My partner is spending more and more time with my 94-year-old mother, who lives alone in her flat and is increasingly in need of care. Though she is very good for age (takes no medications, just hard of hearing and with slight cognitive impairment and memory loss) she is declining and getting frail. I have arranged a carer who comes in three or four times a week for a couple of hours to make sure she eats and look after other things. My partner has taken to doing much of her shopping, phones her regularly, takes her out for walks and to hospital appointments and is even helping her do some baking which she is unable to do unaided. He also insists on taking her with us on weekends away, and pays for a hotel room for her and looks after everything. He often sits all day in her flat with her, watching TV and reading and she is very glad of the company, which I can't give her because I am working, and he is around more often than not even when the carer is there. Of course all of this sounds fantastic and I know I should be very grateful. But I feel terrible because I am increasingly uncomfortable about this. Not because I fear there is any abuse - though he often raises his voice to her, however she does take this in good part and doesn't mind at all ('men are just like that, I take no notice and neither should you,' she says). No, it's more to do with the fact that he is himself a domineering character, and can be very bullying and controlling, also verbally abusive - between being an absolute paragon and the perfect partner. As indeed he is proving himself to be in relation to my mother. He has quarrelled with most of his family and has been thrown out of the house by both his brothers in law, and his father (also 94) lives abroad. He visits him regularly, staying in his own small flat in a care home, and takes control of him and his finances as he always has done. Suffice to say that I have and always have had problems with this side of him (we have been together for 18 years though not lived together until the last few months, when he came to live in my house against my better judgement). My feeling is of gradually having my life taken over and the relationship with my mother is the nail in the coffin - but I don't know whether this is jealousy on my part (both she and he tell me it is). They do get on very well, and the trouble is that I find her highly irritating to be with and have never really had a good relationship with her due to a whole variety of issues in the past. She thinks the sun shines out of his backside and can't imagine why I have trouble with him, and constantly calls on him rather than me to do things for her. He seems to get involved in any kind of decision-making for her, but I feel this is a displacement from organising his own life (he doesn't work and hasn't for 30 years, citing having had to look after his own parents) and a replacement for his own mother who died five years ago. I also get the feeling that he is owed something from it - she has already let him fill her garage with belongings from when he moved out of his parents' house and he has taken over more and more of my own small house with his stuff. Everyone agrees that he is an aggressive character who insists on having his own way and becomes highly volatile when he does not get it. I feel the whole situation and my life is getting increasingly chaotic and out of my own control. I am an only child so there are no other relatives to intervene.
Please help - am I reading the situation wrongly and over-reacting and being an absolute bitch? is this just jealousy and feeling left out? should I leave them to get on with it and be grateful? and if not, what on earth do I do because I cannot devote the time to my mother that she needs or I would go insane! - which I feel I am with both of them anyway. I would be so grateful for advice!