Have NC'ed to avoid being outed. We're going to see DH's family in 3 weeks and I won't write it all here to avoid a mammoth post but we have a lot of back history with them trying to control DH with guilt trips etc and it's taken DH a long time to work through the FOG but he's getting there slowly. Reaching the stage now where we can deal with them day in day out (as we live quite a way away) and neither of us want to cut them off as they can be very nice people generally and DH is clear on siding with me/our family so we hope to be able to work through it over time.
Thing is we moved away from them (for other reasons, not them) 2 years ago, they took it badly at the time and still don't seem to want to deal with it. When we see them we get guilt trips about being so far away, but they're veiled enough that there's nothing to actually challenge, it's just little comments that have a 'drip drip' effect. DH, naturally, feels the brunt of it and would love (well we both would) to have ideas of calm and polite but firm comments to shut the remarks down without having to blow it up into a big thing (MIL hates being 'challenged' and will spoil for a fight then apologise later whereas if it's all 'softly softly' she'll back off before it happens).
So what do you say when you get subtle digs about things like;
'we didn't think you'd recognise dniece/she'd recognise you' (ie, you should live round the corner)
'we don't know what to do about xmas, it's so hard not having all the family around' (ie, you should spend every xmas with us even though it's impossible with families far apart)
'that's why it's so good living in X place' (this is from SIL, to infer where we live is hell on earth - granted that one phrase doesn't imply that by itself but there's usually hours of comments like this)
Neither of us are good at being assertive in the moment (better after reflecting and getting back to them) - what would you reply in the moment to get them to stop?