'How I discovered my mother-in-law was trying to destroy my marriage.'

I know mother-in-laws get a bad rap, but mine could win awards. If she were a movie villain, she'd be the one dramatically swirling a glass of chardonnay while devising her next evil plan. From our first meeting it was clear that this was not going to go smoothly. I knew *Denise wasn't thrilled when *Ben brought me home, but I figured I was just a little too "Melbourne" for her; I was a kombucha-sipping, thrift-shopping stray that Ben had adopted from some trendy café.

Things simmered along for a few years, with Denise making the odd comment about my family, clothes or career, but I was good at letting it roll off my back. It was made easier by the fact that Ben and I are a perfect match, head over in heels in love with each other.

The poor woman nearly didn't recover when Ben and I pulled off a surprise wedding at his 30^th birthday party. We denied her the glory of a mother-of-the-groom moment and it only served to amplify her disdain for our union.

For the most part, her meddling and awfulness presented itself in an almost laughable, satire, but things took a wild turn recently, when I found out she'd been playing a long game with a plot twist no one saw coming.

My not-so-adoring MIL decided to try her hand at catfishing. As me. Because obviously, if you don't approve of your son's choice of spouse, creating a fake account in her name and trying to ruin her marriage is the next logical step.

I stumbled onto her handiwork completely by accident. I was just chilling on the couch, scrolling through my messages with Ben passed out beside me when I made a long overdue foray into my "Other" messages folder on Facebook, which is where all the forgotten, weird stuff goes.

Watch: The Motherish Confessions: The worst thing your in-laws have done. Post continues after video.

There were messages from some random guy named Lachlan, which read as if we had an existing connection. I didn't know him from a bar of soap, yet here he was, talking to me about how nice it had been chatting and saying he didn't realise that I had two accounts.

The messages were a few months old, so, I did a little digging and uncovered another me. This Facebook profile had my name and my pictures, but the content was definitely NOT me.

Like a dog with a bone, I worked to fully uncover her deception.

I went through the small friends list – all men – and reached out, letting them know that they had been catfished. They shared screenshots of their conversations with me.

I discovered that this "Jade" had been chatting up a handful of guys. And not just chatting no, Denise went all out, weaving this ridiculous narrative of a bored housewife desperate for a little excitement.

There were messages, comments, even a post or two about "escaping the shackles of marriage" to my husband Ben.

Before it was confirmed as Denise, it was clear that the catfish was somebody I knew. I won't lie — at first, I thought maybe Ben had been dabbling in a bit of creative writing on his own, the info shared was so personal. But the longer I stared at these messages, the less they felt like him and the more they reeked of Denise.

The woman uses full sentences in texts and always corrects my grammar in group chats. And these messages? They were a grammatical nightmare. "Im thinkin bout leavin but idk wat 2 do." If there's one thing Denise can't do, it's pretend she's anything but a walking grammar-check app. It was so obviously a fake.

I brought Ben in, who immediately looked at me with that bloke face that says, "Mate, what the actual…?" After showing him the evidence, even he recognised that this was clearly the work of his mum.

So, we did the most logical thing we could think of: we called Denise. Of course, she played dumb at first, claiming she didn't even know how to make a fake Facebook account. By the next morning, half of Ben's family had unfriended me.

Denise had gone full damage control with the line that the account was not a fake, trying to paint me as some scandalous, adulterer that Ben had to endure out of misplaced loyalty.

The icing on this horror cake? Denise had planned an "intervention dinner" with Ben's brothers to "address my wandering ways."

But here's where Denise's little plot fell apart. In her haste to cover her tracks, she forgot to log out of her fake account on the family iPad.

Ben's brother did a little searching for us. Her account. All of it. Every last cringey, dodgy message to these random guys there for all to see.

Ben stood by me, watching as his mother's entire charade crumbled in real-time. She tried to deny it, of course. Claimed she'd been hacked. Hacked! But we knew. Everyone knew.

It's been six months since the showdown. We went no contact at first, but it was hurting Ben so I suggested we let her back in. Denise now hovers in the background, still making pointed comments about my cooking and sending Ben articles on "Signs of a Strong Marriage," but the jig is up. Ben and I are stronger for it.

We laugh about it when the vibe is right, and every now and then, he catches me writing a message on Facebook and jokingly says, "What's Lachlan up to these days?"

So, cheers, Denise, for trying to break us apart — turns out, all you did was bring us closer.

Feature Image: Getty.