Very complicated - please help :(

So your husband is physically and emotionally abusive, he appears to have manipulated you into joining his misogynistic religion and he's hostile to your family, but you'd be willing to suck all that up if only his mother wasn't so opinionated and pushy in her efforts to be involved with her grandchild?

You're right: your current life is a huge mess, but it sounds to me like you're deflecting a lot of the justified anger and resentment you feel because of your husband's behaviour on to his mother. Do you seriously believe that if your mother-in-law dropped dead this evening, then everything in your marriage would be wonderful and you and the asshole with the carpet-burn on his forehead would live happily ever after?

You need to face the fact that you fucked up when you married the guy and you did it again when you got pregnant with his child. Don't feel too bad about this; virtually everyone screws up in one way or another when they're young. The important thing is being brave enough to acknowledge that we've messed up, and then start taking some concrete steps to get back on track and moving forward in a positive direction again.

From what you say, it sounds like your parents are supportive and you appear to have a positive relationship with your mother, so at least you're not utterly alone in the world apart from your obnoxious husband and your infant child. I imagine it would be a blow to your ego to admit to your parents that you blew it and ask for their help in extracting you from this situation, but it sounds like that might be your best choice right now.

Having said all that, I do have to wonder if you might not have been a little harsh on your m-i-l. Lots of young mothers are very sensitive to any suggestion that they're not doing the job right (not least because they usually aren't sure if they are), and it sounds like your m-i-l comes from a culture where mothers-in-law are supposed to behave towards daughters-in-law and their grandchildren exactly as she has done.

I understand how you might take her saying that the baby looks sad as a personal insult and implied criticism that you're not capable of making your child happy, but you don't have to do that. Instead, you could just acknowledge that what she says is nothing more than her opinion, tell yourself that it has no validity and move on. None of us can control what others say and do; the only thing we can control is how we respond to that.

You're not the only young mother who has received unsolicited advice and implied or explicit criticism from her mother-in-law, and nor are you the first person to have found it extremely annoying. My mother-in-law often came out with the same sort of crap when our daughter was small, and it drove my wife up the wall. I let it slide for a while, but eventually I told my m-i-l that she was full of shit, that everything I'd heard from my wife about her childhood made me sure she hadn't been a wonderful mother, and that she should keep her mouth shut until she was asked for advice or an opinion. Twelve years on, our daughter is very healthy, happy and well-adjusted, but it's clear that my m-i-l and I will never be friends. That's a tiny bit unfortunate, but the crucial thing is that she's very aware that there are boundaries that she crosses at her peril.

Clearly, your husband doesn't have the guts to stand up for you in that way, and it's unfortunately the case that most abusive men remain abusive for all their lives (often because that's what they saw men doing to women when they were growing up).

You have a choice: either learn how to put up with your mother-in-law constantly sticking her nose into your child-raising, tolerate your husband's abuse, and accept that your child will grow up watching you being abused, so she comes to believe that's normal and it's how she should expect to be treated by men, or you can find the courage to move on - even if the reality of that would actually be moving back to be with your parents.