MIL used to live just around the corner so we saw her quite often, if only for short periods at a time. Last year she suddenly decided she was going to move, which she did about six months ago. It now takes a couple of hours to drive to her, so we don't see her anywhere near as often, which she and dh are now complaining about.
Originally she wanted to see dd every week, but I felt that this would eat into our weekend time too much, because with the travelling each visit takes most of the day, so we agreed on seeing her every three weeks or so, which would have meant us driving down every six weeks as we would alternate between her coming here and us going there. I questioned this at the time, as for one thing she has to rely on SIL for transport, and for another thing she rarely visited us even when she lived within walking distance, but this was what she wanted.
She's been here once in six months, and even then she wasn't here for more than 20 minutes, then went off to spend the rest of the day with a friend of hers. SIL is quite happy to bring her, but MIL is now muttering about not being able to come because our toilet is upstairs and she refuses to use our stairs (although she manages perfectly well with even steeper steps at SIL's house).
When we do go and see her, dd and I are pretty much excluded. She saves up little jobs for dh to do then leaves me and dd to our own devices while she and dh do the jobs. She has mentioned that she thinks I ought to take dd out to the shops and leave dh with her and SIL. When we saw her at Christmas they wanted lots of photographs as it was MIL's first Christmas in her new home - dd and I weren't allowed to be in any of them because we aren't MIL's children. We really might just as well not be there, as the only person she really wants to spend time with is dh - she loves to see dd, but after ten minutes she's had enough of her.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, MIL is now complaining that we don't go over often enough - we last went over on Christmas day, and she was here two weeks ago, although as I said it was only for twenty minutes, we were just somewhere convenient to stop for a cup of tea and a sandwich before she went off to see the people she really wanted to see. Dh thinks we should drive over there every other week just to keep the peace, but I really don't want to. It's a long way for dd in the car, she gets car sick so has to be medicated, neither she nor I are particularly welcome when we get there, and I have better things to do with my time than to spend four hours on the road just to be glared at by my MIL for a couple of hours.
I have so many issues with my MIL that my automatic instinct is to dig my heels in, and I find it hard to be objective about her. Is it unreasonable to tell dh that I don't want us to have to drive to her more than once a month, and that if she wants to see us any more than that it's up to her to come here? My gut feelings are that if she wanted to spend more time with us then she shouldn't have moved so far away, and she should be prepared to put herself out a bit in order to do it - but is that selfish?