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My personality disordered MIL is an artist at giving insulting gifts. An absolute master. She likes to pretend she is very poor, although isn't, and she volunteered at a Catholic charity shop for used goods, so she would take home armloads of used crap donated from the homes of deceased elderly people and would give them as gifts, none of which was any use to anyone and was quietly donated elsewhere afterwards. But she also likes to give you weird things that are basically trash, not because she can't afford gifts, but just to get negative attention and make people upset.
Top tier personality disorder behaviour really.
My goodness, she sounds like a monster. Continue doing your best to protect the granddaughter please.
We're all estranged because I seriously cannot take this family. Thankfully granddaughter won't put up with it.
What an odd person.
She's so much worse too. Has called me by the wrong name for almost 30 years on purpose. Her one daughter for married when West Nile virus was a big thing, and had an outdoor wedding, and MIL wore a bush helmet with mosquito netting over top in all of the photos just to get attention. It's quite psychotic really..
I wonder why and how it comes that someone acts like that. Sure, be rude or whatever. But she seems borderline cruel for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for I assume her own entertainment.
Does one always act like that or does it come with time?
She had a childhood where she didn't have much but I don't think her family life was unhappy. We think she was institutionalized for mental illness in 1970 and dropped my SO into the care of his aunt and uncle. When she came to pick him up a year later he didn't remember her, of course, being a baby, and that was distressing for her and probably made him very detached from her, because those primal bonds are so important. She had a bad relationship with her husband but it seemed to be because she was continually provoking him when he actually was home, which wasn't hardly at all because of his job. Like I would not say she had it easy, but also that a lot of things end up the way they do for her because she enjoys what I call stick poking. She has done incredibly provocative things to provoke conflict between her children, for example not telling daughter #1 that daughter #2 was having an engagement party, but then ensuring to post photos on Facebook the very next day. Or she'd invite us over for dinner and then sit inside and talk to nobody while we prepared all the food on the barbecue and just sat around trying to figure out why we were there. She won't have a garbage can in her house and instead walks it all over to the park trash can, which to me is insane.
I'm honestly not sure you could even diagnose her with anything really, she seems to like upsetting people and making them fight and it gives her pure pleasure to do that. I've never seen her smile except when she got a rise out of someone, which makes her smile like it's her birthday. Like it's an abnormal way of being in the world, but it doesn't seem to be from trauma or being neurodivergent, she just really likes to seem to be an asshole as much as possible because she likes it. That's my take on her. It's just what she likes to do.
Hahaha my god you should make a collage out of those photos of her, I'd love to see these.
Also, sorry for what you went through. My birth mother is a narcissist, so I can relate. It can be quite liberating to have fun at their expense, though!
Unfortunately I don't have them. But they were hilarious. Sorry about your birth mom.