Pushed for time right now, so will probably need to explain context properly later on when I get a minute, but does anyone else who has elderly parents living with them feel they get treated like dirt whenever they happen to be having a bad day?
Barely a word of thanks, just being alternately ignored and spoken to like a troublesome and clueless child when I dare to make suggestions about their medical issues. I just feel so angry, hurt and bitter right now that I need to put it somewhere. I’m very grateful I still have both parents still alive, but my mum’s behaviour in particular is testing me to the limit. My father has Parkinson’s disease and mobility/pain issues, but is capable of interacting like a normal human being. Not so my mother (not on bad days, anyway, and those are increasing in frequency) who at her worst is domineering, neurotic, narcissistic, weak, gaslighting, endlessly negative and possibly starting with dementia which she refuses to acknowledge. She keeps trying to ‘block’ my dad’s reasonable attempts to seek the doctor’s advice on his various conditions. It’s all ‘What do you expect the doctor to do?’ etc etc. Any attempt to introduce a bit of reality into the situation is met with tears, victim behaviour and attacks on my personality, and I’m at the end of my tether from the hurt of it all.
If my comments about my mother sound harsh, please consider that she’s put me down my whole life, been critical about pretty much everything about me, and been no kind of role model whatsoever even when she was younger and fitter, my emotional wellbeing has always been bottom priority. She dominates my father psychologically, and he’s never really stuck up for me when she was being unkind. I bite my lip on bad days, while waiting on them hand and foot and trying to keep some kind of a life of my own amidst all this. I suffer from depression and chronic fatigue (poss fibro, it seems to be turning that way), but am I ever asked how I am doing? No, never, because I’m just here to wait on them hand and foot and serve as a wailing wall for them to take their frustrations out on.
Christmas is throwing everything into sharp focus and I am just hurting so much. The worst thing of all is that I honestly don’t think they appreciate the sacrifices I have made for them, to keep them from having to go into sheltered housing or a home which they didn’t want. It’s all just taken for granted and I’m just seen as a combination of skivvy and nuisance (on the occasions I dare to make any suggestions about their health). I've given up a lot to make this living set-up possible for them and the worst thing is knowing they'd treat me better if I'd done none of it, because I'm just so conveniently bloody 'there' all the time that they've come to see me as nothing more than some kind of live-in servant.
If it wasn’t for my husband’s support my MH would probably have collapsed altogether by now, but even he doesn’t really get it, as my mum does the classic narcissist thing of being all charm around others, but as family it’s apparently fine to speak to me and my dad like we’re dirt. I don't think DH believes me about how my mum treats me sometimes. The only respite I get from this shit is time spent with friends, but even some of them have turned their backs on me because they don’t understand what my life is like now, and occasional trips away at times when they are coping between them, which I usually get guilt-tripped about. It’s like they think my role in life is to be there for them to just take all their frustrations out on and I’m supposed to just smile sweetly and keep right on waiting on them hand and foot, and to hell with my own wellbeing.
I can only see this getting steadily worse as time goes on, and it’s causing so much resentment that in turn becomes terrible guilt because I should be grateful they’re still alive. Fuck my life.
Just needed to vent.