I love my parents, and they have helped me a lot with certain things (loaned me and my SO money so we could buy our house), so I don't want to paint either of them as uncaring or anything, but since my LO was born almost a year ago, I can barely stand to be around them.
I've been struggling with depression, anxiety, and ADHD since my early teens. Through medication and occasional therapy, I've managed to get my conditions mostly under control; however, I developed post-partum depression after my LO and I am just now starting to feel "normal" again. In those months that I was severely depressed, my house got rather messy. Even disgusting in some areas, but mostly just cluttered. On top of the depression and taking care of the baby, I work part-time and am attending graduate school full-time. So I don't have a lot of free time for cleaning even when I'm in the right emotional mindset.
My mother is horrid about it. She tells me all the time that CYS will take my LO away because of my house and constantly demands that I clean it; however, whenever I try to clean, she wants me to go somewhere with her or come up to visit and gets really angry when I tell her I can't. How am I supposed to clean when she is constantly demanding my free time?
She also makes tons of comments about how I raise my LO. I stick to my pediatrician's advice for the most part, and she constantly tells me I'm being ridiculous or that I'm wrong. I told her when LO was under 3 mos that I didn't want to give her any sort of medications unless absolutely necessary. I found out that she was giving her Mylecon ALL THE TIME while she was watching her. Like, LO would start to fuss and she'd immediately give it to her without even ruling out other things. When I confronted her about it, she got all defensive and said there was nothing in Mylecon that would hurt LO. Be that as it may, I didn't want to give her medicine all the time because I didn't want her to become dependent on it for the slightest little tummy gurgle.
She criticizes my mothering all the time, but my oldest sister was the crappiest mom on the planet, and my mother never said a word to her. Her house was seriously gross, like 20x worse than mine. She left her kids at my mom's house all day, every day, so it's not like she didn't have time to herself to do her cleaning. She let them all get morbidly obese because she fed them fast food all the time (my oldest niece is 17 now, is about 5 foot 3, and weighs 320 lbs.) She used to take their prescription ADHD medication and not give it to them because it helped her lose weight. She "homeschools" her kids but doesn't feel like actually teaching them, so she just fills in the answers from the teacher's manual and turns it in (my 12yo nephew can barely read). But I'm clearly the bad parent in this family.
She also is very belittling of my academic accomplishments. I am working on my MA in Creative Writing and have already been offered full funding from a school to continue on for an MA in Literature and Cultural Studies. I have had my poetry and short stories published in several literary journals and have been asked to present my work at a few readings. But since I decided to pursue English instead of Chemistry like two of my older sisters, my accomplishments don't mean as much as theirs. She never even mentions me. If she sees someone she knows in the store, she will spend twenty minutes or so praising my sisters, but she never even brings me up. My one niece told me that she never mentions me at home either unless I've done something wrong. My one sister makes comments about how English isn't even a real major, right in front of me, and my mother agrees with her. My mom tells me all the time that I need to go back to school for a real degree, like Education or Psychology. It is very disheartening and it makes me feel like a failure.
Also, I'm still struggling with post-baby belly, I am heavier now than I have ever been in my life and I'm not overly obsessed with it, but it does bother me. I walked in for a visit a few weeks ago and she said to me, "Wow, you're getting really heavy. You need to go on a diet." Again, this doesn't make me feel very good about myself.
I don't know what to do. I really can't take much more of this, and I'd honestly just do a very long TO if I could, but my mother watches my LO two days a week while I work, and I can't afford a babysitter (money is tight at the moment since we will be relocating next year because of my schooling.) What should I do about this? Every time I try to tell her how I feel, she brushes me off or gets mad at me.