With the birth of my first child, I was pretty relaxed overall but there were two things that were extremely important to me:

a) My husband should be the only non-medical person attending the birth (not my mom or dad, friends, MIL, etc.).
b) Grandparents should call ahead of time before showing up for a visit.

Well, my MIL freaked out about both of these parameters. She said she'd never ever heard of a pregnant mother not inviting her MIL to the birth. And she claimed that asking them to call first was disrespectful and basically saying we didn't want them there. We very gently, very patiently tried to explain why we felt this way.

I thought they'd gotten the message, but then my MIL showed up uninvited an hour after my emergency c-section. I didn't make a fuss because, well, I was so exhausted. Then she came by again a day or two later without asking first. I said, "Oh, I wish you had called first. We've had a pretty rough day and we were just about to take a nap." She acted very hurt and said she would leave and we said no, you can stay since you're here, it's just that we weren't expecting you--and of course she made a big production of leaving and there was this huge drama over it where she claimed I was mean to her and that we weren't letting her see her grandbaby and whatever.

I think she has a real problem with boundaries. I hate how she refuses to respect our wishes and then plays the victim when we call her on it. For my next birth, I'm seriously contemplating saying NO VISITORS at all while we are in the hospital. We'd post a sign on the door and ask the nurses to help enforce it.

Is this too radical? What would you do? I feel like my last birth experience was somewhat tainted by my MIL's drama. (FWIW, and my parents live far away and are in poor health, so they wouldn't be visiting anyway.)