Mum expects me to take care of her in old age, I don’t want to AIBU?

[AdvicePleaseHelp]

My Mum was horrible to me growing up, a bad Mum. There were a lot of problems in the family home, emotional and mental abuse and an alcoholic Dad. I was a child that reacted to this but all the family issues were placed squarely on my shoulders. She neglected me badly enough for it to be led to bullying and it was just horrible.

She lies to herself about how horrible it was and how horrible she was to me and believes her own lies.

We recently had a conversation about care homes, (we pretend that I didn’t have the childhood I did) and I said I had no intentions to look after anyone in their old age (I’m much harder to bully these days) she looked genuinely surprised and said ‘I thought you would look after me’ instead of her going into a home, I said it’s not something I want to go through.

So, considering we brush past the past AIBU, should I be helping my Mum when she gets old and provide the care for her she never gave me so she doesn’t go into a home?

Just to add - I’m currently working on going lower & lower contact with her but when you’ve grown up and this has been your normal and all of a sudden realise as an adult how fucked up that was it’s incredibly hard to just go NC when it’s never been an issue before and many other family members would be greatly affected.

I would not expect my children to look after me in my old age. It was my choice to have children and it wasn't so they could spend their late middle age dealing with a cantankerous old lady with dementia. Added in that your mother sounds foul and YANBU.

Completely agree.

Elder care is a literal labour of love. I've done it and don't regret doing it, but it's hard, heartbreaking, relentless and more often than not will go on for years rather than months.

I wouldn't judge anyone for not wanting to do it, even if they had a good relationship with that person.

One thing I would say is that even if you try and maintain arm's length and say you'll only help with arranging carers, it tends to fall over. All it needs is a carer not to show up or for the person to refuse the carer and tell them they don't need the help. Then you get a phone call saying they aren't dressed, haven't eaten, can't manage the loo on their own and are sitting in a mess....then what do you do? You can't leave them in their nightie soaked in urine and hungry. So off you go and step in and boom, you're giving the care. Which is fine if you're prepared for that, but it's going to be hard if you were not.

I'm not saying don't offer to get involved, but just that if you do offer you have to go into it with your eyes WIDE open. As I say I don't regret what I did at all. But there's no way I would have done it for someone who abused me as a child.

Sometimes it's not so simple. My brother, at 67 is in a care home after a series of strokes. My mum does not appear to grasp the reality that my sil cannot look after him at home, as it takes 2 people and a hoist to get him out of bed, and that he cannot be left alone.

After my dad died, my mum asked me if I would be her full time carer when the time came (she lives 2 hours away - she was contemplating moving near to me).

I said absolutely not. I don't think she'd considered the enormity of it and that it would mean that I would literally be tied to her and that I couldn't go anywhere.

Sometimes she's still says that she doesn't want to go into a home. I ask her what her solution is - coz I can't do it, amd if she needs more care than outside carers can provide - what other option is there?

And just to mention - she was another piss poor parent- but that just gets airbrushed out of the picture now.

You wouldn't be unreasonable to be unable to do this (whether for logistical or emotional reasons) even if you'd had a good upbringing.

If you need to withdraw from your mum for your own protection then don't worry about that.

Hugely ironic, given what's just gone on with Justin Welby, but when taking a CofE safeguarding course recently, I found one slide very helpful that talked about Christian forgiveness and safeguarding. It said forgiveness is not the opposite of justice, truth or protecting the vulnerable. I quote: "Someone who has abused another person can be forgiven, but this does not mean that we treat them as if they no longer present a risk." So if you feel conflicted about going NC to protect yourself, it doesn't stop you from forgiving what's happened in the past.

You absolutely shouldn't if you don't want to.

I had similar with my mum, crappy childhood but never really realised it until I had my son and the things she did just baffles me now. Wouldn't cross her mind to go to a school play (she didnt work), parents evening, didn't even think to ask me what I got in my GCSE results, gave away my pets without asking, went to school with mouldy packed lunches, the list goes on and on.
I was a perfectly behaved child, always tried to please her, I didn't realise how bad it was until after she died and I got older and wiser otherwise I wouldn't have a relationship with her now.

She lost the ability to walk when I was about 14. She had a long term partner but it dawned on her when I was about 20 that if he died she needed help. She held a meeting with me and my sister to ask if her partner died would we move in with her and take care of her.

My answer was definitely not, I told her I imagine I would have a family and children at that time and obviously couldn't leave them and take care of her so we would arrange carers. She was really hurt by this and couldn't imagine why a daughter wouldn't look after her mother.

My MIL on the other hand is amazing, I wouldn't think twice about caring for her, she is loving, caring and is always there for everyone, she is the glue to the family so that just shows how you reap what you sow x

I wouldn't do any actual care but would help out with organising of the care with e.g Social Work and more general life admin if I had POA.

I sincerely hope you don't feel grief. For me, when my mother died quite unexpectedly and suddenly, I was surprised to feel something akin to a feeling of loss. When I gave myself time to reflect, it's still hard to explain but the best I can do is this - it wasn't like the grief feeling of loss when my loved MIL died; it was the loss of hope (that I hadn't actually realised I had) that some day she'd acknowledge her neglectful parenting and express some sort of regret for it but I realised with the passage of time since she died it was never going to happen. Best wishes

This was in reply to a PP but her post has been detached for some reason 😯

Yanbu. I wouldn’t look after her in those circumstances. My dm needed care, I did as much as I could for someone that had health problems and I was a ‘sandwich’ as dds were still young. I have explicitly said to them that I don’t want them to care for me, they need to lead their own lives.
It’s selfish of your m to even think or assume you’d dropped everything for her, especially for the way she treated you.

My mother had early stage dementia. I attended a meeting at the hospital (she was in a rehabilitation ward recovering from a broken hip), where her future was discussed, and she looked daggers at me when a care home was mentioned. A day or so later one of her friends had a chat with her, and her attitude changed and a week or so later I took her to the home and she was happy there from day one. She would never have expected me to care for her, dementia or not, and would have happily returned to her own home, where she had been rejecting my offers of help anyway.

A few weeks later as I was trying to pluck up the courage to ask what she wanted done with her flat she mentioned it to me and said it had better be sold.

Not everyone is the same.

Dementia isn't always the case, sometimes people just expect to be cared for and make it known... It's not always for selfish reasons and I can understand the prospect of going into care being scary, but I have seen it with my own eyes.

Used to work in healthcare rehab and a patient who was not that old refused to engage in therapy and get better and insisted their adult child can just look after them for the rest of their life. No sort of brain injury at all, just wanted to be looked after. They discharged themselves and we had to come up with a plan to teach their loved one how to do everything by themselves as they refused any carers coming in. The patient had a very good capability of gaining more physical independence. They refused to wipe themselves when assisted to the toilet cause why shouldn't the staff do it when they were capable of doing it themselves.

I understand where you are coming from in the case of dementia though, it is really really sad and I wish that it did not exist. Such a cruel form of existance and I would not wish it on anyone or their families.