My mom is also passive aggressive, but I don’t think she realizes how bad it really is. She genuinely believes that she is operating in good faith, and is being kind or polite by not being direct.
But if you look past what she is saying, and listen to what she’s implying, it becomes very clear that she is extremely judgmental when others don’t live up to her impossible standards.
For context, I believe she has pretty good reason to have “come by it honestly”, as it were; Her father was in the Army, and spent a lot of her childhood flying Hueys in Vietnam, which left the kids with their born-and-raised Southern Baptist mother who holds a bachelor’s in Home Ec, and lived on base. It was pretty much drilled into her from the youngest age possible that keeping up appearances is absolutely crucial, and failing to do so or to care about doing so is a moral failing. She was basically trained by the Queen of passive aggression.
She fully believes she’s being considerate when offering use of her RV bathroom as an alternative to the bathroom in my aunt and uncle’s house. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Because the reason she considers that bathroom unsuitable is not because it doesn’t function properly, but because it doesn’t meet her standard of cleanliness.
She truly doesn’t understand that this single statement tells me everything I need to know about her opinion of the state of my living space. Also, considering that I’m entirely uninterested in someone’s judgment of me and/or my partner based on standards that are not possible for me to keep, it all but guaranteed that she will never be welcome in my home.
Because I know exactly what the result would be: More backhanded “kindness” in the form of unhelpful advice for disabled people written by non-disabled people, gifts of cleaning supplies, questions about my progress on tackling clutter, etc., etc…
The best way I’ve found to handle it is to take her implication, and state it bluntly. Hooooooooo boy, does it take the wind outta her sails when her polite facade is summarily ripped away mid conversation. She never expects it, because she starts these conversations with her own idea about how it will go. It’s incredibly satisfying to see the glimpse of sincerety as she realizes that the tools she uses to control her image are suddenly useless.
Now, I could rag on the mistakes of my parents until the cows come home, but just to be clear, I believe she is earnestly attempting kindness, and doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She was just held to impossible expectations by a strict, overwhelmed caregiver who was a poor role model because of their inappropriate priorities (among a long list of other things). It’s still hurtful behavior, and it still needs to stop, and I will continue calling her out on it, but I don’t blame her for it.
That being said, I refuse to pass this on. The passive aggressive lineage ends with me.