That sounds really tough with your in-laws. I certainly would not be ok with them openly lying to me either. Can you give some examples of the 'gaslighting' that you describe?
I don't know if this has specifically happened to FLBiker, but the kind of thing that goes on with my parents is:
Me: We're vegetarian*. Don't give my kid that ham sandwich.
Parents: Sorry, sweetie, you're not allowed any sandwiches because [eyeroll, put-upon voice] Mummy says so.
[Toddler is upset because he thinks he's not getting any lunch.]
Me: He can have a cheese sandwich, just not a ham one. Here, have a cheese sandwich. [Spends some time consoling toddler.]
*Example because FLBiker brought it up. We're not.
Me: When you take him to the zoo, please don't buy him anything from the gift shop.
Parents take child round the zoo and instead of walking past the gift shop, they take him in, let him look at loads of stuff and then either:
a) "Sorry, sweetie, we're not
allowed to buy you that thing we've cajoled you into wanting because [eyeroll, put-upon voice] Mummy says so."
b) They return home with a massive stoopid toy. "Oh, you meant don't buy him
anything from the gift shop! I didn't
realise! But he looooooves it, can't he keep it, Mean Mummy, pwetty pwease?"
c) They return home with a massive stoopid toy. "Oh, you meant don't buy him
anything from the gift shop! I didn't
realise! Here, sweetie, you'll have to give me that toy. You're not allowed to keep it because [eyeroll, put-upon voice] Mummy says so."
When this fantastic option exists of just not taking him into a shop if you're not going to buy him anything. Or saying at the beginning that you're not going to buy anything but he can have a look if he still wants to. He can absolutely handle hearing that because we've never bought him anything "off list" and the only shop he's accustomed to going to is Aldi to do the weekly food shop, which is done off a prewritten list.
It's hard to understand if you've never had to deal with it. Mostly, each individual incident isn't really a massive problem. But it's like death of a thousand cuts.
Our wonderful friend took Awdry, who is three, to a museum. We said don't give him anything to drink except water (juice etc causes a peeathon) and don't buy him anything from the gift shop. Other than that, have fun! So the carton of juice they got with his kids meal came home unopened in her bag, and she said they looked at the models in the gift shop and he did think he was taking one home but she explained they weren't to keep and it was fine.
Somehow she was able to understand and action our requests with zero drama and zero creating of situations where Awdry gets confused/upset because of something that isn't actually what I said.
Somehow she managed to understand that even though we don't give biscuits/sweets/whatever at home on normal days, it was fine to give him a big chocolate cookie on the way home, and to know that we'd be happy he'd had a nice time eating it.
Somehow she figured out that when we asked if he'd eaten much at lunchtime, we were asking if he'd had a big lunch or a small lunch so we knew how much dinner to make him, and there was no need to cower in pretend fear and say, "Ohhh, wellll, we were going to get him the nice-sounding children's meal but we knew we weren't allowed to give him [list of made up things I never said he's not allowed], so we told him Mummy had said he wasn't allowed it and got him a plain sandwich instead. He was sooooo disappointed!"
So I either have the choice of giving a general rule that they will wilfully misinterpret to make me a bad guy by saying I said something adjacent to what I did say, but not actually what I said. Or I have to give a rule for every possible situation and then it's so confuuuuuuusing and I'm so meeeeaaaaan and prescriptive, wah wah wah.
Fuck, I need to get these people out of my life. I have no idea how. But typing it out is really bringing it home to me. It kind of gets lost in the flow of conversation and I'm not very quick to process and react to it, but it's actually kinda awful now it's here in black and white with a spotlight on it.[/list]