Welcome to Plathville.
On the surface, this sounds like a friendly place to be, doesn’t it?
TLC viewers know otherwise, however, especially when it comes to Olivia Plath and Kim Plath.
The former is married to Welcome to Plathville star Ethan, while the latter is his mother.
It’s not unusual for relatives of this nature to occasionally clash, but Season 2 of this reality show concluded with Ethan walking away from his family due to their treatment of Olivia.
Just about a year ago, Ethan’s brother, Micah, tried to explain the basis for the disdain.
Micah told Us Weekly that his mom went “overboard” with the 2018 wedding planning for her son and future daughter-in-law, turning their big day into her own celebration.
“A lot of frustrated and bad communication,” Micah told this tabloid of how things fell apart on what should have been a joyous occasion.
“Just people not saying what they’re going to do, doing things differently, doing things other people didn’t want to.”
Did we also mention Hurricane Michael had just struck Florida?
“We didn’t have power until, like, an hour before the wedding,” Moriah Plath has said of this same event and this same fallout.
“There was so much stress. And so I feel like a lot of people’s true colors came out at that time.
“That’s kind of when everything got exposed, and it just didn’t turn out how everybody expected it to turn out.”
According to Olivia, however, tension existed between her and her controlling in-laws long before her wedding day.
“When we were dating, I knew that I was being controlled in what we were allowed to do, what we’re allowed to say,” the photographer explained to Us Weekly last August.
“I remember the night that it clicked for me was the night we got engaged. We come in the door, [Kim] waited up for us and she, like, grabbed my hand and looked at the ring. And the first thing she said was, ‘Oh, I want to trade rings with you.’
“And I was like, ‘OK, that’s really weird.’”
Ethan and Olivia have since moved far away from the former’s parents.
Partly because, even once they were married, Olivia felt Kim was still trying to interfere in their lives.
“It was just, like, a pattern that she tried to make a lot of decisions for me,” she told Us just under a year ago.
“And I was fresh out of my parents’ house and figuring out who I was, and I didn’t want decisions made for me.
“The wedding was where a lot of that culminated, but it was just across the board. … That created a whole bunch of tension.”
Did we also mention that Kim thinks Olivia may be possessed?
On a Season 3 episode that aired in October, a producer approached Kim and told her what Olivia had said in the wake of an argument with her in-laws.
“Olivia has expressed that you told her that she had evil spirits,” this producer told Kim, to which the mother of nine replied:
“We believe that when people are experiencing bitterness, un-forgiveness, hatred, hatred of other people or hatred of themselves, you know any of those things, it’s the influence from the devil.”
Concluded Kim, who just announced the end of her marriage from Ethan’s dad:
“I can see where Olivia could have taken it that way.
“That when we said that she had bitterness towards us that knowing our belief system that she could’ve internalized that as being we think she’s full of evil spirits.”
Just a basic misunderstanding, we guess.
But when you have any inkling at all that your mother-in-law thinks you may be under the power and influence of Satan, it’s really hard to come back from that.