Am I being unreasonable to expect my mum who is not ill, has no health problems apart from high cholesterol, to keep the house tidy and clean?
Me and my 2 DCs, 17 months and 3.2yrs have just returned from a 4 day stay at my parents house and yesterday my DD of 17 months got a vomitting bug. Now I am feeling so guilty that I allowed her to be in a house which is unclean and unhygienic and yesterday I told my mum I won't be visiting again (they live 4hrs away) due to the mess.
She harldly ever does any housework. She claims she does. She came back from holiday about 5 days before we visited and I asked her what she was doing in that time (not in a why haven't you tidied up way, but to hear what she's been up to) and she said she'd been tidying up, but the house was just as messy and unclean.
My dad who is 74, does his fair share of housework (he always been doing more of the housework than my mum), but it is a largish house, so can't do everything himself, plus he is old, but still relatively healthy.
As a result the house is pretty filthy, not quite bad to get Kim and Aggie involved, but I am constantly stepping over the mess. The floor is not clean, the carpets havent' been hoovered properly, the washed dishes are still dirty, there are marks on the walls, on the doors etc. My mum's bedroom smells of stale, sweaty clothes. She never opens the window to let any air in, claiming that it is too cold. Her room is a total mess.
The living room where the kids spend most of their time is relatively clean, but still messier and dirtier than average I would say.
My mother I feel, is just lazy. She just doesn't want to do any cleaning. She said that she doesnt' DO hoovering. She is in denial that the house is a mess. She will sit on the sofa drinking tea whilst there is mess all around her. She will go to bed at 8.30pm, claiming she is tired (when she's hardly done anything throughout the day). She cooks a meal, fair enough, but she leaves a mess in the kitchen and me and my dad does all the clearing up. I cook in our house and DH cleans up, but I clear away the cooking ingrediants too and put all the washing in the appropriate place next to the sink.
When she's been up to help after my DCs were born, she has to be told what to do, even things like taking plates back to the kitchen. She only wanted to help with the DCs, i.e hold them. She said she wasn't there to help with the housework. When DS was born, he had trouble latching on and I needed to give him a top up, so asked my mum to boil a nipple to steralise it. DS was 6 days old. Later after the feed I discovered that she boiled it in a pan she had cooked porridge in that morning and hadn't cleaned it up properly. I went ballistic. I was hormonal and that was the last straw.
Am I being to unreasonable to expect her to be tidier and cleaner. How can I ever visit my parents again? I don't know if my DDs vomitting was due to the filth in the house, but it is very likely. I just feel so upset over everything, and my mum just denies everything.