JNMom and JN family are wearing me down.

I don’t know what it is about the holiday season that evokes such erratic behavior out of mine and my husband’s family, but lately it’s been bad. I’m literally planning a therapy appointment because I’m so sick to death about feeling this way all the time.

I’m one of those people with high walls because I have a lot of trouble trusting others. My own family included. My mom has landed herself firmly in the JN category and slowly creeped out and gained my trust back when I had children, and is now firmly gridlocked in JN territory.

I’m tired of laying out boundaries to have them stomped all over. I’m tired of having basic expectations for hanging out with me or my children to have those ignored or even made fun of.

This Easter holiday my mother tried telling me that she thought I was going to get physical with her because I went out to her vehicle and confronted her on leaving my home early without saying goodbye to my kids. I addressed something pretty big that she missed in the morning (because she can’t be bothered to actually pay attention to my children when she’s around) and she got offended that I asked her to watch my kids a little more carefully in the future. I opened her passenger door and that was enough justification to call me an abuser and say that I was going to be violent with her when I was just trying to work things out so my kids could have a good holiday.

I’m not afraid of confrontation and i speak very plainly, so this has upset people in the past. It’s a trait that I try to work on but the more I suppress that side of myself, the more people walk all over me. But when I allow myself to be direct, other people find me intimidating or overbearing in some way. I’m also a big woman so that doesn’t help my case.

Either way, my mom spins this whole tale about how I’m an abusive person to our whole side of the family because I confronted her. If anyone redirected her and said hey I think you’re overreacting she just blamed her trauma and continued to play the victim.

I’m just really tired. There’s also things happening on my husband’s side of the family and it’s literally to the point that it’s starting to effect our marriage. My sister in law is JN as well, she and her family have spread horrible things about us for years because we offered up a home to any relatives that needed it and their daughter took that opportunity without telling them. So in their eyes we threatened their family unit, they tried to tear us down in any way their words could. They said horrible things about me at my job, they said we abused drugs, that our children were illegitimate, that our marriage was a sham because we were swingers. A lot of untrue things. I could go way into it but I won’t.

Anyway, this resulted in them also ostricizing their former daughter in law and I reached out to try and create a relationship so that she would have more people to reach out to if she needed help with her children (our family’s great grandchildren, great nieces and nephews etc.) Her family is pretty small because shes not from here and she vented about having to do things alone a lot. Former daughter in law started putting up heavy boundaries for similar reasons we did and it got a whole lot worse just before the holidays. I’m not going into crazy detail, but my JN sister in law pulled a wild and crazy stunt while having a supervised visit with her grandchildren while I was present with my children. I found it so beyond out of line that I called the former daughter in law up to come get her babies.

There’s court shit going on now, I’m so exhausted with all this crap going on because I’m mostly introverted. I’ve vented to my husband multiple times about being exhausted. An argument between him and I broke out last week because of all the stress we’re under. I don’t want to keep cutting people off because I feel like then I’m becoming a JN but I’m tired of letting people walk all over me just because we’re still in contact. And then when I finally speak up and say hey, don’t do that, you’re crossing my boundaries here, these people make it seem like IM the person that’s work to be around.

Thus the therapy appointment ;-; has anyone else been in this position? How do I handle these unruly relatives, because to top it off everyone on either side of them openly enables their shitty behavior.