Please be kind with comments because I need a little perspective here if I am being unreasonable/hormonal or if I am warranted to be a little annoyed? This is a bit of a long one so I do apologise.
I have a horrible feeling when I am around my family in law. My MIL is overbearing with my partner & his sister (shes overprotective & way to involved in each of their lives - something I’ve never been used to). My partner has an older sister who is approaching her 30s & has never had a relationship/child etc. I think naturally she always thought she would be the first to settle down & have a family and I can understand that so I was highly sympathetic to this for a long time.
I was with my partner for a year and then I found out I was pregnant. I was 21, he was 23 & we were young and excited so when we told both sets of immediate family and before I knew it all of the family knew because they decided to share it. This made me really uncomfortable because I was only around 6 weeks at the time and months prior to finding out I wasn’t even sure I could have babies. When we got our 12 week scan, all was okay and we shared it online (stupidly). My sister-in-law posted it as though it was her who was experiencing the pregnancy… I let it go because we were so happy regardless. This was one of the many things to come. Throughout the pregnancy she would make little comments or post things that was really about our little family but try to pass it off as her own - such as scans, etc. I let it go.
When my daughter was born, it was really touch and go for both of us. I had GBS & it spread to my daughter in birth, she ended up exremely poorly in the NICU (I won’t go into it but she was a miracle as doctors says she could have died). I was also severely unwell and was in and out of conciousness. My partner had updated family that baby was born and then before we knew it all the posts started coming through on facebook all the while my baby is in the NICU & I am drifting between conciousness. I had no idea how bad it all was until days later. I am still really traumatised by it. Thankfully we had no visitors because of COVID but we experienced the NICU stay and all the fear alone in the hospital. They didn’t see that.
When I came home I was in a deep state of PND that I wouldn’t eat, sleep or talk and I was always crying etc. At the time we were staying at my PIL as we lost our home due to covid/losing our jobs etc. I needed my mum more than ever before and I was just hurting and upset all the time. The first night of us being home it was overshadowed by my Family in laws wants as they wanted us to stay up all night in the livingroom so they could see the baby, they wouldn’t give us baby back and just kept going on and on about how much my daughter doesn’t look like me or my partner but looks like my SIL. Btw she looked nothing like my daughter. But it hurt because it was a comment that was repeated over & over again. My partner had to tell my Family in law to stop the comments as it was hurting my feelings. But not 2 weeks later on my first birthday as a mum they both decided to come in to our room with big memory books to ‘prove’ how much MY daughter looked like my SIL right before we went on our first walk together as a family. Again, she didn’t look anything like her. But it hurt me so much that I was crying the full night.
My daughter has now just turned 1 and in the past year it has continued to the point where I don’t want to be around any of them. It has affected my relationship with my partner and it was a big part of my PND (as I felt like less than). I feel I have bit my tongue and myself & partner have both suffered mentally trying to keep everyone happy but ourselves. They have her one night every weekend to bond, we travel 30 miles all in 2 times a week on top of that so that they can see her and in the entire year they have visited us twice because my SIL refuses to drive up here with PIL?
In the past year my SIL has tried to claim all the big special milestones of our first year as parents & of my daughter as her own. She bought my daughter a halloween costume which she INSISTED my daughter HAD to wear on Halloween and got upset when I said I had actually bought my own daughter stuff for halloween. I felt that bad I had upset her so I put it on and took a photo for her but she took that photo and posted it all over social media without out consent. Then on halloween, we had planned to have a family night carving pumpkins, making cupcakes and watching films but she made a big point of trying to involve herself even though we specially said we wanted to do it as a family as it was my daughters first halloween. She again got upset because I told my partner to tell her to stop being so involved.
Shes went out her way to do stuff to impose herself & her family enable the behaviour even though we have on numerous occasions actually said that its too much and that its not her place. Whenever I try to say anything about how we are parenting our child (rear-facing car seat, weaning at 6 months, bedtime at 8pm) my parents in law will say things like “oh we had two kids and we did it this way so we cant do it your way” or they agree but then completely ignore everything you have said and are so blatant about it. So it creates a trust issue also. They make me feel as though I am so irrelevant and that they think my SIL is actually my daughters mother. I don’t get any respect and neither does my partner in regards to how we choose to parent our children. I try to tell them the reasons why we choose to do things the way we do but it falls on deaf ears and starts an arguement.
My SIL posted photos of my daughter half naked all over the internet and I asked her to take them down (commenting on the post) and she completely ignored me. She told us she was buying a cheap (non isofix) forward facing seat for my 1 year old daughter for “when she wants to take her out” - I told her not to bother as my children wont be sitting in that seat as they arent safe. She got all upset. Like the list goes on.
How on earth do I approach this because it is driving me insane. I have my second on the way late december/early january and I am stressing myself out for all the same happening again I think. I can’t keep going through the cycle with them! Please help me on how I can calm myself as well as how I can let her know to stay in her own lane and not have to go through it all again.
Pleaseeeee help me