I'll try to avoid an AIBU by stealth, so this might be long....
My mother is 70 this year. She thinks that her birthday is a huge deal (she's hopeless at doing things for anyone else's birthday, but that's a subject for another thread). Dh, for reasons I can't quite fathom, has decided that we should rent a cottage somewhere for a week around the time of her birthday and all go on holiday together (i.e, me, dh, 2 dcs, my parents, and possibly my brother too). We would pay for it. I can think of few things worse.
I loathe my mother (as does dh), and was emotionally abused by her as a child. I had to have counselling as an adult to try and recover from the effects of her abuse. Dh knows this (my mother doesn't). I love my father dearly, but he is very much in her shadow and only comes out of his shell and relaxes when she is out of the room. I would have severed all ties years ago if it weren't for my father. She is a very self-centred person, completely lacking in empathy for others, very opinionated (and loud), and very hard work to be around.
We see her once in blue moon for a couple of days and by the end I am tearing my hair out.
Dh thinks the holiday would be a sort of box-ticking exercise, as if we only have to do one good deed and that's them off our backs for ever. He also likes the idea of babysitting, I guess.
He has already had a holiday this year (another AIBU thread ), going for 2 carefree weeks to South Africa for a wedding. He also gets to travel a lot for work, and often tacks a day or two of sight-seeing onto the end. This will be my only holiday.
Aside from the fact that I don't even like my mother, we would all drive each other mad in a confined space. We are up at 5/6am with ds2 and in bed by 10pm. My parents like to stay up until 2/3am, being noisy, watching tv at full volume, then lie in until lunchtime (they won't compromise on this).
I think a better solution would be to pay for them to stay somewhere as our gift, or go and visit them for a weekend (live 3/4 hours away), or anythinbg really.
So, if you've got to the end of this epic and haven't fallen asleep, AIBU?