Dear Prudence,
My mother is a difficult woman to like. She went out of her way to make us cry as children, often over things as petty as what our favorite colors were. When I was 14, my boyfriend beat me until he broke my front tooth, and she said she understood why he did it. Age did not mellow her, but she has suffered from cancer and a stroke. All four of her kids collaborate on caregiving so we can live with the balance—we give money generously and try to limit our face-to-face time.
The problem is my youngest brother’s wife, who ignores our agreement and wears herself thin accommodating my mother’s demands. Almost every hour she’s not at work, she’s running errands for our mother, driving her around, and enduring her cruelties. She doesn’t have to. We’ve made provisions for professionals whose buttons my mother can’t push as easily, but my sister-in-law insists you can’t fob off family on strangers and then gets increasingly resentful that me and my siblings don’t step in. It’s caused vicious fights between her and my brother, and my brother and the rest of us. I do feel guilty that my sister-in-law has taken up the slack that we won’t, but there’s a reason we won’t. And we all agreed to this initially. What can we do to make our sister-in-law either back off or make her life easier without actually doing any of the things she wants us to? We offered to pay her the money we give to various services, but she rejected us angrily and didn’t talk to us for a week. (Please don’t say we should just grit our teeth and take over visiting our mother. It would end badly. I do not trust myself around her and haven’t spent more than two hours at a time with her since she threw me out at 17.)