Please tell me we all don’t end up like this

[Queijo]

Just spent a few days with my parents who are now entering their 70s.

The FAFFING. It took 25 minutes(!) to serve up lunch because they couldn’t find the right teapot, and then, horrors of horrors, it wasn’t the right ham. So they had to have a very intense discussion about the properties of ham. Whilst I’m slowly dying in the corner from hunger and frustration.

Cups of tea take decades to make, is this the cup you want? Do you want decaf? No? Oh ok I’ll just get the special non-decaf pot down. Are you sure you don’t want decaf? Right. Sugar? No sugar?! Since when?

Can’t say no to cup though or there’s 3 days of fraught discussions.

Lunch at 12 noon dinner at 6pm. CANNOT under any circumstance deviate, and if anything is taking slightly too long to cook it’s the end of the world. God alive 😂

I’m exhausted. Please tell me I’m not going to end up this way.

LIGHTHEARTED before anyone starts! I love them dearly but they never were like this before.

My parents are just like this OP. My dad is a really intelligent man. He’s been reduced to a faffer, I think much of it is my Mum, who was always a faffer but now even more so, has rubbed off on him as they spend too much time together. I feel like I can feel my dad’s brilliant brain decaying as I watch them faff over what to cook their beans in.

If I am visiting, I call as I leave my own house (ten min drive) to give them time to organise themselves enough to answer the door for me. Knowing they need to gather the keys, have a wee, wash their hands, put a dog out the way. Even then, with ten minutes warning, me and the kids are stood on the step in the cold for several minutes whilst they shout “hang on, hang on, Dad can’t find the keys…. NOT those keys… where are YOUR keys?”

I find the amount of faffing that my grown-up children do before anything gets done drives me insane. I want to go out: I get my coat, bag, keys, leave the house. With them it's all "have you been to the loo?" Where's my phone?" "Who's got the car keys?" "Put your shoes on" "Where's John?" "Will you get off that computer ... we are leaving in five minutes!" We get into the car. Then it's "Did you switch off the tv?"

Meanwhile, I'm sitting in the car playing Angry Birds.

That TikTok is hilarious and the comments section is gold.

I think the world is full of faffers and non-faffers.

My mum is nearly 85 and still very brisk and non-faffy.

I agree with the pp who said about their DH in his 60s though. DH says he's going out, and half an hour later he is still here. I fear he may be turning into a faffer although he is efficient enough getting out to work.

Whereas I say I am going out and have gone 5 minutes later!

I think modern life, with all its choices, makes faffing almost inevitable

I don't think so, I do everything very quickly. I agree sometimes there are choices, but I know eg that I want a flat white in a coffee shop and that's what I ask for. I guess if you want non-dairy you are prepared to say "with oat milk please".

The faffers will not be prepared and will be surprised when the server asks what they want.

I think my one routine is my supermarket shop comes between 9 am and 10 am on a Thursday morning. There is a reason though, we coordinate with neighbours as we often used to have the delivery van from Sainsburys arriving 2 or 3 times on the same day so now we try to do this tiny bit to save the planet and have co-ordinated deliveries.

😂OMG yes, I recognize the behaviour! My own father is in his 70s and very active still, but plans, appointments, decisions, routines are sacred and must not be changed. Changes will send him into a frustrated hissy fit, but he will alter his plans in order to help one of his kids or grandkids, bless him.

Not for any other reason, mind. He is lovely. 🙂

It’s better they’re like this. I love it, the teapot fuss, the chats about ham, you’ll remember it all fondly in 20 years

^
❤️

Loved the tik tok.
I’ve just been grumpy with my elderly mum. She asked me about cards for May birthdays and moaned I’d not sorted loo (it's not flushing normally) we have 2 more toilets to use. I said I’m working on a just in time basis here. I did apologise for being grumpy.

Well, I’m 67 and am just off to swim for 40 minutes, will return and do some jobs in the garden, so not faffing! I love retirement.

Ha, love this!
I know someone in their forties who does that when their partner is trying to tell a story. They always have to set all the details straight, no matter how insignificant those might be.

Totally agree with this. My mother has had anxiety her whole life however it's got much worse as she's got older and significantly impacts on other people particularly now my poor Dad. Unfortunately she doesn't see the problem and despite managing on the odd occasion to get her to the doctor and get a prescription she refuses to take it. She has absolutely no self awareness and can't see the impact it has on everyone else.

I have absolutely no sympathy for her. She makes every interaction exhausting. She's never worked and cooking and cleaning is her raison d'etre. Went for a meal last week and we had to have the conversation about whether we were having a starter 5 times with her faffing over the minutiae of the various decisions relating to it. I don't find it sweet or adorable and there is no way I will end up like that but then I have spent my whole life actively ensuring I'm not like her.

Honestly, this makes me thing perhaps raising retirement age is a good thing. People need to be occupied and engaged into old age, if they are in good physical health. And motivated to have good physical health so they can have a good quality of life as long as they can.

My mum is pure chaos. She was always a bit laissez faire but I definitely think it's got worse as she's got older (and she's not old - only 62). Lunch can be any time from 2 all the way until 6, dinner at 10, you can never plan anything in advance with her, it's always last minute on the day, you can never ask her for an ETA, if she does give you one she's always hours late. It does my head in because I'm very much a routine based person and I hate being late.

My in laws are the opposite extreme. As in, they won't do anything on a Tuesday because that's the day they do their food shop and it never occurs to them that maybe they could do their food shop on a different day. They have breakfast at 8, lunch at 12 and dinner at 5 7 days a week 365 days a year.

Both can be quite difficult to deal with. I am somewhere in the middle!

My PIL only went shopping at 4pm on a Saturday. They once came back from holiday on a Saturday and then struggled with having little food all week, only going to the corner shop and freezer stuff, because they couldn’t shop until Saturday.
It amazes me that MIL was so against small children having a routine.

My parents have always been faffers - I now wonder if it's a coping mechanism for poor memory worsening with age though I think it also feeds off one another doing it.

I say that as I watch FIL mental decline and increasing memory problems - it's worse post retirement but honestly was there before - so I think it's more aging.

There's been few incidents where he clearly forgot what he doing or where he left things - sometime narrowly avoiding serious problems in response. MIL is often unconsciously covering for him and she now appears to faff when actually she's surreptitiously checking having been caught out that he has forgotten to do things.

It’s boredom. My own father is 81 next month and still running the family farm. He doesn’t have time to faff. I think retiring too early is detrimental to your mental health. It’s like not working when you suffer from depression when working would actually help the condition. Humans aren’t designed to sit around without a propose in life . Especially not from as young as mid fifties.

This is definitely my mother now. She's 77. Even trying to tell me a simple story takes forever and is punctuated by an excessive number of irrelevant words. A typical anecdote goes like this:

'um...you know, so anyway, um, I er, I you know, I said to him, I said, the point is Brian, the point is, you know, er.. so....was that on Monday? I think it was Monday. Might have been Tuesday because I had the doctors on Monday, but anyway I saw my neighbour Janet and I was telling her and she agreed with me about Brian, so I said to him, I said, you know....'

The other day I actually lost patience and said 'for god's sake mum, spit it out!'

When she comes to my house she insists on trying to 'help' by unloading the dishwasher, except that she doesn't actually put anything away because she doesn't know where it all goes, so she piles it up on the counter where I am forced to put it away immediately myself whether I wanted to or not, because there's no space anywhere if I don't. Then she'll start washing up when I have a dishwasher 2/3rds full and just waiting to be full so I can run it. When I say 'mum please just leave it because I want to put it in the dishwasher' she'll say 'Oh I don't mind, it's only a few bits, it won't take long.' Let's just get it out of the way.' Completely missing the point.

When I am in a hurry to get out of the house, or to do something important she always chooses that moment to do or say something completely non urgent and faffy and unimportant, even though she knows I am busy with something else. My DH went to collect her on Christmas morning and as soon as she walked into the kitchen to say hello, she insisted on emptying out two carrier bags of old clothes she'd bought with her in case I or any of the young adult DC wanted them. 'Do you think XXX (my 25 year old) could use this fleece for work? I know it's probably not the height of fashion but it's lovely quality and very warm.' She's 77 for crying out loud. What 25 year old wears the same clothes as their Gran?

There were 12 people in the house and I was up to my neck in turkey giblets and parsnip peelings and she wanted to give me blow by blow account of every item in the bags, where it was from, what she paid for it and why she's never really worn it. This was pretty much before she even took her coat off.

I said to my DC afterwards 'if I ever get like that, you have my permission to shoot me. In fact I insist on it.'

The egg sandwich family seem rather sad to me. It feels exploitative. I see so much of my mother and perhaps little bits of myself in there. The way she wants everything to be OK for everybody and is so worried.

I'm sorry , I don't find it amusimg at all.

My parents are in their 80s and not like this. My dm makes sure she is a busy as she can be. If your dp repeat themselves, is there a mental decline at all?

As I get older I might be doing some things that others would regard as faffing.

There's a lovely condition called vaginal atrophy. It means you might need to go to the loo a bit more frequently, so it makes sense to pee before leaving the house.

I also don't pay for everything by smartphone - this is a good strategy in the rare event of supermarkets' IT systems going down - so it takes slightly longer to pay, because it involves both phone supermarket app and bank card.

I expect people to tolerate these minor delays, because it is likely that they too will be old in their time. Their bodies may not function perfectly. They may be less quick to adopt new technology. They shall hope to be tolerated - and perhaps even cared for - by those who are younger.

But I do a challenging job, can run 10k/walk 10 miles, and get a nutritious cooked from scratch meal together in under 30 miles.

I have to say I have very little patience with elderly people (who have the cognitive ability to do so) who point blank refuse to use technology. My Gran is in her 80s and uses a smartphone, does online shopping, banks online etc. There's no real reason they can't learn in most cases.

It's like looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Their world closes in and becomes smaller, whilst the things within that world grow larger. At some point your relationship will flip and you become less passive and can take charge and give out instructions. Luckily my aged parent is hard of hearing so he doesn't hear me muttering FFS under my breath. 😁

Maybe it depends...

I've watched my parents go from pretty fucking faffy in their 60s to increasingly ridiculously faffy in their 70s, 80s and 90s.

For one of them, eventually, hospitalisation after a fall resulted in total disorientation from which they never recovered.

It's as though they came to depend on a rigid and predictable daily routine to stay on track mentally, and any deviation from that literally throws them off the rails.

I suspect that unless we exercise it with surprises and challenges, our ability to adapt flexibly to daily life simply withers away, like an atrophied muscle.

So perhaps our lifelong aspiration to live a comfortable, settled old age isn't really what's best for our minds, any more than overeating and idleness suits our bodies.

I console myself with that thought whenever I start to panic about having made inadequate pension plans etc. At least it will keep me on my toes 😁

I know eg that I want a flat white in a coffee shop and that's what I ask for.

Don't get aphasia. Made worse by the fatc that I don't want a "flat white". What I want is a "filter coffee, white, no sugar".

The day will come when you want a "flat white" and it's called something else. And all your years of knowing exactly what a "flat white" is will be worse than useless because they will interfere with your ability to remember what the new equivalent (or not quite equivalent) is called. You could just pick something at random and hope for the best, and people will sigh as they have to wait while some foamy concoction you didn't really want is lovingly prepared for you.

Or you could refuse to do anything new.

The world of faff is coming for you, like it or lump it!