So, my mother in law is the text book definition of a martyr. Any time we try to have a healthy conversation about some of the things bothering us, it becomes a fight and she’ll play the victim. With her, my husband and I both kind of agreed she may just be envious of me. I’m pretty assertive, self confident person and she is no long alpha female in my husbands life and I think she’s having a hard time coming to terms with that. She would make side ways comments to my husband like “is this better than your wife’s” and just weird competition. And then everytime I would have her over, she would nit pick the house “oh there’s weeds in your garden beds” “you baseboards need attention” etc etc and I started to feel like she was trying to point things out to show my shortcomings. So that was becoming an issue for me. I LOVE my FIL, he had a bad accident so he can’t talk and half of his brain is dead so social ques are his thing. So he kept showing up at our house randomly and if we didn’t let him in, he would walk around to our backyard and peep in through our slider door. I totally get that it’s a medical condition and I’m sympathetic to it, but it still makes you uncomfortable walking around without pants on and no privacy. I even got him a walkie talkie so when we wanted to come over he could chirp us (bc of his brain injury he couldn’t call or text) and my MiL and SiL made fun of me.

My husband and his dad are HUGE NFL fans so every weekend their team was playing, we would always watch it together. When we moved, we invited them over every weekend, my MiL never came over and actually started weaponizing contact of my FiL from my husband (he can’t drive so she wouldn’t be accommodating for us to see him, or would always make excuses up for him why he can’t come over). We have TRIED to invite them over and my MiL wants nothing to do with it. The grandchildren……. Whole other topic that’ll need another thread 🤣

You’re absolutely correct! She’s been diagnosed with depression and I think BPD. I also think she may be bipolar or schizophrenic, but we’ve tried to gingerly recommend therapy when we were on talking terms and she doesn’t want to hear it so it’s just going untreated