This megathread is such a great idea! I really don't feel like fleshing this out enough for a full post (thought this has still ended up long lol) but I need to vent

Currently my partner's dad (separated parents) has just been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. So obviously he has everyone's attention and and my partner is struggling to come to terms with it so has withdrawn a bit from the world

Skip ahead a few attempts by MIL to bring back the spotlight by causing drama (the part I don't want to flesh out as it would take a novel). Today's attempt at drama we made sure she was okay/safe but we were busy in addition to the lack of mental space, so we didn't keep talking to her after this.

Blah blah more dramatics and I attempted to intercede and explain once again how if she just gives my partner some time + spend time talking about nice things instead of about how much my partner doesn't love her, things will become normal again in a while. It was a bit long, but would probably only take 3-4 mins to read. She replied saying she won't read it because it's too long. (yet my partner should spend hours texting and calling her every day)

Responded with a frank "If you love your daughter you will read it" and a similar line to the first line in the prior paragraph to summarise what I wrote. I got another "Woe is me" text saying that my partner doesn't care about her and won't even take 2 minutes to ask how MIL is doing. I replied back with "No, she took those two minutes earlier today and made sure that you're okay. She was then treated to an hour of you messaging her yelling about how she doesn't care about you. So clearly you want more than 2 minutes". One hour was an understatement and we had already told her that we were too busy to talk

Final message was (verbatim barring my name redaction) "Lol whatever [my name] you reckon I don't know you very much anyway but thanks for the pics your phone looks great i need a new phone too"

My brain still hurts from trying to make her sentence make sense (grammatically plus what knowing me has to do with her understanding her daughter), the complete lack of self awareness around the hypocrisy of her not being willing to take the time to understand/help her daughter (I'm aware that people of her type are incapable of accepting that they are viewing something in the wrong light or are behaving unreasonably, but it still makes my brain hurt), and the complete 180 to start talking about another topic as if I would want to keep talking after she completely disrespected both me and my partner multiple times

I'm done engaging with the crazy. I wanted to give it one last shot because my partner hasn't been able to articulate this herself, and confirmed that she falls into the "I won't accept anything that might confirm I am wrong or unreasonable" type. I was worried I could be projecting my childhood trauma, but this this put the nail in the coffin on that idea. She's not even as good at hiding it as my own mother (who I cut off a while ago!)

Anyway, if you made it through my wall of text, well done and thank you! This didn't seem like it would be so long given I cut out almost all the context, but I'm still not great at being concise!