To be frank, I don't have a great relationship with my Mum. She's always behaved like she has this weird obsession with my life and that she's entitled to know everything about it. When I was a child living at home, this caused me no end of grief - I couldn't keep a diary, get mail without her opening it, or get changed after a shower without her barging into my room and trying to look at me naked. She would constantly criticise me and try to shame me, I grew up with massive confidence issues from listening to her negative comments about my body. There was some physical abuse too when I was very, very young but the mental stuff was far more damaging to me.
I'm a private person and I don't care for anyone, let alone my nosy Mum to know every detail of my life, and once I left home and started to assert my personal autonomy this caused her to get way more obsessive. The less I shared with her, the more she pushed. Once she even broke into my house while I was on holidays and went through my bedroom, then tried to claim that she was "only try to help" by cleaning it for me while I was away. I was 32 years old at that point! This was the trigger I needed to really set down some boundaries with her and not put up with her crazy anymore.
These have mostly worked and given me some space and peace of mind. While Mum stopped coming to my house whenever she felt like it, she is too proud to outright ask me if I'm up for a visitor, so instead she just does weird things like comes to my house (unannounced, still) and leaves things in my driveway for me to find later. It's bizarre as heck but it's like she's doing it just to have a little power flex? I don't know but I just let it be because pick your battles, I suppose?
I have an 8 year old who is in school. I have continued to keep my mother at arm's length, because over the years she's demonstrated to me that she's not a safe person for my kid to be around. Mum has never been left alone with my daughter, she's never babysat her or had her sleepover. Putting aside the fact that I don't trust her, Mum has some medical conditions that limit her mobility and physical strength. If there was some kind of emergency, I don't think she'd be able to react quickly. So my kid sees grandma once every 2-3 months or so - my partner and I will invite grandma over for dinner or we'll go out for lunch somewhere. The last time we had lunch together, Mum started talking about my daughter's school and asking whether they needed volunteers for the canteen. I told her that it was quite physical work involving needing to lift heavy trays of food out of the oven and that you need to be on your feet for most of the day, so not to worry about it. I wasn't bullshitting her, and she lives an hour away from us so I thought that would be the end of it.
But no, about a fortnight ago I got a message in the school p&c group chat welcoming their newest canteen volunteer - my mother. So I went to the school and spoke to the office staff and canteen manager, and warned them that my daughter was not to be taken out of class by my mother and not to be left alone with her, or allowed to be picked up by her after school. The school said they understood, and they'd send an email out to the teachers to get the message out.
About a week later, I received a phone call from the school principal to let me know that after my Mum's first canteen shift, she'd shown up at the office asking to have my daughter come out of class and see her. The staff member told her that they don't like to interrupt the kid's breaks and Mum left, and the principal said "I don't think she was very happy about it". I thanked her for letting me know and asked to pass along my thanks to the staff members as well.
I am just so tired of my Mum trying to push her way into my life, and trying to do it in ways where she can claim plausible deniability and pretend she's "just trying to help!" and make me out to be unreasonable. AIBU?? I've never told my daughter why she is never left alone with her grandma or babysat etc but maybe it would be reasonable to do so now?