I interrupt MIL selfish monologues with yes I know, you told me this before.

[TheRubyPoet]

MIL always interrupts every conversation into how it relates to her without letting anyone else finish. My son's graduation dinner yesterday turned into what she studied at school, how she was the oldest in her graduation year. I replied yes, you told me this before and she kept talking. So I said it louder, you told me this before.
She got visibly upset but kept talking.

After 22 years of her I have had enough of her boring monologues and inability to let someone else have a moment. When I was sick when I was pregnant she kept talking about how healthy she was and how long she breastfed for blabla.
Everything i say results in her relating it to her.
Plus hours of nonsense about train times, shop opening times, What's in Sainsbury's.
My husband is quiet and unbothered by her blathering, so she gets away with steamrolling us.
AIBU if I interrupt her and say you told me this before.

I would love to coach her! Unfortunately she's completely lacking in self awareness and if I said something like 'I've noticed that you interrupt me when I'm trying to tell you something important and it makes me feel that you aren't interested in what I have to say and I would really appreciate it you'd let me speak" - she would look shell shocked and talk more and tell everyone how rude I was! She'd turn on the waterworks with DH and then he'd be upset with me.
All I can do is try to stop it in the moment by sighing, saying yes, I know, and maybe get up and walk away or feign headaches.

@GoldDuster

"OP hasn't anywhere indicated she's spoken to her MIL like shit on her shoe"

I think repeatedly interrupting someone to stop them talking because they're boring you is talking to them like 'they're shit on your shoe'.

Being boring, repetitive and a bit self obsessed (we only have the OP's word for this) makes someone a bit tedious. It doesn't make them intrinsically bad people or unworthy of kindness.

We all know people like this. My brother in law is profoundly like this - and my husband and I laugh about it when we get home from a family event. But when we see him we treat him with kindness and don't try to embarrass him or put him down.

It sounds to me like the OP hates her MIL and has demonstrated this by treating her with contempt at a family event.

I'm glad I don't have someone as bitchy as the OP in my family.

My FiL could have bored for Britain. I learned to cope with it by making sure that I had a book or magazine available, or at the very least some knitting or crochet. At times it must have been obvious that I was engrossed in my book and just saying "Mm" occasionally, but I don't think he really cared so long as he could carry on uninterrupted.

It's boring and tedious but is she actually horrible outside of it?

Well, obviously it’s a very dismissive and rude thing to do but it sounds like she’s quite challenging.

Was she only speaking to you, or to the rest of the table too? If she’s speaking to everyone and you keep interrupting to say you’ve already heard it, that’s also quite humiliating.

Ha! Yes he is actually called John. Is your husband a Mike 😬🤣

First of all you excused OP's MIL's behaviour because, according to you, she was obviously old and frail. OP has confirmed that her MIL has been like this since she first met her when she was 52, so now you saying that OP hates her.

Constant monologues are normally a sign of a self-absorbed and self-centred person. OP probably dislikes her MIL because her MIL isn't likeable.

Bulldozing over a group of people to dominate the conversation with pointless bullshit - and not stopping when it's clear nobody wants to hear it - is also a form of bullying.

Some of the suggestions here are lovely and well meaning but clearly show the posters have never met someone like this!
They don't care whatever you say they'll just carry on regardless!

I thought I was quite polite actually.

I always feel sorry for posters who go to the trouble of starting threads, then some people don't seem to read them properly.

I don't understand all these posts saying 'poor MIL'. She sounds like an utter pain in the arse. My own mother can be a tiiinyyy bit like this. She isn't narcissistic and she means well, but she can talk over people. I don't let her get away with it. If we're in company and she starts talking over someone, I'll tell her 'let X finish, don't interrupt'. Some people might think I was being rude, but actually she has got better since I started speaking up.

As for all the 'maybe she's neurodivergent': I have two things to say. 1) You don't know whether she is or not. 2) It doesn't matter anyway, as being ND isn't an excuse for being rude and annoying. I am always astonished on here by how being ND is treated as a get out of jail free for all kinds of nonsense. If I were autistic or had ADHD, I would be utterly mortified to think that people were merely tolerating my presence out of kindness and charity and because they thought I didn't know any better and couldn't learn to behave appropriately in company. The expression 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' comes to mind.

She/ people like that must want to be part of the situation or conversation, but as their world is so small, they have nothing but old stories to regurgitate.

Does she maybe have adhd?? I thought i was relating to what people were saying by adding a similar story (I do wait until they're finished though) and have recently been told you are not supposed to do this? I had no idea. I would be able to take the hint though of I was interrupted or told that id already told them. Mum also does it but interrupts on the middle of a story I'm telling but I believe she also has adhd so just finish after she's told hers 😆

Haha that's a no , would have been funny to find my sil on here .

YANBU. My mother is the same.

She was abroad at the time my twins were born. It was before the era of free calls on what’sapp, so I had to spend £20 on a phone card to ring her from the hospital bed.

i think the phone card gave me precisely 6 minutes to call her. In that time, she asked zero questions about her two new premature grandchildren. In stead she told me stories of her own c-sections. I wasn’t asked how I was doing, just all prehistoric information from 30 odd years previously.

She also managed to not listen to the correct spelling of one of my
daughters names (nothing quirky, just a name with various different spellings). The wrong spelling was then shared widely amongst extended family, so came home to a pile of cards all with the wrong name on.

You sound nice. Not.

@nomas

I am nice actually. I don't treat family members with contempt because I find them tedious. I'm not catty or bitchy to my relatives, my colleagues or my friends. I treat people kindly. The OP doesn't.

You have not been kind to OP at all.

I wonder if people would be so hard on the OP if it were a FIL who was a monologuing bore, rather than a MIL. I can't tell for sure, but I'm betting that there would be a lot more support for her shutting him down than there has been for her shutting down her MIL.

@ExercicenformedeZ

"As for all the 'maybe she's neurodivergent': I have two things to say. 1) You don't know whether she is or not. 2) It doesn't matter anyway, as being ND isn't an excuse for being rude and annoying".

Actually it is. Autistic people, like the OP's MIL, are sometimes not effectively tuned in to the social needs and social communication of the people they're talking to, and this can make them seem rude and be irritating to others. That's why they're much, much more likely to be bullied at school and at work and to experience social isolation and loneliness.

"I am always astonished on here by how being ND is treated as a get out of jail free for all kinds of nonsense. If I were autistic or had ADHD, I would be utterly mortified to think that people were merely tolerating my presence out of kindness and charity and because they thought I didn't know any better and couldn't learn to behave appropriately in company. The expression 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' comes to mind."

So you expect autistic people not to show any signs of their faculty for social communication being impaired? You understand that autism involves a 'triad of impairments - impaired social interaction, impaired communication, and impaired imagination/flexible thinking? I have an autistic son and I would hope that decent, kind people would try to 'tolerate' the idiosyncracies of some of his social interactions. Unlike the OP, he's not intentionally 'rude' and he can't help being annoying sometimes. Oh, and if you were autistic you likely wouldn't be thinking about the fact that other people might just be tolerating you, because that requires 'theory of mind' and it's one of the capacities that many autistic people struggle with.

There's a difference between someone who is old and frail who repeats themselves and someone who is self centered and only wants to talk about themselves.

This has been going on for 22 years so it is not old age, and she has form for bringing every single conversation to make it about her, anything update about her grandkids she finds a way to make it about her, she is not repeating herself like a frail person, she is dominating the conversations to make it all about her and that is a very selfish.

Thank you, although I have a lot of gratitude for the lessons I learnt having such bad parents! She didn't 'groom' me to accept anything. As a child I literally had no choice, she was my sole care giver and until I was taken into care I was forced to live with her, I never thought it was acceptable behaviour, I was aware from a very young age that she was quite terrible. I only think she's my responsibility in a way that she is part of my life path whether I like or not. I could disown her, or make a scene or confront her every time she acts badly and lord knows over the years I've done both. As a well adjusted adult I have now learnt to accept that she is who she is and change will only be miniscule at this point in her life, I have set my boundaries and no longer need her as a mother, and therefore accepted the role we play in each others life. By choosing to keep her in my life I have by default assumed a responsibility to treat her with respect and decency and acceptance for her limitations, I don't want or need to change her anymore and personally I believe that brings us both peace.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about OP and her MIL.

There is zero proof MIL is ND, frail, elderly, etc.. The only information given is that MIL has form for this and OP has been dealing with it for 20+ years and got fed up with it when they were at her son’s graduation and she was hearing another story about MIL for the umpteenth time.

MIL was visibly upset and continued anyway as usual.

There are plenty of people who meet your definition that do not exhibit such behaviours. My own grandmothers were elderly and frail in their late 70s and never did this and also weren’t like this before.

MIL could be ND or simply likes the sound of her own voice. None of us knows, but it is a bit much and ridiculous to call OP a bully over it.

Limit contact with her. She won't change. Tell husband her behaviour really drains your energy and you must therefore limit interaction. Give everything a time limit. Don't invite her where possible. Plan in advance for every scenario where she's a bloody knob and prepare the response.

I wonder if getting up and walking off/ toilet break mid her talking could help. Or just don't even speak. Just say hmmm. And change the subject.

Sadly there are people like this, completely unaware of their impact on others. You telling them you've heard it before won't stop them.
My MIL rang one evening to say she enjoyed her holiday but was worried about the dog. I said that I thought she'd rung to ask about DH/her son, who was in the middle of 10-hour life-changing surgery. She said she'd forgotten (my translation: she was too self-absorbed to care).
I came to see it as quite sad because she was so damaged.