Ever had to have a word with elderly parent about how much they complain during meals out?

[thefourgp]

I was embarrassed….again and I’m really getting sick of it. There’s nothing wrong with complaining when it’s something genuine but it’s getting to the stage it’s every single time we go out for a meal and it’s petty crap. I take my elderly mum and her two best friends on a day out or for a meal every couple of months as a treat. None of them drive and they’re nice women in general but they seem to be constantly looking for something to complain about every single time now when we have something to eat. It’s getting to the stage I don’t want to take them out to eat any more. Last night the waitress offered to replace the meal or bring something else and one of them sat like a huffy toddler saying ‘you’ll just bring me another bad meal - I’ll just eat my chips. I’m not coming back here again.’. So what’s the point in complaining? She’s been polite, offered you a resolution and you’re still not happy. They took the meal off the cost of the bill but I was embarrassed about how rude she was to the waitress. It pisses me off. The other three of us had the exact same meal and there was nothing wrong with it. I’ve commented to them before about how much they complain and it goes in one ear and out the other.

Querulousness of this type is often a signal for dementia.

She has lost the ability to control her emotions or behaviour to a certain degree and effectively runs her mouth at everything she doesn't like.

There was probsbly nothing wrong with the meal, but she didn't like a certain aspect of it.

Sitting there, waiting for her to find something to whine about must have ruined the mood for you.

I hate going out with my pils. This has now dwindled down to ds's birthday meals and I think it is all down to her not being in charge.

Last time she was heard to do a stage whisper that she would never go to the particular place again. Suits me as DS will always choose Nandos, and if she doesn't want to , it's her loss!!

The other table ordered cokes and jacket potatoes, so their food arrived before ours. Grandad majorly kicked off, insisted on seeing the manager, complained we were here first, we were waiting. They shouldn't have been served first and so on.

My mother (in her early 60s, so age is no excuse) once did this at a very naice lunch spot. I was absolutely mortified, and amusingly, the waiter shut her down straight away. Quite rightly. It's interesting to me how class plays into it, similar to the finger-clicking cabbie above...she's very working class yet thinks she should be treated as an empress when she goes somewhere.

My Father in Law's partner is like this. Not so much complaining to the staff, but she's a very fussy eater so every order has to be accompanied with a litany of instructions for swaps and changes à la When Harry Met Sally. Then when it does arrive she invariably picks at it and says something like "it isn't what I was expecting."

I feel your pain, I recently decided I wasn't going to bring my mother anywhere again after her behaviour when she wanted a waiter's attention, ignoring the fact that he was carrying big plates of food, she actually poked him in the side saying excuse me repeatedly. Then accused me of trying to start an argument with her when I told her to stop.

Previous examples are that she didn't want her egg done too hard, then when it arrived she complained loudly that it was too soft.

Brought her and an aunt to a swanky hotel for lunch, they thought the food on the menu was too rich and just wanted a toasted sandwich. Lovely waiter said no problem, he would get it sorted. Sandwiches arrived with bread only toasted on one side, mother complained, waiter apologised and explained that the kitchen was busy. He came back to check how we were doing and mother said there was no butter on the sandwich. So he brought butter. Came back to check and mother complained the butter was hard.

She has also regularly complained about "foreign" waiters "taking our jobs", thankfully out of earshot.

There have been far too many times I've been embarrassed by her and felt the need to leave a huge tip.

I won afternoon tea for 4 at a very swish hotel a couple of years back. I debated for a long time who would appreciate it the most and decided to take my DM and my MIL along with DH.
All the ladies did was moan unnecessarily- the tea was cold, the scones were crumbly, the waiter wasn't very smiley, chocolate truffles on top of cake was plain weird etc. It was delicious. It was as if they wanted to out-complain each other.
As we drove them home my MIL's closing comment was "Thank the Lord you didn't have to pay for that!"
I have not repeated my mistake in taking them out together.

Oh yes. The fussy eating and When Harry Met Sally-style demands.

Yes my mother !
I take her to lovely places, usual drive so she can drink, and I more than often pay.
It’s cringe and I feel so sorry for the staff.
I tell her to stfu (politely!) but apparently ‘it’s people like her that keep standards up’.

She also gets the hump if I go to these places without her

My mum, although she’s not “old-old” (ie she’s mid-70’s and looks great for her age, is increasingly rude to people / lacks social graces as she ages. It’s really odd. She’s a friendly person usually but acts like she doesn’t give a shit about people in shops/restaurants/queues. She becomes hyper-serious, blanks people, doesn’t realise when she’s pushed in front/taken someone’s trolley etc, would never dream of making friendly small-talk or smiling at a stranger, and is generally unaware of the need to be polite to people. It’s so so so odd.

I think it’s because she’s quite a hermit now, amd does experience some anxiety. She goes into ‘fight or flight’ mode in public and I suspect it takes all of her efforts not to have a meltdown, so she’s unable to remember social niceties.

For some reason it REALLY irritates me. I suspect it’s because it brings home to me that she’s ageing/changing/losing parts of her younger character. I should be more compassionate really but inside it gives me the awful rage

Oh god - my Mum is like this - she's nearly 80 now but she's ALWAYS found something to complain about - for at least the last 40 years.

They came to visit us - was the first time they had seen their granddaughter and great grandsons for nearly 2 years.

I arranged an afternoon tea to be delivered - she refused to eat out anywhere due to Covid and is always saying that "if it wasn't for cake she wouldn't eat a thing"

Cue presenting her with two personalised boxes - 3 finger sandwiches all vegetarian fillings and 2 scones with jam/cream you put on yourself, and a selection of 3 home made cakes.

Whole things was labelled up beautifully with her name and there was a menu showing exactly what was in all the items.

She opened it a little bit, looked at it, sighed, looked around the room, sighed again, opened and closed the box a few times and then finally picked up a sandwich like it was a bomb about to go off... tried to palm it off on her 3 year old great-grandson and then eventually didn't eat a fucking thing.

Cost me £82.50 for that afternoon tea to be delivered to all of us and it was mainly for her and that's what I got.

Trouble is - every single time I say NEVER AGAIN and then do it again and it totally fucks me off all over again.

No point trying to take her out - she's even worse because then the chairs will be wrong.

The best one ever was when my Dad went and got her an orange juice from the bar. She's SO particular it's untrue, mustn't be fizzy, must be pure orange juice, must NOT have ice in it or any other adornments - just a glass of fresh orange juice.

Dad came back with exactly her requirements and you can tell he was pleased as punch that he had got it right.

She takes one look at it and sighs...

I say "what's the matter with it"

She says - "look at the size of it - there's far too much"!!!

You.Just.Can't.Win

Attention seeking I reckon! :(

My mother is like this too. Once she sent back four bottles of wine in a row because she didn’t like the taste, apparently unaware that you’re given a small taste to check the bottles aren’t corked rather than whether the wine is to your liking. The whole time she was surly and high and mighty with the poor waitress. She’s not even very old!

My mum says at her age she compares whatever she is eating with the best one of its kind that she has ever had in her seven decades and inevitably it falls short! She is lovely, and rarely complains to the staff and certainly doesn’t treat them badly, but it is a rare outing where she doesn’t find something to moan about. I did have to leave the table for a little walk outside to calm myself once, when she was moaning about something during a meal in a hotel which I had paid for, both hotel and meal.

@MuckyPlucky my mum is the same with this sort of blank highly disdained stare! I hadn’t considered it might be anxiety related but this could be a good working theory…

My grandparents were a bit like this. I think a big part of the problem is that there seems to come a point where people can no longer mentally adjust to inflation and so everything seems so expensive to them - we'd go to mid-range places, gastropub-type places and they thought it was so unbelievably expensive that of course it couldn't meet expectations. Looking back I think it was sort of on my parents because we should have just gone to the two places that my grandparents actually liked eating at because they considered them to be 'reasonable' - Sainsbury's cafe and Wetherspoons - but my parents are a bit too snobby for that!

Sorry, OP, but that did amuse me - in a very wry way!

Dh and I used to take his old aunt out to lunch every few weeks, and whatever it was, you could absolutely guarantee that it’d be too hot/too cold/too tough/too sloppy/they don’t know how to make pastry any more - you name it.

Plus she had to eat on the dot of 12.30 (I think her DM must have told her that unless you had absolutely regular meals you’d sicken and die) so she was always ‘starving!’ while waiting for food to arrive.

In the end we stopped taking her out - I’d take simple food to her cook at her flat instead. But she had a Thing about everything having to be fresh, nothing frozen or tinned, let alone processed 😱 - so I used to buy e.g. a couple of M&S tins of stewed steak in gravy, decant it into a Tupperware, and pretend I’d made it myself.😂

If I were you I’d tell your two that since they’re never happy with the meals out, perhaps it’s a waste of money going out at all - would they like to take turns to cook instead?

BTW I do think that moaning about everything can almost become a barely conscious habit in some older people. Hard to say anything without causing a row, though - speaking from experience here!

In my aunt’s case, it’s part Hyacinth Bucket syndrome, part loneliness, part having everything just as she wants it at home which is all she knows these days, part not liking how expensive everything is compared to 30-odd years ago and therefore not being good value for money, part now knowing how (or caring) to make polite conversation anymore, and part having been spoiled by her now deceased DH who used to enjoy ensuring everything was always as she wanted.

She’s a complicated woman

@MuckyPlucky
My Mum has gone the same in the last two years, she is seventy one.
It is so embarrassing in public and she's just as rude to me when she visits my house.(although I haven't invited her since last time she did it)
Don't know where it's all gone wrong or why it's happening but it infuriates me. Constant complaining and moaning.

some people are born Hungarians, some turn into them. we love complaining 🤣

I'd not take them again.

Not just elderly. I used to hate going shopping with my dad as a kid, he was in his 40s, as he was so rude and difficult with everyone. I mean fair enough asking if shoes are leather and so on but there is a way of doing it. Also he would say things like "HOW MUCH???" loudly in the shop.

My mum is much easy in general, but can be critical of other people and this can be really embarrassing which she speaks in loud whispers and it is very audible. I bloody know these people, we live in a small village!

It’s funny isn’t it? We were brought up by these very people to show and understand manners and now they seem to have forgotten them themselves!

I used to find eating out a complete strain with both Mother and MIL. With my mother the food or the plates on which it was served were never hot enough. I almost became obsessed with watching out for the inevitable hand on the crockery and the tut of disgust that the food was “freezing cold and I like it piping hot!” I don’t think she was ever served ‘freezing cold food’ and short of the chef serving it directly from the oven, it couldn’t have been hotter. She also looked down on serving staff, despite coming from a poor background herself. I pointed out to her that a lot of them are students training to be professionals so they should be admired for supporting themselves, but it always went over her head.
MIL used to like to be taken shopping same time, same place every week for her shopping. We always ended up in the supermarket cafe for lunch because she never wanted to go anywhere else - even though we drove past a lovely pub that served great food and we were happy to pay . She always wanted something with chips, complained that there were never enough (there always was!) would eat every scrap and then announce loudly that that was the worst meal she had ever been served! But still wanted to go there the following week. If we took her anywhere for a family meal (our treat) she would scan the menu, complain about the prices and compare them to the cost of how much you would pay for that specific item in a supermarket. When a waiter took her order and asked her whether she would like a drink, she would always bluntly reply no - not, no thank you or I’m fine thanks. The rest of us would go into over polite mode to try and compensate for her rudeness!

I always got home with a thumping headache from trying to play the pacifier.

My mother is like this. I simply stopped taking her out. I couldn't bear it.

My mother is also quite difficult when it comes to eating out. She has never really enjoyed going out and has always refused to go to the pub but for the last few years bringing her out for a meal has become impossible.If any of the family suggest going out she will make all kinds of excuses not to do so and if we finally manage to get her out the door she sits at the table with a face as long as a mile .what usually happens then is that she will spend ages picking out what she wants to eat but inevitably will pick the cheapest and worse thing on the menu .She will then poke and prod at the food and eventually just shove it in front of her with a sort look of disgust on her face and then proclaim that 'someone' had told her that this restaurant was rubbish anyway .This is said about every restaurant in the town they live in. I have now stopped taking her out at all as she has spoiled so many family outings with this behaviour .Feel sorry for my dad who loves a meal out .My mother is other than this quite a reasonable person so i am baffled as to why going out for a meal causes such consternation.

I hear ya. Lol. Its just an age thing - as if they don't have to/can't make an effort anymore.

My mum was the politest person in the world but age and dementia has changed her. It's as if she has no awareness of distance so if something annoys or worries her she just says what she's feeling, regardless of who's around. I spend my whole time saying, mum stop it; mum, don't say anything; mum, be quiet; mum, don't you dare. If we're in a restaurant, I'd just say sorry to the waitress and leave a big tip.

My mums mum was always very proper and came to live with my parents when she started with dementia. We'd go to restaurants and she'd take her teeth out and mum would be wrestling with her to put them back in. We once got back to the car and mum had to go back inside because gran had left her teeth under her napkin. When mum is driving me to distraction, I always console myself that at least she can't rake her teeth out! Lol.

Then why do you take her out???

Just STOP....DOING....IT. It's really quite simple. You are making yourself miserable, and you are rewarding her behaviour.

@alittlequinnie why on Earth didn't you ask her what she was playing at with the afternoon tea?

'You love cake mum, whats wrong with this one? Too posh for you?'

It'd have wound me right up.