of her living with us up, I very calmly interject that I really want us to have our own house. He gets so defensive, goes off about how he has to take care of his mother or else she'll rot, and quickly ends his tirade with how we will talk about it another time. He's not a mama's boy. In fact, they barely talk on the phone and half the time we see her, they fight. However in the end very oddly, he gets overprotective of her because she's divorced (not to my father-in-law, they never got married) and living alone feeling sorry for herself after all these years. She has duped my husband into thinking that she needs to live with us because her divorce left her barely able to stay in her house. I know this sounds cold, but I no longer feel sorry for her financial problems. She refuses to change her "glamorous" lifestyle. She cries she has no money but the next weekend is dropping a hundred dollars for a pair of shoes. When she asked to be part of our cell phone plan because splitting the bill for the better plan would be affordable for her, my husband swore she would pay her part when I told him I was against the idea. Of course she does not and when I suggest she either goes on a low plan or a different service provider, he always says that after all that she has gone through she doesn't deserve having crappy service. Maybe some people feel a cell phone as a necessity but I still see it as a luxury as I remember what life was like without one. This is another issue I cannot quite resolve. Although she had been divorced for two or three years when my husband and I first started dating, she wasn't quite like this. As time goes on, she gets more and more dependent like this. I sometimes want to shoot at my husband, "What bill's next? Her cable? Credit cards?" I am so frustrated because she's far from elderly since she had him so young or a person with medical needs and can live in an apartment or a much smaller house once she sells her current house. The fact that he and I want to buy a house should be a discussion between us yet the only time we get to talk about it is in front of her where she always adds how we can all live together and how that would help her be more financially secure. My husband and I worked so hard to save for a house taking on extra working hours, skipping vacations, limiting how much we go out or do anything special, etc. I did not do all that with him for a house that really will not feel like my own. How can I resolve this? I sometimes consider talking to my mother-in-law alone about how I feel about this and how we would of course help her find a place to live if need be, but I fear that I will walk away from that conversation with her looking like the victim. On the other hand, I really worry that this situation is going to come down to him choosing between his mother and my wishes and feelings over the matter. Maybe my only solution is to just stay in our apartment and move into a bigger when we need more bedrooms as we have children. We have had such a great marriage where like any couple, we have our differences (aside from his mother) and argue occasionally, but we always overcome any struggle. This whole financial dependence and house situation unfortunately is the only thing we cannot get past.

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