u/Sweet_Friend3071

I need to vent a little too.

My mother-in-law has a passive-aggressive personality. My husband, his brother, and his stepsisters have all had the same experience with her in the past: she would always get offended, stop talking to them for months, and then act like nothing happened. Sometimes, eventually, she would reveal what the problem actually was (and most of the time it was something completely ridiculous).
Now my mother-in-law hasn’t spoken to us for a year. She only wrote to me when I invited her to our house last autumn, saying: “I only go where I feel good.” When I asked her whether that meant she didn’t feel good at our place, she replied: “No comment.”
My husband tells me not to poke at it, that she has always been like this and there is absolutely no point in trying to resolve it. He says it could literally have been something as small as someone looking at her the wrong way and her taking it personally.
But it pisses me off. A lot.
Our son asks about her. He’s at an age where he actually remembers her now, and what am I supposed to tell him? “Grandma has too much work”? For a whole year?
I even invited her to our son’s birthday party, despite her passive-aggressive response before that.
Her answer? “Too bad, I already have plans.”
That was the point where my husband got angry and wrote her a very polite message saying that we genuinely don’t know what is going on, and that she needs to handle it like an adult and either tell us what the issue is or stop responding aggressively to me as well.
Since then, nothing.
And it honestly makes me so angry, because at a time when I am completely overwhelmed and exhausted (we have two small children, both of us work, and I’m also finishing my university degree on top of that), any help would mean a lot. The only people helping are my mum and my sister-in-law, and they are really doing everything they can. Meanwhile, she decides to get offended over some stupid nonsense and behaves like a fifteen-year-old brat.
Both of our fathers are dead, so the only person who can really help is my mum. But she is already overwhelmed herself, because besides our kids she also helps with my sister’s children. I don’t want to put more on her, but sometimes I’m so exhausted that I feel like I’m climbing the walls. And then the anger toward my mother-in-law hits me so hard — that she is such an easily offended bitch and that at the exact time when we need support the most, she chooses to behave like this.
Sorry for the vent, but I think I just needed to get it out. It has been eating me again for the past few days.
I should also add that in the twelve years my husband and I have been together, she treated me completely normally for years and we never had a problem. And I regularly heard from people around me that she was a bitch, but I always thought, “I won’t believe it until I experience it myself.” Well… here we are. 😅