Should I give him another chance or not?

This is really long so buckle up, really hoping I get some good perspectives on how to proceed.

So we are currently separated but both have been hoping for reconciliation. We did couples therapy for about 6 months but he insisted the entire time that I was the problem in our relationship, was jealous of the special bond him and his mother shared and hated her for no real reason. To him, she was always nice to me and therefore her overstepping and undermining of me and our relationship was just her flawed personality. She told him (privately) that she loved me and that she thought I was a great mother so any issues I had were my own and not her fault. We have two young kids (both under 5) together and have been mostly coparenting well.

I finally left after we had a terrible couples therapy session and I was barely holding myself together when he video called with his mum in our space without warning. I had had enough and we separated with me moving out a couple of weeks later.

Here is a summary of how she treated me/us throughout our relationship:

• Always calling him with her problems. Financial, emotional, health, friendships, relationships etc. Day and night, waking us up even when we had a newborn baby.
• She was extremely invasive with medical information especially when I was pregnant wanting to know the dates and times of any appointments. She would then start texting at the appointment time asking how it was going and expect a full run down of what happened including details of how much I weighed etc.
• We (SO and I) decided that no one would see our first born without the COVID vaccine until he was six months old. He was born very small (but fullterm) and spent some time in the NICU. MIL is antivax and refused the vaccine. She cried to him repeatedly until he gave in citing that she just knew it wasn’t good for her body and he declared that she would quarantine and see the baby once we were ready for visitors. She didn’t even quarantine properly but that’s a rant for another time.
• She constantly tells me how to parent and if I disagree with her stance then she will do it anyway. This is actually minor things but over time it really affected me as she was repeatedly implying I am a bad parent. (Imagine putting gloves on a child when I specifically say they don’t need them, or demonstrating feeding a baby with a spoon when I explained baby led weaning).
• She knew it was important to me to be around for firsts yet she chose the first time she saw the kids without me to paint with them. I’ve never seen my second born childs first painting and I am treated like a psycho for caring about it.
• This woman claims to have a nut allergy but never mentions it in a restaurant. When I cook for her she scrutinizes every ingredient and refuses to let me use things like nutmeg because ‘nut’ is in the name. Even when I go through all the motions she always eats the tiniest portion, her face says she doesn’t like it but she always tells her son she loved it.
• The biggest issue for me was her calling on my late brothers birthday claiming she was going to die in her sleep and she HAD to come and stay with us. She wouldn’t drive herself so SO drove to pick her in when it was snowing heavily (nearly 2 hour round trip) and we were sleep deprived because our then 6 month old was sleeping in one hour stints. When I asked SO how long he planned for his mother to stay he acted like I’d asked him to cut off her leg and hurled all sorts of abuse at me. This was the event that led us to couples therapy, at last.

These are just a handful of events, I could write a book on all the wild things she has said to me and done over the years.

Around the time of our separation we both started individual therapy and my therapist was our couples therapist, I fell into a deep depression, couldn’t eat or sleep, lost a worrying amount of weight. I repeatedly begged him to take me back but he refused and said he needed space.

Now we’re six months down the line and things have been great between us. He realised quite soon after I left that she had an emotional attachment to him because she was calling him several times a day including to tell him she was going to bed. He has taken some space from her and she didn’t see the kids or him for a few months, she had an open invite to visit him and the kids but she didn’t want to. This is 100% her MO, she was waiting him out to see if he’d cave and bring the kids to her like always. Well now she’s seeing the kids again like nothing happened and I feel weird about it, not sure how to explain it but it makes me uncomfortable.

But here’s the kicker. Even though he realises now that he had no empathy for me and how hard it was with her relying on him and taking time and energy from us, he thinks that is on us a couple. Not his mother for doing that or him for him allowing it. He says he has explored enmeshment and he is not that. He says things will be different moving forward and he has apologized for all the stuff I went through because of their ‘special bond’. But for him that is the end of it. I would like to see him hold her accountable for her actions before we move forward with reconciliation but he disagrees saying that she always has good intentions and therefore we should just move forward in a new way.

In his defense, towards the end of our relationship when he saw her undermine me (taking our child from my arms without asking for example) he would call her out and correct it. I believe he has grown a lot in that department but I’m not sure if I trust enough that she will be held at arms length and not be allowed to interfere in our relationship again.