A bit of background. I moved abroad to my DH country several years ago to be with him. I have a difficult relationship with his family to say the least. Nothing outrightly nasty has happened but we're completely different kinds of people (they're all a lot older, very old school and traditional and of course there's the culture and language differences) I can understand and speak their language but by no means am I fluent. They all know English but prefer not to speak to me in English. In their culture it's common for all the family to meet up at least every weekend. At first I went along with this but because they are all very interfering too, and need to know exactly everything what's going on in our life and need to have some sort of control over the decisions DH makes, I stopped going all the time. Now I see them once or twice a month which is enough for me. This did cause a lot of trouble at the start but I stood firm with my decision (I realised I needed to establish boundaries to protect myself). I've never tried to stop DH seeing his family. He visits his parents at least 2 or 3 times a week and they speak on the phone all the time. It upsets me that they treat him like a 40 year old baby, constantly mollycoddling him, but I've accepted this somewhat. Anyway, I dread family meet ups. Tonight we went. It was the PIL, SIL and BIL. I'm about to have major surgery in a couple of weeks.the whole evening they spoke to my DH in their native tongue about my condition, asking question after question. Not once did anyone even address me. I sat there- as usual- like a small fucking child without saying anything until I snapped and said enough, stop talking about me. I understand everything you're saying and I don't want you talking about this. It's my business. I'm so fed up. We left shortly afterwards and now DH isn't speaking to me. I really wonder sometimes how I ended up here. Any advice or nice words of encouragement? I'm in the Middle East by the way, my family in the UK.