am i exaggerating?
this isn't a dig at my MIL, i don't think she does any of this maliciously but it's starting to get all too much it's making me start to resent her a little.
it started off in my pregnancy, she would often compare me to her niece who had had a baby the year before. sometimes it seemed like it was harmless statements such as "you know, my niece said such and such happened in her pregnancy", "you're bleeding? my niece said this and this" or "my niece experienced..." it wasn't the point of her mentioning her niece, it was the constant comparisons of whenever i had a doubt or something came up that i was either preoccupied with, or figuring out, she would run to her niece and bombard me with unsolicited advice, most of which, i didn't agree with.
my partner and i didn't live together, and since LO was born, he has been living with me, but it's also partly due to the fact that when i was pregnant she decided to change housing to a one bedroom flat and told him that him and i needed to figure ourselves out, which i think was a bit thoughtless of her, considering the pandemic has made it hard to find housing suddenly and i was also on a temporary work contract, so once baby was born, i wasn't eligible for maternity leave and would have to leave my job. it made moving out super difficult and she just pretty much kicked him out.
but now we live with my parents, and she often mentions, more so complains at how little she sees her grandson in comparison to my parents. she didn't even consider the option of us moving in with them for a short while and now she sends explicit messages stating that we have "shoved her to one side"
she really never comes over, even though i am home alone with DS, every day, but she expects us to go over to hers regularly. my partner is off work on the weekends, but just like his mother is only available on the weekends, other family members are too, so we go for dinner every saturday night, yet she often complains that's not enough and then makes comments about how lucky my parents are and how we take away from her.
but what has really started picking at me is the comments she makes about how i raise my baby. how i don't feed him enough. he's a 9 week old who weighed 5.5kg at 8 weeks, being born 2.8 at 37 weeks, which is a good amount of weight gain. she mentioned my breast milk was "weak" and not "feeding my baby enough" which often led me to doubting myself and sadly, which i regret, i don't breastfeed anymore as i started to question if my baby was actually getting enough nutrients.
i changed milk several times to suit her satisfaction because every formula i tried wasn't right. but i've had enough. she often challenges me with wanting to increase the formula dosage to make the milk "stronger" and advising me to not follow formula instructions. not to mention she constantly tries to get me to feed him even when he just sucks harder on a dummy 30 mins after a feed. she then tried to shove her finger into his mouth to prove he's hungry as he sucks as if a dummy and tries to prove he's hungry arguing with me, making it seem as though i'm denying my baby food.
but what really irritated me most was her disregarding the fact that i had said from early on i did not want DS on a dummy until later, and she went and gave him a dummy against my will.
am i exaggerating for the fact that it's getting to the point that i can't stand her? there's so much more i can talk about, but i think you get the gist of it.