I don't know what to do.
DM is 76.
Lives alone.
Zero friends - can't maintain healthy relationships due to lack of boundaries or understanding about how her behaviour impacts on others.
Lifelong mental illness which is untreated as she won't engage with mental health services or her GP. The reason for her refusing to engage is due to the mental illness itself.
Mixture of unstable PD, lifelong depression, clinical anxiety, PTSD, self harm, self neglect, emotional dysregulation, ASD and ADHD.
Refuses medication and refuses therapy - lifelong refusal.
Her MI caused a caused a difficult childhood for DB and me and I carry this with me through my adulthood.
She raised us as a single parent.
DB is now NC with DM for his own MH protection and he aportions a lot of blame on her for his own depression and anxiety.
All of our extended family are NC with DM due to the emotional difficulties and challenges she presents in trying to maintain a long standing relationship.
Christmas is a huge MH trigger for her.
We have her to stay for a few days over Christmas and it is very hard work.
She is an emotional rollercoaster between being irritable, snapping at me and DH, talking in a stream of consciousness about her ongoing difficulties, devastation about not seeing DB and his children at Christmas anymore, crying, desperately wanting to spend every waking minute with my DC over Christmas on an emotional level whilst at the same time showing a complete lack of engagement with them on a demonstratable level, being non stop highly stressed, anxious, zero ability to sit through a kids Christmas movie with them or play a game with them, too distracted to get through a conversation with - she can't keep track of anything I try to talk to her about, and physically as unhelpful towards the general busyness of Christmas as it's possible to be. Sits there for entire days not moving. Doesn't occur to her to pitch in and help.
It's just bloody hard work and I feel like crying at the thought of another Christmas like it.
When the DC were little they'd bounce around excitedly not noticing all this. But they're getting older now and are beginning to pick up on things.
The thing is DM isn't mentally unwell but lovely with it. She isn't vulnerable in the sense that she leaves you feeling like you want to look after her. She's verbally argumentative all the time. She's hostile. She never smiles. She's paranoid in a negative way. She's accusatory. She can start an attack of arguing out of nowhere. Her conversation just goes round and round in a negative spiral. Every word she utters is negative. Endless moaning. I can have a completely neutral expression on my face and she'll argue at me for looking at her in an angry way.
I must add that we really are nice to her. Buy all her favourite food. Adapt food and cooking to her liking. Abandon family activities that DH and DC and me enjoy because she doesn't want to do them. Tip toe around her endlessly changing mood. Buy her really thoughtful and lovely gifts. Turn down social offers we'd personally love to accept because she stays for days. Pick her up. Drive her home. We appease her on every level.
And then after it's all over, she'll spend days texting me about how she knows me and DH hate her but she only comes to stay so tbat she can see my DC who she regularly tells me are her only reason for living.
The older I'm getting the more she is impacting on my wellbeing. I'm pretty strong and I think I've been pretty emotionally resilient through my life, considering I've been raised by a mother who's been like tgis my whole life. But strangely, I feel more affected by her behaviour in my middle age now than I did in my 20s and 30s, even though it has now been much longer since I lived with her (I left home at 18 which I spent 2 decades being either cried at or argued at about, with her blaming me for abandonment). I don't quite understand why it's all affecting me more now at this age.
So......I can hear you all thinking dont invite her over then. But the alternative is she sits at home alone with the TV and a microwave meal, and despite how impossible she is to get along with, I know about her life traumas and I understand those traumas are the reason for her illness, and knowing that makes me feel like I'd spend the entire Christmas feeling such guilt that I wouldn't enjoy it anyway.
I have tried all my life to support and love her.
But I can feel my brain is beginning to change now, after the effects of all these years of dealing with this.
And I just want to say - I hate serious mental illness. I really truly hate it and all it's harmful, toxic, devastating repercussions.
I hate it. I feel defeated by it.😞