To not want to have the same conversation over and over?

[Flamingoblue1]

I'm a crank and I know I am. My mother phones me and I feel like it's Groundhog Day. She's not got dementia and isn't old btw but the conversation is the same all the time. I go to someone's house she wants to know the ins and outs and what the house looks like. I buy a dress she wants to know the make size colour cut. So on and so forth sorry but I don't understand why people want to know so much mundane detail about crap

OP I feel like this - in my case it's because I see my mum nearly every day (which can't be helped) & it's just too much.

It's got much worse since I went Part time for DC. She's really kind & means well but is very overbearing. It's actually putting a massive strain on my marriage.

So no advice but just wanted to say I understand!

OP, I can relate. MIL is a lovely woman, and I'm always grateful for how she cares for her family. However, conversation with her is usually a stream of well-worn anecdotes tenuously linked together (she has no memory issues), and it gets tedious.

I have the same 3 topics of conversation with my MIL EVERY time I meet here. She seems to have no ability or knowledge to talk about anything else. I find being around her quite a strain.

My mother once went out for lunch with five people I had never met. She insisted on telling me exactly what all six at the table ate. I spent a good while listening to a discussion of the eating habits of five complete strangers.

How odd, I have repativie convos with people meaning they tell the same stories over and over and over again.

Luckily in my case, the orator is hysterically funny and the stories are worth hearing over and over.
How is wanting to know details, repetitive?

I love detail, and often people don't think x is important but its worth mentioning...

Understand your frustration op, with the fact this is something that annoys you but I do feel your being a little petty on this one....

I expect for many older people its hard to keep the convo scintillating if their lives have slowed down, friends moved or passed away, children grown up and have their own lives, maybe not working, easy to see how your world can suddenly shrink..

Obviously I can't speak for the OP but my MIL has a good social life, lots of friends and goes on interesting holidays. I think it's just her way of relating to people

It's boring, but as you've been dragged down that track early on in the thread, think how much you'd miss these boring conversations if your mother wasn't around.

OP your post made me think of my mil. I'd love if we chatted in detail about clothes, instead its about hospital, docs or dentist apts failing that i have to hear about relations im not even speaking to! Give me a nice dress conversation i'd be delighted.

I'm sure all of us must be boring to someone though. Not everyone is going to be interested in our job, holiday, pastimes, exercise, clothes, social life, political opinion, garden, favourite drink or whatever else we find interesting ourselves.

My mother just talks about church/ church related things and gardening most of the time - I am an atheist who can barely muster the motivation to mow the lawn in fact DH does it and sees planting stuff as a project you are obliged to occasionally do with DC but no other motivation to do it...

My mil does this, endless conversations about what Mavis had when they went to the Harvester or (increasingly) who died and what off - these are never people I know.

Although when fil was alive they would both do it. Between them, they once told me the same story four times over the course of dinner and I struggled to find a response the first time, never mind the fourth.

She is lovely but her conversational interests and mine really do not overlap.

yANBU, can totally relate. Think I have the same Mil as 60s name by the way. Endless reports of other people's lives, usually ones she met on a train. Also believes everything the daily fail writes and says "you would think that" if I ever voice a different opinion! But her Sunday lunches make up for all her flaws! I do avoid her calls tho, or I pass straight to DH!

My mother talks about the cost of every thing she buys from the supermarket.
She's particularly fond of discussing the price of vegetables. She asks me how much I pay for vegetables so now I try to remember. It's dull but I've turned it into a bit of a running joke now.

I think I'm like your mum I'm 34

Standout my MIL has fairly recently started doing the long conversations about people who have died, she didn't used to do it - she knows that it is logistically impossible I could know the people most of the time, and usually DH doesn't even know them, or perhaps vaguely remembers meeting their cousin or thinks one of his siblings might have been to school with that person's son... but she seems to need to tell me in detail about how they died anyway, even if she only knew them well enough to read about their death in an obituary or hear about it months after it happened...

She only started on this as a main topic of conversation when her own MIL died a couple fo years ago - it was like a switch flicking. Prior to that she complained about GMIL doing exactly this - its like the mantle of "MIL who talks at length about recently deceased people nobody in the room really knew" has been passed on as an inheritance

This thread had made me remember to call my mother!

A woman wants to chat with her daughter about not very much? How awful of her

Never mind, OP, just ignore her till she gives up. Or shuffles off the coil and you won't have to put up with the chit chat. It's not like she ever did anything for you, like created you and raised you and all that....

Harsh ziggy

oh ffs, my DM is long gone and never even met her dgcs and I miss talking to her... And if she was alive she would be driving me batty and we probably wouldn't be talking with the same old same old every call.

I totally get where the OP is coming from, and now have my Mil to fill the hole, endlessly waffling on about complete strangers without even having had the decency to give birth to me. Grin, bear and vent online, no other choice really.

Maybe. OP didn't seem very lighthearted about it.

Some of us would quite like to talk to our mothers but don't have any. Hard to have sympathy with those who find the old dear a bit dull.

My mother's dead but one thing I don't miss are her phone calls. She was lovely in person but on the phone shouted (she wasn't deaf but the phone had to be held well away from my head) long monologues about stuff. She complained I didn't say much but when someone talks for over 5 minutes before drawing breath and pausing even slightly you stop concentrating. Missing someone who is dead and missing talking to them on the phone are too completely different things.
Some people are rubbish about talking for 2 or 3 sentences then pausing and letting the other person have a turn.

When she is gone you will realise that your Mum is the only person who really ever cared about those trivial things that you did in your day to day life....

My Mum used to want me to discuss politics with her. She was surrounded by conservative voters and had no one she could rant about Cameron etc with.