I'm not familiar with the term 'asshat', but I like it! And it does describe her very adequately, and you're right of course. She is indeed vindictive, but to the point where she literally leaves people scratching their heads and wondering 'WTF?'. Her actions go beyond what I would consider to be vindictive, if that makes sense. Cruel - I guess that's more of an apt description of her. She has put her kids through so much when they were living with her, some stuff we knew about, some we have only learned since my SD has been living with us, and I cannot tell you the amount of times I've cried when I've heard things that are too appalling for words. She has an OCD for tidiness (is OCD common in alcoholics?), and the children shared a bedroom when they were with her. They never had a wardrobe, and their clothes were kept in a cupboard in the wall. They had piles of their clothes, folded, and if they dared to get a t-shirt from the bottom of the pile and cause the pile to lean slightly to the left or the right, she would throw everything from the cupboard into a big heap on the floor, together with all their bedding, everything out of their drawers, their toy boxes and make them tidy it all away again without letting them stop for a break, a snack, their dinner, nothing. My SD has told us this 'punishment' would take them a couple of hours to do, and said she often felt so depressed by it she would cry and wanted to run away. This happened at least twice a week, because even an adult would find it hard to remove an item of clothing from a pile and not disturb it in any way. Sheer madness.
When she has the little boy round for a visit, she makes him do chores! I'm not kidding. His dad has told us he often doesn't want to go and see his mum because she makes him do cleaning!!!! Why would she do that when she's only seeing him for a couple of hours, and he doesn't live there anymore to be making any mess to clean up, so she makes him clean up HER mess!!!!!!
Sadly, this obsession for tidiness seems to be rubbing off on the boy. His dad has noticed that the boy complains about mess at their home, and when we had him for a weekend not so long ago, he mentioned to me several times that he thought his sister's bedroom was 'messy' (it isn't actually, it's just normal for a teenager!), and that our lounge looked messy because we had a couple of newspapers on the coffee table!!
She is a car crash that woman, a danger to her children. Grrrrrrrr!!!!