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I know this is the old post, but maybe what I have to add will help.
My MIL is an altruistic narcissist masquerading as a borderline personality. She was also enmeshed with her son and grandson; they were not so enmeshed back, but suffer fallout of varying degrees (my stepson is worse, because his mom is also personality disordered).
Examples:
One of the first stories she shared with me was how she called a University hospital in another state, managing to convince them to write off the cost of cancer treatment for a friend’s wife. For this 15 minute effort, she thought he should have replaced all of her aging landscaping (the friend owns a nursery). She was disappointed when after three years of free Christmas trees and other nice things, he started charging her again.She paid half of the private school tuition for the school she pressured my husband to send his son to. Because of that, she believed she should have parental-level involvement at the school and with the teachers, and had the RIGHT to be involved in EVERY decision regarding the boy. (This is not an exaggeration.) If my husband was making a decision she disagreed with, she would call/text him up to 12x/day (conveniently forgetting about the last contact, acting as though it was the first time) to pressure him towards whatever decision she wanted. After days or weeks of this, he would wear down and give in – partially or entirely – just to make her stop.
She schmoozed her way into being an aide at the school, only to do a series of actions that can only have been intended to further isolate my stepson from his peers, beyond being the “new kid” in a fairly closed atmosphere. If he was isolated, she could keep control had keep all his attention to herself.
To encourage my husband’s to divorce the ex, she offered after-school care. Only after the divorce was finalized did she guilt him into taking her out to dinner on the weekday evenings the kid was with the ex (three evenings over each two week period). Sounds mundane, doesn’t it…? Consider that this was a single man who had spent seven years in a miserable marriage with a personality-disordered woman, and these evenings would have been prime opportunities for him to start dating again, but she ate up that time AND made him spend the money he might have used towards those dates on her instead. He had one Saturday night, every two weeks to use for dating because of this. Had we not already been friends with similar interests and both having work schedules that allowed us to meet up for lunchtime and Sunday outings, I doubt we would have ever been a “thing”, and that began years after his divorce (though he had used that time to heal from the ex and much of the known damage his mom had caused which lead him into that relationship in the first place).
When my husband divorced his ex, his mom took a second mortgage out on her house to “help” him get custody so he could hire the best attorney, “to make sure he would have a good relationship with his son”… nevermind the guardian ad litum all but insisted on him getting custody because his ex couldn’t help herself to not badmouth him in front of the kid. Remember how she was so concerned about her son having a good relationship with his son? Well she used every opportunity alone with her grandson to tell him bad things about his father – to tell him how his dad is mean (because he pushes back when she would cross his boundaries), that he overreacts, how she disagreed with decisions he made (regarding him, her grandson), or would do things different if they were her decisions to make, or that his dad “didn’t know how to be a dad, because he never had a dad” (despite that being patently false and the kid knowing his dad’s dad). She told the kid every time she had a disagreement with his dad (and ultimately me), because “she has a right to talk about how she is feeling” (but really, she would never miss an opportunity to look like the victim, at the expense of making other adults in the kid’s life look like ogres, undermining all trust.
In short, she used my husband to get the access she wanted to the kid, then used her time alone to undermine the kid’s relationship with his parents – mostly with his dad – all while my husband faithfully paid back the loan that she told everyone who would stand still long enough to hear how she “generously” took out for him so he would have a good relationship with his son. Undoubtably she believed the ex’s propensity to badmouth my husband to the kid was enough cover for her to hide behind when the SHTF as a teenager. Yes, this caused the predictable issues one would expect when my stepson entered high school. Thank God for the completely awesome therapist we found for him who has managed to undo most of the effects of this extreme parental alienation in what has to be record time!)
Shortly before we all went no-contact, she spiraled out of control. This started after my husband proposed to me (holy cr*p, was she shocked he didn’t tell her before he proposed, despite him being nearly 50 years old, and though clearly he had good reason not to).
On one memorable day, she inexplicably declared that she was her grandson’s “third family” because of the time he spent with her after school. When I asked her if she didn’t feel like an honored extended member of her son’s and grandson’s family, she answered “no”. This followed her telling my husband that he shouldn’t expect his 12 year old son to turn in his homework (because, hormones. Lol), and can’t punish him when he doesn’t do it. Some of this was designed to get a reaction out of me (to make me look reactive and mean, because her lack of respect for my husband as a father and an autonomous adult had been a trigger point in the past, but I believe it also belied her true positions on the topics).
So now that she had declared she was direct competition to my husband’s role as a parent, he started pulling back his control. First change, an age appropriate decision that he would start taking the bus home the next year (this was March/April of the school year) instead of going to her house. To counter and keep the kid coming to her house, she offered to buy the kid a gaming console – he turned her down, but she did it anyway (and then predictably tried to use it as a pressure point to guilt the kid for not coming over to play it after we went NC). She also offered to get him a Pug (his favorite breed of dog) to keep at her house. He was really excited about this until I asked him to find out what her expectations were regarding it. When he looked confused, I asked him if he thought she might expect him to go over there every day to feed/walk it… he understood immediately what she was really up to and that was the end of it.
This was her M.O. – do something nice for someone, and use the owed favor to demand something she knew no sane person would do/give of their own free will, but drop that shoe only AFTER they had accepted something nice from her.
I saw this immediately, but I’m from a reasonably healthy family, so I stayed as far away from her as I could. I even told my husband after my first solo convo with her that I wouldn’t be spending any more time alone with her because she spoke really poorly about people behind their backs, even while showing those same people great affection to their faces.
I also refused to accept any sort of favor from her, which confounded her to no end because she had no leverage to use on me. And… after six years in a relationship with a narcissist prior to reconnecting with her son, I had learned to control negative emotions like pity and guilt, so she wasn’t able to use those against me either.
I could go on and on, but this should paint an accurate enough image.
Thanks for giving me a place to vent and let this go.
AB