Thought I would update this.
DM ended up blanking me for the whole of January. She didn’t contact me on my birthday. She only got in touch with me after my DF told her to. It was a totally innocuous message with no reference to Christmas, or my message to her, as if everything was fine.
I replied and again reiterated that before we could go further then we needed to address what had happened. And that DH needed an apology at the very least.
I got a voice note back in which she said she was “sorry things got heated but that DH started it(?!), that DH should have been the bigger person and apologised to her, she understood if she had to stay on the naughty step but that she’d love me for ever.”
I took a couple of weeks to compose what I was going to say to reply, but just before I was able to do so my DF became terribly unwell. He had a week in hospital, during which we found out things were very serious. He had to have a life saving operation and was in and out of hospital. So for those three months, DM and I had to communicate about my dad’s health. DH, DS and I were travelling down every weekend or every other weekend (with a 5-8 month old!), everything was very superficial when we saw her and DH understandably barely said a word to her.
Once DF was discharged, again we had some surface level conversation about how he was recovering, but essentially, once things were looking better and DF was doing okay…. DM went back to blanking me! No messages, ignoring mine, not even asking after DS, nothing.
Today was nearly two months of it and we happened to visit home to see DF, so I asked my DM why she was ignoring me…
”I’m still not over Christmas. I know you were there sitting next to him and I know DH says he didn’t shout at me, but he’s a liar! He screamed at me! I told you I didn’t want this to come in between us but you have decided that it has.”
”Mum, it was my home you did it in, my husband you attacked, my baby you made cry, it was my family you hurt, of course it has affected me!”
So there we are. I think for the first time, I have stood up to my mother’s behaviour instead of us all brushing it under the carpet, probably because for the first time it hasn’t just been me on the receiving end, so things are different. She clearly doesn’t like it and also seems to have completely reversed the order of events in her mind! My mind boggles at the thought of DH screaming at anyone, a more polite and mild mannered man you could never meet.
It is infuriating that we will never get an acknowledgment let alone an apology, and it is heartbreaking that we are never going to have fun family events ever again.