My DF has a denegerative illness and DM is caring for him, they are in their 80s.
The background to this is that DPs have made some terrible decisions in planning for old age.
In practical terms, they prioritised spending on long haul holidays for many years. They still wanted a big house, big dog etc, so around 15 years ago "downsized" to a 3 bed house that's a long walk to the local amenties in the village they've lived in for years, where there are hardly any jobs so is miles away from where their children stay. They extended it so in theory they could live on the ground floor, but cut corners with the extension design and build so it's difficult to access now when they are getting infirm, plus they don't seem to actually want to lose the extra living space so have installed a stairlift.
My DM has also been manipulative about my DF's health for at least a decade. Probably the worst example about 8 years ago she kept getting upset about how ill he was. We organised to move closer to where they live so we were 45 minutes away rather than 90 mins, and once we were committed to the move they announced they were going on another long haul holiday.
I've got 2 small children and work virtually full time and last year I had a really rocky patch in my marriage, so I feel like I'm running on empty all the time myself.
My DF is now genuinely frail but won't do activities or groups to get himself out the house and maintain his mobility.
Every time I speak to my mum she spends the first part of the call moaning about the stairlift, how they're having to adapt their house and crying about how hard it is for her, and guilt tripping me to visit more often "to keep DF's spirits up".
They were meant to be coming to ours for Christmas and spent months dithering around about hotels and tried to invite their dog along even though it just wasn't practical for us to host a big dog, frail elderly person and look after a toddler, then ended up cancelling at the last minute because of DF's health, which landed me with quite a bit of extra food and expense.
We went down to see them on Christmas Eve which I didn't begrudge but was quite a lot of extra stress. This didn't really seem to register with DM at all and yesterday she was back to the crying and guilt tripping.
I'm at the end of my tether with it all, have a history of depression and am beginning to feel ill myself. I'm sad that my DF is ill but my DM would ideally like us to act like he's at death's door for months or years, which I can't really do because I need to put my own kids first.
Does anyone have any advice?