It's interesting, because my husband and my Mum adore each other, but my husband avoids his mother at all costs. Basically Mum has a life, and the energy and love she gives us is time taken out of that life. MIL wants DH to vindicate her existence. I'm really pissed off at the moment, because when DS was born, and DH rang her, all excited and buoyed up, she said, "I hope he'll be a good son. I hope he won't just abandon you when you're old and need him, and never bother with you and leave you lonely, after all you've done."
I offer for her to see my baby son once a month, but she refuses as DH won't be there in the week, and he isn't willing to have her take up a quarter of his weekends. I offer for her to come at Xmas, but she insists all of us should go to her - including her ex and his new partner, who understandably would rather boil her own head, and my own mother. She tried to insist we spemt our summer holidays with her, in Doncaster, as foreign travel is wasteful and pointless and we could have a lovely fortnight with her.
I know she is lonely, I know she has no friends, no partner, her siblings avoid her, and she thought having a son would ensure she had company for life. But frankly most of the contact I have with her is because I'm sorry for her - it's grossly unrewarding. She lies about times she has been excluded - there are photos of her to our right when the wedding cake was cut but she insists she wasn't there and nobody bothered to fetch her. And she constantly tries to compete with me, which is bloody ridiculous because she drives DH a lot madder than she ever could me. Example: her b'day is on Valentine's day. One year, he completely forgot. I was cross with him and spent hours online and then on the phone, trying to persuade a local florist to deliver (at late notice, same day... on Valentine's Day.) Eventually, a woman very kindly was moved to sympathy with this poor forgotten Mum, and agreed to take the order. For a year after that, she would say every time she saw me, "X sends me the most wonderful flowers! When did he last send YOU flowers, Qally?" Which hardly inspired me with the determination to do it again. She flips out when he hugs me ("I don't want to see that!"), and she spent the first year we were together warning him I'd get pregnant on purpose to trap him (I was in my final year of a law degree at an academically tough uni. Funnily enough, I had other things on my mind at the time) because that was what she'd done herself. And she is VILE to her ex, who is a darling and always speaks glowingly of her, while she will sit there talking about how she'll spend his money when he dies. They've been apart for 14 years, and she left him for another man. She has no boundaries. She just seems so bitterly jealous, and as my own Mum is thrilled that we are so happy and so well suited, and dotes on my DH (takes his side in disputes, 9 times in 10) I find it all completely batshit insane, tbh.
The really miserable thing is that DH hates any contact with her, because her desperation and bitterness make it a nightmare. I tried at one point getting him to call her every week before she called him in case it made her less clingy, but all that happened was she started calling daily instead. For hours at a time. I know she is lonely, I know it's really sad, but the essential problem, as DH pointed out, is that she doesn't want to think her only son can't stand to be around her much, so she blames me. And nobody can sustain warmth and sympathy from someone who acts more like an embittered ex-wife than a mother-in-law. She's actually said that he left her for me, and that our wedding day was the saddest day of her life because she knew she'd never come first with him again. That is not normal, surely? Her own sister says she needs to get a life! It's awfully hard to build bridges in that setting, because he isn't about to move back in with her and hermetically seal himself off from anyone else, and she insists on trying to compete with me when it shouldn't be a contest, we each have our own role. I am at such a loss on what to do at this point. She essentially is bitter that her son is grown up and independent, and she prefers to think that's down to me. There's nothing I can do to change that preference.
God, this is long. I'm sorry. But honestly, it's so frustrating when you try and try and a problem is insoluble. This and breast-feeding have been the two most impossible challenges of my life - and at least my struggles with bf will stop bothering me, once DS is weaned! My main anxiety is that I want her to have a warm relationship with DS, because grandparents are important - but she's such a self-absorbed child, and I am worried she will guilt trip and manipulate him. Gah.