Is my boyfriend's mother interfering too much?

I feel like my partner's mother is interfering with our relationship. We have been together for about a year and a half and have recently moved across the country together. His mother seemed to be very supportive of this, but for some reason her sincerity never seemed very sincere to me.

My partner is 21 and has lived with either of his parents up until just a few months ago, when we moved in together. Since the beginning, I have sat back and observed the kind of relationship he has with his parents, and it has always seemed to be rather unhealthy to me.

His problems with his father aside, his mother has always been like all other mothers: very protective and extremely overbearing. What makes their relationship especially complicated is that she got cancer 14 years ago and struggles with it to this day. Somehow this seems to complicate things.

I grew up without a mother. She died when I was three, and I was raised by my single, gay father. I have always had a hard time dealing with other women. I do not know how to deal with that overbearing parent I never had.

When we first got together and lived in the same town as our parents, we spent a lot of time at his mother's house. She was completely smitten by me. She would always invite me over and share very private stories and buy me presents. My partner and I got together in September, and by Christmas, she went all out. I was not expecting any of it. It felt nice that we were friends, but as someone who is motherless, I have never had any interest whatsoever in adopting a mother at 21.

That winter, my partner and his mother got into a big fight, and she threw him out and told him to move in with me. This was a problem because I lived with two other girls, and not only was the apartment too small for someone else to move in, but he had no business being there. When I told him this, he said it was no problem and that he would sleep in his car. I gave in. My housemates were extremely upset with me, and my partner and I kept fighting, as my room was very small and he just had to bring all six instruments with him. Even worse, his mother could not understand how I could have been upset with her. She even told my partner that I was ungrateful: that she apparently gave me the best Christmas of my life (even though I never said that).

When their fight was resolved and my him moved back in, everything got back to normal within a few months. But she stopped inviting me over and never let me sleep over, even though she used to encourage it. She blamed the landlady who, admittedly, did not like me.

A couple months before my partner and I moved away together, he temporarily moved to Texas to work for his father so that he could save the money that he needed to start his life on the West Coast. During that time, I moved in with my father so that I could save money. Even though my relationship with my father was great, living with him was quite difficult, as I did not have my own room or even a bed to sleep on. Thus, I ended up spending time with his mother: she was lonely after he left. Suddenly the landlady was perfectly OK with my spending the night.

At first it started with the extremely nice gesture of buying us water-proof winter jackets. When you are new to a rainy city, it is a necessity, and I could not have been happier to accept the gift. Then she sent a few boxes of household items that we did not have. She had told us she planned to even before we left, so it did not feel weird. This past Thanksgiving, our funds were pretty low, so she sent us a Trader Joe's gift card for $100, which helped out a lot and allowed us to make a nice meal for the holiday. But lately it is getting crazy. She is sending us huge boxes full of stuff. Soooo many clothes, we do not know what to do with them all. We have four times as many knives as we do hands. And that $100 gift certificate was the first of many.

I was on the train earlier today and realized that everything I was wearing except my socks and shoes -- jacket, underclothes, pants, shirt, backpack-- were all gifts from her. She has bought our food for the last month. She told my partner the other day that she created an emergency fund for us both incase we cannot make rent. This all from a woman who is on disabilities! Now she is even talking about moving here so that we can live with her!

Perhaps I sound like I am an ungrateful girl. I do not think that I am. I appreciate the clothes and the food and everything else she has done. But I feel like I am becoming dependent on her. My father is an extremely loving parent, but he has always let me make my own mistakes and my own decisions. But my partner has a mother who is encouraging him to mess up so that she might benefit. It would have been one thing for her to create an emergency fund incase we needed to borrow money for rent: it is quite another to offer that when we are doing fine. That is enabling irre