Help me with techniques for addressing my MIL’s behavior

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11/14/2021 12:15

Subject: Help me with techniques for addressing my MIL’s behavior

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Anonymous

My MIL will be staying with us for a week for the holidays and I am totally dreading it. As I’ve gotten older and now that we have two kids and life is much more complicated, my tolerance for her is just at an all time low. There are some specific behaviors she has that drive me bonkers, and I need new techniques/responses for dealing with her. Specifically, here’s what I need ideas for:

-she tells me the same stories over and over about my partner as a child. We have been together 14 years and it’s not dementia - she just likes to tell the same stories to people over and over again that she thinks are endearing (they aren’t—just to her) and she expects me to be enthralled and act like I have never heard them before. When I try to interject politely, “oh yes, you’ve told us about how Larla dumped trucks in the toilet when he was 2,” or gently tease her, “I think I’ve heard this one quite a few times before, didn’t X happen next,” she doesn’t take the hint and keeps telling the same story.

-she is constantly talking about the past and all her deceased relatives and how the holidays were so much better when they were around. She resists any attempts I make to divert the topic, and my attempts to get her to stop sitting around lamenting the past and create new holiday memories (let’s go look at lights, let’s go to the zoo, etc) and rebuffed.

-I am nursing. Whenever my babies or toddlers get fussy, she tells me they need to nurse or will announce in a passive aggressive way, “I think Larla needs to
Nurse.” She nursed her kids on demand whenever they wanted or fussed about anything and I don’t do that and it frustrates me when she tries to dictate my nursing schedule.

-she is very loud and can’t moderate her noises - she slams doors, toilet seats, etc. and walks around with heavy feet when the babies are napping and never seems to remember to be quiet, but when they wake up it’s my problem.

-whenever DH or I express any frustration about anything (oh, Larla isn’t sleeping well or work is stressful or whatever) she always interrupts and says, “Oh I know.” I find it very rude and invalidating but I don’t know how to respond.

-she brings excessive amounts of gifts that often have tiny pieces, paint, glitter, or are duplicates of what we have. Then she insists on bringing them out and making a huge production of the kids opening them. If the kids don’t respond positively, she keeps trying to get them to play with her toys for the rest of her visit and keeps saying things like, did you see what I got Larla? It’s really so great. Etc.

-she doesn’t treat our home with care. At her last visit she insisted Larla make a collage with feathers and glitter paint she brought, and then immediately hung it up on the wall without letting it dry so the glitter paint ran down my walls and I had to clean it up. Her home is pretty sloppy but that is not how we keep our home and I was dumbfounded that an adult who had children would hang up a wet painting without letting it dry first.

-she constantly tells me how my kids look like her dead relatives (eg oh Larla has great aunt Louise’s nose) and never says anything about how they resemble me or my side of the family. My DH has admitted he thinks this is a tic of hers because she is sad our kids strongly resemble me and my family, but I feel so weird when she’s constantly talking about my kids and their features, especially since these are dead people and my older kid gets sad hearing about people who are dead and then goes down rabbit holes about it, like Grandma are you sad your mom is dead? How did she die? Etc.

Thank you for any ideas for how to it would address this, my husband thinks I’m a horrible daughter in law because he says I don’t hide my irritation from
Her on these things very well.