Thinking about you, angelico. My tricky MIL has surprised us all by being very well-behaved, but still very sorry about yours...
Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - these things are wholly one-sided. In your shoes I'd be making myself frantic trying to work out if I was the nuts one - in your case, it seems unlikely.
Whatever is going on with your mum is probably bigger and deeper than youand your baby. If she can't articulate/recognise what's really troubling her, it's unlikely that you will - and even if you can make a good guess, your odds of convincing her are very low. I've recently seen this play out between my mum and her sister, who was bereaved long ago and probably never came to terms with it. She also, we now think, never came to grips with my sister's sudden death, and six years on, projected a bunch of unrecognisable 'she's not coping' type attributes on my mum, resulting in anger, bewilderment, gossip, resentment, the works. (Trying to stay objective, outside observers think Mum has done a superb job coping - to this day its not uncommon for people to stop her in the street and tell her so.) (It was a well-known incident in our hometown.)
Point being, my mum eventually (and with great difficulty) came to the conclusion that if her aunt couldn't recognise her own craziness - which she couldn't, the roots were likely in the first bereavement about 30 years back - then mum would not be able to convince her she was being crazy. My aunt had a lot invested in 'not being crazy' and just as much invested in '(my mum) being crazy', so trying to convince her otherwise on both counts - especially coming from the 'crazy' one (my mum) - was never going to fly.
So my mum targeted the behaviour and only the behaviour. The specific actions she took were:
- Refusing to talk to my aunt on any 'trigger' type issues
- Talking directly to the people in the gossip circle about what specific things had Ben said that either weren't true or that made her angry, and why
- A couple of symbolic gestures to make it absolutely clear that this is Serious (she's not going to Christmas at my aunt's house for the first time in living memory)
- accepting her own anger and working bloody hard (it is hard) to accept that she will never get recognition for the bad behaviour from the perpetrator, not because the perpetrator is bad or wicked, but because the perpetrator actually does not have the capacity to recognise that the behaviour was bad.
It's thin milk, I know, but maybe a scrap or two might be useful. FWIW, they're talking again, and the folk who got sucked into the gossip circle are chastened and chagrined.
Hey
squid, you're all about cosleeping - my bub is in a Moses basket, but it's lovely to hoik him out to lie next to me for his nighttime feeds. What are your top tips for doing this safely?