Appalling behaviour-dressed up as old age-it has to be addressed

[BlueLegume]

Hi all, having followed and contributed to several threads on ‘Elderly Parents’ I want to thank so many of you for helping me look at my/our situation. I won’t name check you just yet but you know who you are. This thread is not to be unpleasant about the elderly who are having a hard time. It is to address a very honest point that my parents have always been difficult. Impossible to discuss anything important with, always known better and having watched them alienate good decent people I am angry that they made no effort in life to do anything other than fun stuff for themselves and now expect me and my siblings to pick up their mess. It seems so many middle aged people have fallen foul of these ‘war babies’ as my mother still refers to her and Dad. Yes I accept they were born at the end of the war and they will have had to live in a post war country. For our mother that is all she talks about. She doesn’t accept they had the boom years post war which she has photo evidence of living it large in the 50s and 60s. She was an incredibly authoritarian mother yet after a few drinks would party all night. Always a case of do as I say not as I do. Now as I approach 60 I am wracked with worry and anxiety because she now ‘can’t cope’. It’s ruining life . I have all the therapy theories and have shared much of it. That said I am mad at the fact I am still dictated to or it feels so by her. Father is in a nursing home after a lot of denial that was what he needed. She will not have any help in the house so it is all falling to us. We are broken. My own family are fed up and rightly so. Selfish as it sounds I did not retire to look after a very unpleasant woman who has never liked me. I appreciate that sounds very bitter.

@Lexy70 @HoraceGoesBonkers I think we just need to understand some of us have incredibly immature (toddler/teenage esque) parents. I read so many lovely kind posts on here with adult children wanting to help their parents - just as we helped out toddler and teen children. They won’t accept help as they know better - we just have to suck up the mess. No we do not.

@BlueLegume Indeed. I think it also stops me going insane to remember that I started off - and I think all of us on here did - trying to help our parents.

I know I'll be painted by my "D"M as fucking off when things got hard but it took quite a long time between my Dad getting really ill and me not wanting to speak to her - years of trailing up and down, being bitched about behind my back and not saying anything to keep the peace, having to go to her stupid parties even although she'd made a point of going abroad for my birthday for about 20 years, trying to help them get appropriate support in place only for it all to be thrown back at me.

No wonder so many of us facing really similar behaviour from them have cracked in some way or another!

How similar are they all in ages? My parents are in their early and late 80s. I did wonder about @Feckedupbundle's point about some people being somehow "trained" to do this.

I don't remember either of my grannies being like this at all, or to be fair my late FIL who would be roughly the same age as my parents. And I know there are lots of lovely older people who just get on with things, look out for their family however they can and don't like causing a fuss. But there just seem to be so many of us on this thread whose parents seem to be following a very similar script and I wonder why that is.

I was just starting a bingo card then realised @JohnPrescottsPyjamas had done one upthread which I was sniggering at - it's so true. I'd also add in:

Refusing appropriate adaptations/help at the right time, usually with a bad outcome
Expecting things to be rearranged for their convenience, even when it's vastly inconvenient for everyone else
Being weird about money
Often misogynistic
Living somewhere awkward
Apparently not understanding that other people need to work or look after children

@HoraceGoesBonkersmine are mid 80s parents…my grandparents were fabulous….yes to mine living in an awkward place. @JohnPrescottsPyjamas bingo card is somewhat bittersweet but funny nonetheless.

It can't be a surprise to reach extreme old age to think your husband or you may pass away. That doesn’t mean to say you want to plan for it.

No, but just like many things in life it needs doing or it falls into someone else’s shoulders. I wonder if it’s easier to do these things at a relatively young age when it seems very far away and not so much of a threat.

Your Mum most be very old. I'm 74 and was born after the last war, obviously I have no memory of it.

So your Mum, if she recalls the last world war, is 80+? Even then, her memory of it must be vague as she would be quite old now.

Does she have dementia?

Oh wow. Reading this has been so eye opening. Every single post is just more and more reassurance that going low contact is the right thing.

my 88 year old father is refusing any care for him or mum - who has dementia. They had respite in a care home when he’d had a black out and fall and it was awful. Somehow I still managed to be running round after them in there too and the staff actually pulled me to one side and gave me a real talking to about caring for myself and putting boundaries in place. They were so good but nothing was ever good enough for dad and he was vile to them.

i have arranged in home care that was refused so they’ve now been home without any care and I’ve not been there to run around. the whole episode caused me to have a breakdown. There have been poison emails and phonecalls demanding I get over myself and get back to serving how it was before. Then ‘we can’t survive without you’ and emotional manipulation and abuse.

Expecting it to come to a head in the next week. I’ve got a back up plan of the care home and carers as I won’t be in the country. But it’s very funny how this always happens when Inhave something planned. Three holidays have been cancelled/returned home early from now. Not once have I been asked how I’m coping. There is an entire essay I could write about what’s gone on, but safe to say it isn’t happening anymore. My poor small
child has lost out so much over the last year and it’s stopped now. We’re all happier for the radio silence.

I don’t think they’d have stopped until they had destroyed me. And even then I’d have been told to get over it and carry on.

Im still in bed hence awful typing as only one eye open and on my phone

@Exasperateddonut your sentence ‘I don’t think they’d have stopped until they had destroyed me’ really resonated. I have always said my mother has a self destruct button and when she presses it there is no point where she stops or anyone around her can say stop - lets be sensible and look at what we can do. I have a medical condition managed well with medication and lifestyle changes- stress is not my friend. I genuinely think she is such a doubting Thomas that she will not believe my husband when he asks her to back off until I keel over and have a medical alert. Harsh but that is how it feels.

I thought we might like to share the weekends bingo numbers xx

1. 86 yr old father with end stage heart failure decides to drive 80miles to nearest shopping centre so that mother can go to marks and Spencers for socks!!! In the middle of the severe gales

2)Bombard me with emails and multiple phonecalls because your father is wondering when he will see you again. FFS I arranged to go down for their diamond anniversary recently,it didn't suit as they were going away two days later!!!

Not bingo but the C word. Eldest sister has taken the hit the last two years. I am not doing it,I am not having her wreck yet another special day. At least ten Christmases I have hosted and she has wrecked. By wrecked I mean torrential criticism to me, if no reaction needle me about my children, drunk, always. Demand very special dietary requirements that are impossible and change hourly.

I could go on. Please tell me about your weekend bingo!!!

Ignored email setting out how I can help but how unwell it has made me to take on the bulk of their life.

instead I got a message saying I needed to be there immediately as one of the fell earlier in the week and the wound isn’t healing.

i am not a doctor.

@Lexy70 @Exasperateddonut sorry that this is happening. this thread was started because I read so many similar posts from clearly busy, sometimes unwell people dealing with frankly unreasonable elderly parents. Sometimes I wonder if it should be moved from elderly parents thread to simply ‘unreasonable’ or to middle aged people who have pandered and tolerated ridiculous behaviour. I know @MereDintofPandiculation rightly checks some posters that they are not simply bashing ‘the elderly’. The ‘parent bingo’ cropped up in a counselling session recently. My sister and I have sought it as we need to be strong for each other in dealing with our mother. Our brother is a very erratic and often volatile critic of us so we wanted to seek some impartial advice. The counsellor asked us if we felt the ‘bingo card’ was us deflecting from our mother’s poor behaviour. Absolutely. We have always done it. Counsellor pointed out that from how we have described our mother the ‘bingo card’ needs ripping up. Without going into too much detail the counsellor laid bare what we have tip toed around that our mother has narcissistic personality disorder. The bingo card seems like it has run its course-perhaps because it isn’t really helping any of us. Solidarity to everyone dealing with similar issues-please look after yourself. It feels like an epidemic for our generation tolerating silly behaviour rather than being able to point out how preposterous it is. Our brother thinks we are cold fish - we are just knackered.

Going to have to visit her today to sort out her power of attorney. This has been ongoing for nearly a year now. She was reluctant because "You can just come to mine/accompany me to the bank " etc if any admin needs doing.
It took her neighbour collapsing suddenly and ending up in hospital for her to agree that it might be useful.
She has managed to nobble the process twice, causing us to have to redo the process,so I am going to make sure she can't.
I am already dreading it, because once you are in her house it's difficult to get out, there is no pleasant conversation, she will just talk at me, interrupt if I try to respond and spout GB news talking points for as long as she can.

@reesewithoutaspoon sympathy with your challenge. I’m preaching here what I am not very good at practicing but could you be firm and just say ‘ Mum stop. I am here today to complete the task of POA. Once I have done that I will be leaving.’ I do think they gabble to fill the air to avoid reality. It may be out of fear but it is no help to those of us picking up the pieces.

I just go with a pre planned excuse to leave, like shopping in the car that needs to go in the fridge.

I know she just wants you to stay, but she is just so negative and bitter and conversation is non existent that is painful and boring to visit
I can't remember the last time she asked after me or her grandkids. She isn't interested in anything but herself.

I can't remember the last time she asked after me or her grandkids. I found that. But then I started emailing him with what the family were doing, and he started talking about the family rather than the neighbours.

I put it down to him needing to talk rather than to listen (he listened to Radio 4 all day), so giving him family news when it didn’t impinge on his talking time was they way to go.

We had a family joke that my mother was so disinterested in anything anyone apart from her had to had to say, we should get a life size cut out of us all so she could just talk at it and she probably wouldn’t even notice!

She could never listen to anyone else’s view without talking over them and/or bulldozing her particular opinion - whether it was asked for or not. She was unable to understand that sometimes people just want someone to just listen and show empathy, not hear her being judgmental and self righteous about their life choices that hadn’t perhaps hadn’t worked out as well as planned.

She was very fortunate that she married my dad who enabled her and had financial clout so she had the freedom to be snobbish about others - although ironically she was from a very impoverished background herself.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas yep again I find myself nodding in agreement. Monologues about how everything she did was better than everyone else’s choices. Black catting is a useful term. As in if you had a black cat our mother would have a blacker one. It’s all bitten her on the backside now though. Now our father is safe and sound in nursing care everyone has scarpered as she’s alienated everyone with her horrible rude judgemental behaviour.

@BlueLegume I think it was the lack of personal accountability too. Nothing was ever her fault. It was always because someone else had ‘made’ her do it, or because someone else hadn’t ‘done what they were supposed to’ ie what she wanted them to do! Or she would blame her rudeness or unreasonable behaviour on tiredness or because she was allegedly ‘feeling under the weather’ I never heard her say, “You know what? I was wrong. I didn’t handle x,y or z particularly well. Next time I’ll handle things differently’
Always full of excuses.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas absolutely spot on. Zero accountability, zero humility. But content dumping on us 3 and being self entitled.

I've had a quiet few weeks after I told mine I only wanted to communicate if it was something important about DF (this is after years and years of trying and increasingly failing to cope with her).

Today I got in and realised she'd sent a card to the kids wishing them a happy Halloween and saying her and DF (DF hasn't been capable of sending anyone anything for years) have sent them a voucher. If she has sent them a voucher I don't know where to, although she does like sending my household stuff - I feel really awkward about it but I think that's the point.

She's got a real thing about wanting to be the centre of attention at birthdays, celebrations, holidays etc.

It feels like we're back to her attempting to ramp up contact - one of the reasons our relationship has ended up being such a complete bin fire was that she always wanted more contact than I did, and just wouldn't listen when I tried to talk to her about some of the times her behaviour had been very upsetting (she's never wrong).

@HoraceGoesBonkers completely understand the wanting to be centre of attention at events. My mother was centre of attention since forever birthdays, deaths,….my own wedding was all HER day. I didn’t want to get married. She just told me she wouldn’t speak to me again if I didn’t do it her way.

This is really very clever. Think it probably works a treat for nice-but-cabin-fevered relatives.

How long you got?
But seriously- boundaries.....

@TammyJones we understand about boundaries we really do but @Lexy70 and @HoraceGoesBonkers probably do what we do - turn up to visit with good intentions but then find ours selves manipulated into trying to ‘fix whatever random appliance or issue our mother tells us is not working. They are all fine but it prolongs us being there and it enables her to play the victim as to how awful her life is. As other people have said nothing at all planned sorted or adjusted for getting older but mocked peers who did make lifestyle changes for old age.

Unfortunately I think many of us on this thread have parents who just don't do boundaries. So either you accept they're going to trample on them or the relationship falls apart.