I don't know, I'm a fan of telling the cheated-upon. Yeah, half the time they already kind of know and they don't want the confirmation and they'll blame you and cling to their cheating jerk of a partner, but they still have a right to know that they're not operating under the same conditions in their relationship that their partner is.

However, the person telling also needs to make sure that they're doing it for more or less the right reasons. Not necessarily because the effect will be different, but people pick up on if you're telling out of compassion, or out of revenge, and tend to react accordingly. It's also a matter of self-interest. Most decent people will feel terrible if they told on the cheater because they wanted to see the cheater's relationship go down in flames.

So, LW, I'd take Cary's advice first. Let it go. Once you're sufficiently detached to look at things with a cooler head, then you can decide if telling the husband is something you want to do.

Not to put to fine a point on this, but where in the nine bloody hells is your husband? Why is it assumed that you, the person who's not her child, are going to be the one to take care of your MIL? I'd make it pretty damn clear to your husband, first of all, that you will not be taking care of his mother, so that means he has to step up to the plate.

Because of proximity, the burden will fall on your husband and you the most. There is not much that can be done about that. You can, however, make it clear that while you will support your husband, the care of his mother falls under his purview. Encourage your husband to take the steps that Cary outlined. Whenever questions are asked of you about your MIL's care, direct them to your husband. Support your husband through this, and help him with his tasks.

You, and your husband and in-laws, have my sympathy. It's going to be a rough ride.

I know why the Obama campaign chose to portray Michelle the way they did. I know why Michelle was the one to make sacrifices in her career, even before Barack was running for president. And it still doesn't make it any less reprehensible that in order to win the presidency for her husband, Michelle had to act the little housewife. It still doesn't make it any less terrible that she has to sacrifice her professional career for his.

(And of course, she chose it! Just like almost every family with two working parents *chooses* the woman's career to sacrifice! It's a choice! It's not sexism!)

To be honest, reading through these comments has really emphasized one of the reasons I don't want kids--I don't want my identity and my worth as a person to just be "Mom." I'm not denigrating mothers, or the work they do. I'm denigrating the way that this society treats women who have children, the way women are expected to stay at home or cut back hours, the way women are expected to do most of the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, because she has kids and they're still viewed as her primary responsibility, with dad as the helper and babysitter. How it is expected of the woman to sacrifice herself on the altar of family, while the man gets to continue to have his life, his dreams, his goals.

It isn't true of all families, especially families who make conscious decisions about how to more equally divide the work of raising children. But it is still true of the expectations of families, of the cultural narrative of what's expected of mothers and fathers. And I want no part of it.

LW doesn't give us much information on how her relationship was with her S-I-L before she read the email, but I'm assuming it was cordial. In any case, ignore her as best you can. Vent to someone outside your family if need be. Also assuming that your family is mostly sane and not given to this kind of crap, they'll take a cue from you, and probably also ignore it.

(Except as an item of gossip between them--every family has that one member or in-law that rubs everyone the wrong way. Even as the occasional "What was s/he thinking?" email or phone call goes around, most sane families will try to keep things polite to the offending party. Who wants the kind of drama your S-I-L is trying to stir up?)

Ahem. On another tangent, my husband and I do have a shared email account, used primarily for family communications about where we're spending the holidays. We also have our separate accounts that we use much, much more frequently. I wouldn't dream of either giving DH access to my email, or to ask for access to his. Don't people want some privacy, even from their spouses?