Mother-in-Law HELL

First of all, I am so glad to find this site. Every time I complain about my MIL to my friends or coworkers my stories are too crazy for them to believe. If I don’t watch out I’ll end up writing a novel on here so I am going to try and keep it short and to the point:
-My evil MIL started off as an evil mother. My husband says all growing up she was a single mom with a master’s degree but refused to work so her 2 boys lived in poverty, so poor that most of the time they did not have food to eat. Instead of working she went out and tried to be a famous singer, is still convinced she is going to be a rich and famous singer someday even though she is not talented or attractive or even tolerable as a human being, and is also way too old to dress like she is Brittany Spears. She never cooked or cleaned a day in her life, and was too busy going out with men to ever be home for them. She now lives with a guy who has a decent job and has convinced him that he must pay for everything because she needs to focus on her music. All she does is sings at karaoke bars and she is really not even good at it; she doesn’t even get paid or asked to do this. She sits around all day while her husband works his *** off for her and takes “sexy” pictures of herself to put on her myspace music page.
She never had any money while her boys were little so now she brags about it and constantly calls me “spoiled” just because I came from a family with both parents working.
My BIL was diagnosed with a disease that is like Parkinson’s but a lot worse which is going to cause a very early death and require constant help from the whole family and what does she do? She moves 5 hours away “to follow her dreams” and calls constantly to complain that I am folding my BIL’s shirts “wrong” or I am cooking his food “wrong” or that I don’t do enough for him. I want to say, “If what I’m doing is not good enough, why don’t you move back and help? He’s YOUR son!”
She told my husband that me and him can never have children because they will end up like his brother, lying that his condition is somehow genetic, just because she doesn’t want us to be happy. I don’t *think* he believes her but she is so convincing that she could make anyone believe anything, and at the moment he is afraid to have children, and she thinks she knows more than the doctors.
Every time she is around for more than five minutes she causes a screaming argument, with slamming doors and crying and everything, it doesn’t even matter who it’s with, or if she even knows them, she just LOVES to argue. She can’t help herself. And she brags about how she loves to argue and how she is always right about everything. As soon as she walks in the door she starts this interrogation session where you can’t answer her questions fast enough and she tries to make you fumble your words so she can catch you in a “lie” somehow. It can be about anything, really. She can start off asking me if the ants are bad this summer and turn that around to mean that I am a horrible house cleaner (and wife) because I must have been a spoiled child who never had to do anything for myself. She can start off asking me if my heat bill is high and make it seem like I am wasteful and forgetful (and a bad wife) because I just “had everything handed to me on a silver platter.”
It gets worse. I made a huge mistake:
One days she calls and cries and makes a scene about my BIL and how she wants to help him more because we aren’t good enough at it. She convinces us to get a bigger house so she can have a room there, and come visit every month, and promises to pay part of the rent (because we can’t afford a bigger house, and don’t have a need for one, and were perfectly happy where we were before). She said she didn’t want to interfere with our lives and would be gone to my BIL’s house the whole time she was here. This was before I knew her very well, so I agreed to it, thinking it would be good to get some help, and nice to have a bigger house.
When we signed the lease, she insisted on signing it too, for whatever reason, even though it was my understanding she would just be an occasional house guest. While I went to use the bathroom I heard her trying to convince my husband to ban me from signing the lease, since I “probably have bad rental history and it would be a bad move.” I have perfect rental history.
When we go to move in she insists that I am “not as strong of a woman” as she is and doesn’t let me lift anything just so she can complain about it to her family and friends that I am lazy.
Although she says she just wants a room to stay in, and will never be here, she moves so much stuff in to our house that we can’t fit any of our stuff in, and we have to throw a lot of it away. She has her own house hours away so I don’t even know where she got it all from. She filled the basement up with useless junk that she purchased at yard sales and thrift stores in the 80’s, things like a teddy bear clock, just trinkets, but enough to fill the entire basement (and it’s a huge basement). She even filled one room up with garbage. She said it was stuff she was meaning to recycle but that was too big to fit into the recycle bin. When I commented that most of it was styrofoam, she snapped, “Well, I am sure that ONE day they’ll find a way to recycle styrofoam, and I just can’t BELIEVE you can sleep at night knowing you are so wasteful and lazy and uncaring of our environment.”
*Just a note: it has been 7 months and she hasn’t touched any of that garbage. Once I threw away a couple things and she somehow knew it was gone and caused a huge fight over it, even though it was all garbage.
She began to be very controlling of the way the house was decorated. She decorated it however she wanted by putting up decorations from the 80’s and from flea markets and just generally things of very bad taste. She had an entire wall full of pictures of teddy bears cut out from magazines. Not even posters or painting, just sloppy cut-outs. I was embarrassed to have my new house I just moved in to to look this way. I began to think she was playing a really mean joke. Every time my husband or I disagreed it led to a screaming argument until we had to give in. She threatened to lie about us to the landlord and get us kicked out (it was Christmas). All the arguments led to her crying to my husband about “Oh wah, I am your mother and that girl thinks she’s so much better and just thinks I’m trashy and not good enough.” So we just began to tolerate the pink painted walls in every room and the scary baby dolls everywhere.
She decides that her furniture is better than ours. In some way all of her furniture is way prettier and of better quality. We argue and argue and to no avail because we had spent our last dime on this place and had nowhere to go. The only reason she wants to use her furniture is so she can inspect it for any tiny scratches or spills or marks and cause a huge fight about it. My husband told me to tough it out because she would go back home soon and we wouldn’t see her for months and when she finally left we could change everything the way we wanted it.
Well, she finally left back home, but used this house as an excuse to call every day. When my husband and I were having sex, she would call and ask about the keys. When we were on a date, she would call and ask about the bills. It never stopped. She wanted to control everything about this house. Like one house wasn’t enough for her, so she had to control two.
A few months later, she calls and says she’s not paying anything anymore. She doesn’t want to help out with BIL because she’s too busy with her music. What? We don’t have enough money to pay for this place and have signed the lease for a year. Now we are both working two jobs and we still can’t afford it. She ends up paying the cable bill only, even though we don’t watch tv. Even though she’s not paying rent, she won’t move her stuff. Every time we try to tell her to move her stuff she makes an anonymous call to the landlord that we are doing something horrible, like having crazy sex parties or catching the place on fire. She comes up every couple months and stays here and starts a fight about everything we have changed in the house. She says since her name is on the lease she has an equal say.
For example, she tries to make me put all the food in a tupperware container in the fridge instead of in the garbage. Then to take it outside and throw it in the yard. I think that is absolutely insane. She thinks there is no such thing as a garbage can because EVERYTHING should be reused or recycled. Like if there is one single piece of corn in the sink, she wants us to put it in the container. It’s so much work. And I don’t want to put the rotted food in the yard. If we don’t do this she says the house is going to have roaches and that her name is on the lease and she’ll get sued. She calls the landlord and then lies and tells him we have roaches because we leave food laying everywhere and never clean up our filth. She tries to make us do laundry in a weird way. She wants us to turn it on the wash cycle and let it spin for a while before we put the clothes in, so that we can “save” on the detergent and only put 1/4 the amount of detergent required. She wants us to put only a couple of articles of clothing at a time and do a million loads of laundry. If we don’t she says that we are going to break the washing machine. Then she calls the landlord and tells him we are breaking the washing machine by shoving it full of clothes and pouring half a gallon of detergent in.
She saves everything and junks up the house. If she buys a box of cereal and I throw the box in the recycle bin, she accuses me of being wasteful. She wants us to save it because we can somehow find a use for it later.
She wants to not use the heat in the winter. She says we should just wear our coats inside and “tough it out” like she always does. Heat or cold, she is extremely volatile if we use the thermostat.
She is always accusing me of gaining weight. I haven’t gained any weight but every time I eat she tries to warn me that I’m getting fat and tries to warn my husband that I’m tricking him into marrying a pretty girl who is going to turn ugly and lazy and fat. Every time I eat she thinks I’m eating too much. Every time I buy a new article of clothing she tries to say it is because I’m wasteful and also because my old clothes don’t fit anymore because of my fatness.
She has turned BIL against me, telling him that she can’t stand me and that’s why she can’t come and help him up here, because I’m mean to her. She babies BIL constantly and has him very brainwashed. She convinces him that SHE is the one who takes care of him and that me and my husband are worthless and selfish. I have been taking care of him for years and he actually believes this crap. She even convinces him to mess up his house and pee and poop on himself to make it harder for us when we come over to clean up. We only put up with all this because if we leave him then he will end up in a nursing home. I feel like moving a million miles away, but I can’t because BIL is here and won’t move. We can’t abandon him.
I am really learning to be assertive lately, because of a promotion at work, and I am learning to stand up for myself. She is in town today, and I am considering throwing all of her stuff into the yard or setting it on fire. Last night when she got in she noticed I had painted the living room, and caused a huge scene about how her name is on the lease and she’s going to get sued, blah, same old story. I told her that we were working very hard to get her name off the lease. That put her in a state of shock. Then she started to freak out and was like, “No, no, my name HAS to be on the lease at least for the next six months. Because if I break the lease it will ruin my credit.” and I said, “No, since we are both still going to live here it would be impossible for that to happen. Because WE aren’t breaking the lease. And I don’t see why you care so much about this place since WE are the ones who live here. It’s really our house and not yours.” The conversation went on and on and she outright refused to ever take her name off the lease. She even “accidentally” bumped into the paint can and spilled it all over a picture of MY mother that is irreplaceable. She has sucked up to the landlord and became so buddy-buddy with him that if I were to explain my situation to him he’d call the mental institution on me. If I could only save up enough money to move out I’d do it. But I’m too busy working so much to pay for this place. It’s like, she just wanted to cause stress and unhappiness in our relationship and she totally succeeded. I told my husband last night to get her out of my life or I’m leaving. And I mean it, completely. People only treat you the way you allow them to treat you, and I will stand for it no more.
I am in utter disbelief of this devil woman.