I know you guys often say "BE THE BH" however, I don't feel as though it is solving anything. I know you also say to address things in the moment, however, over the weekend we were together with SIL specifically for ODS's birthday (as opposed to a family get together), she was the one driving (I asked DH if we could drive separate... he said no or that he preferred not to, which I understand because parking was expensive but OSIL got a discount because of a membership to the place we were going)
After having a HORRIBLE time out with SIL where I basically felt yelled at and scorned all day, she sent me a pleasant email for Mother's Day, "wishing me the best". I didn't respond, because, BH. But I see it as an attempt to rug sweep. I can't rug sweep her behavior cause it KEEPS happening. She keeps acting like a know-it-all, I'm your authority, pain in the ass SIL every time we spend time with her. And she's only like 18 months older than DH and he's only 6 months older than me, so while she does have 2 years on me, that's not much in the grand scheme of things.
It was basically death by a thousand paper cuts, but moreso the tone she was using.
-Saying that I'm wrong about the way MY OWN DEBIT CARD works (she said she can't believe the bank charges me if I use it as debit, I said I don't care about that cause I can just use it as credit. She said she doesn't like that cause then it's credit so you could overspend. I said it doesn't work that way. It comes straight out of my account. She said it can't cause it's credit. That's when my tone got forceful and I said I know how it works, it's my bank account, I don't get a bill every month, I monitor the charges. They do indeed come out automatically, it's not possible to overspend and I've had this bank account for years and think I know by now how it works. Then she got quiet)
-General arguing over if DH and I should get a membership to the museum we were visiting. If we didn't, we could use her guest passes for the day. I said to DH that I was concerned about getting a membership because we've done memberships at other places before and it didn't pay out if our schedules got too busy to go to said place enough times. I said I'd rather him use the guest passes now and we could decide on a membership later. She started to act basically like a sales rep from the museum, telling him all the reasons why he needed a membership, and ultimately he ended up purchasing one. Granted, we will probably use it enough for it to pay for itself, but I saw this as a huge overstep and like my opinion didn't matter
-Like I said before, I had mentioned us driving separate. One of the reasons was because I needed to go to a certain store to do a return. She agreed to take me to do the return so we could ride together. When we approached the store, she said in front of everyone "if you could NOT SHOP, that would be great" which I found INCREDIBLY rude. I don't have anything close to a shopping problem and she herself wasted a lot of time doing other meaningless activities during the day so if she's just complaining that she would have to sit uninterested while waiting for me, well the shoe would be on the other foot in this case, now wouldn't it.
This is only a small handful of the unpleasantries of the day. But basically, I feel like the BH isn't working because she clearly hasn't changed her behavior. I didn't say anything right then cause I wanted to play nice cause we were going out for ODS's birthday, and also her two kids were around as well as my YDS. She's already on LC on Facebook. So my options are to continue doing what's not working.... or send her an email saying EXACTLY how I feel. Which would be difficult but it might work.
What do you think? I mean she had me in tears when I got home that night.