MIL is a serial attention seeker. All her family know this. If she's not the centre of attention, she isn't happy.
I'm 38+3, and MIL has been coming round to our house 3x a week, every time with an excuse like "you have some post that came to my house" or "have you got the carpet down in your DC1's room yet, can I see?" and my husband thinks it's because she's worried she won't be the first to know when I give birth. (she already said she wants to be.)
Then she keeps calling and saying that if we want her to have DC1 while I'm in labour, she'll be happy to have him. We don't want her to have him, I'm having a homebirth and we want to keep it quiet when I'm in labour so we can have some time after the birth to ourselves, just the 4 of us. My husband is going to look after DC1 while I'm in labour, so he doesn't have the time to pester me. This has been discussed and explained at length, and for months.
Why should we have changed out minds, and does she think that we wouldn't have asked her already if we had?
"Work is so hard, I'm so tired, and I have the kids to deal with". Her youngest is 11. The only other one of her 4 kids who still lives at home is 21 and looks after himself. She works in a quiet shop and sits on her behind all day apart from when she serves the 3 customers who come in occasionally, drinking coffee. Somehow she managed to get through the 20-odd years before that without complaining as much about her kids as she does now, and she had 4 at home then, a husband (who has since divorced her) and various pets.
Me and SIL go to a toddler group together and she said her mum has been putting it on thick with her as well, about how busy she is, and how hard life is (holidays abroad without your kids, paid for by your rich live-in-lover are such a burden...), and all these other things.
When nobody took pity on her, she started trying to get attention by making up all these hospital appointments, first for a colposcopy because apparently her smear said she might have cervical cancer (but at the time when she said the appointment was, her car was parked in the only car park in our town, 25 miles from the hospital where she supposedly went). When this didn't get enough attention, she publicised on facebook, extensively, how she had split up from her partner, lavishing all the attention from her friends and work collegues. Neither her sons nor her daughter said anything about it to her when they saw it on facebook, my husband wanted to wait for her to tell us. She didn't, but we bumped into her in the middle of a field yesterday (sounds odd, it's the only place around here to walk dogs and let children run loose) and guess who she was holding hands with? you guessed it. Her face, when she saw us, was a picture.
AIBU to be somewhat bewildered by her behaviour?