UPDATE: mil threatened me
I (21F) and my MIL (41F) have had a decent relationship for the past three years, but that all changed when she got hospitalized. For some context, my MIL has two chronic illnesses that cause her to be hospitalized from time to time. This time, though, it was bad. Her drain tube had gotten infected, and she had become borderline septic. She was in the hospital for a week.
Before that week, I had been watching all five of her kids plus my two, so I had seven kids to take care of while she couldn’t. I was more than happy to help because I love her kids like they’re my own. Anyway, after helping watch the kids for two weeks, they all ended up getting sick too, and we were doing our best to help them get better before she got home.
On the day she was discharged, I got a long paragraph from her telling me what to do and how to make the kids feel better, and that was all I got from her the whole time she was in the hospital—not a single thank you. What was weird to me was how obsessed she was with the fact that my boyfriend wasn’t calling or texting her every day while she was in the hospital. She even had his dad get onto him and tell him he needed to call his mom, even though he works 13-hour shifts and, when he gets home, he’s exhausted and just wants to relax.
The day she was discharged was fine, but the day after was awful. My boyfriend was off work, and we were play fighting. He looked at me with a big smile on his face and jokingly said, “You hit me, you abuse me,” which is not funny to joke about. I told him, “That’s not funny. What if someone heard you say that? They’d get the wrong idea.”
We stopped play fighting because I had to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, my MIL was getting something to drink. I told her what had happened, and she made a comment or two about how, if he ever laid a finger on me, I better tell her. But then she looked me dead in the eyes and said that if I ever laid a finger on her son “in the wrong way,” she would tell his dad and have him deal with me because she was too weak to do it herself.
After that, she gave a little giggle and went on with her day like nothing had happened, and now I don’t know what to do after that.