I want to ask my MIL to stop drinking, but want to respect my spouse's wishes
Hi all,
My spouse is an only child of an alcoholic mother. We spent the last 1.5 years caregiving for his Dad who had terminal cancer. His Dad was a lovely person, but had one large fault in that he never stood up to his wife's drinking or behavior or protected his son from it. He lived a "people make their own choices" kind of life. He passed away around 6 months ago and we are left with his 78yo alcoholic mother to care for. She has no other family and has a ton of alcohol related health issues (severe ulcerative colitis, neuropathy in her hands and feet, memory issues, easy bruising, sleep issues, occasional taste issues, etc.) This was definitely a path nobody expected since she was in such terrible health because of her addiction and he was active and fit for his age with no addiction issues.
She is a miserable, depressive, anxiety ridden person. She had a severely abusive childhood, so I understand the "why" of her addiction. She has "rules" around her drinking, she doesn't drink and drive, she doesn't start drinking til around 4pm each night. But nonetheless she is an addict who consumes 1-1.5 bottles of wine a night plus a number of glasses of brandy. When we see her during the daytime for lunch she still has the anxiety and depression issues, but is relatively pleasant to be around. But at night time when she is drunk it is terrible. She prefers we see her in the evening as this is the "hardest time for her", so we can only get away with lunch every other visit or so.
For financial reasons, we cannot go no-contact with her. We have been trying to set boundaries to make it more doable. We used to see her every weekend and are slowly having weekends off where we don't see her at all. The hope is that she will go to independent living at some point as she is barely able to care for herself now, but that seems highly unlikely given her inability to change or accept that she is old and has limitations. We absolutely will not live with her because of her addiction and abuse.
We saw her last night for Mother's Day and it was horrible. She spent the whole time saying how nothing makes her happy and she wishes she was dead. My spouse spent the time doing a bunch of chores for her which she belittled and harassed him through. When it came time to leave and I told her we wouldn't be seeing her next weekend as she had previously agreed to, she started crying and saying that we were abandoning her and were her only family and nothing at all helps except seeing us (which i find hard to believe because she is so miserable when we are there). We stuck to our guns and said we needed the weekend to ourselves and we would see her another time.
I came home extremely stressed, didn't sleep well and woke up pretty depressed about things. I told my spouse I wanted to ask her not to drink around us. He said they have tried everything before and any insinuation that she has a drinking problem leads to a full on meltdown. If it was not for the financial tie, I would love to set a harder boundary of "if you drink we leave" or go full on no-contact, but that isn't an option for us at this time.
I didn't grow up with this, this is my only experience with alcoholics. Is it worth it for me to try to talk to her? I don't want to make things worse for my spouse and I, and I don't want to waste my energy, but something needs to change.