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.

Definitely recognise this.

My mother spent some much time and energy into cultivating and projecting a public personality - that contrasted so starkly with her in house one - I honestly think she didn’t actually knew who she really was in the end, if that makes sense?

She would speak in cliches and sound bites she’d picked up from others, but there was no substance behind what she said. If questioned or challenged, she was unable to justify a stance and used anger, attack and aggression as a defence rather than stating a view logically.

This is exactly the sort of thing mine would do! I sometimes found out what had happened and sometimes not.

One of the weirdest ones was when a relative I'd never, ever heard of got in touch via my husband's work e-mail asking him to let my mum know that an aunty I'd vaguely heard of but not seen or spoken to for decades had died. I'm guessing that at some point my mum had been boasting to distant relatives about DH's job...

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas agree that the energy spent cultivating how they wish to be seen is astounding. Looking back whenever we went anywhere as kids we would either have a lecture from her before we left home or in the car as we arrived ’telling us’ what we were and were not allowed to discuss from home. It usually went along the lines of ‘so BlueLegume I won’t tell them about how naughty you were last weekend’. What that actually meant was ‘BlueLegume do not even think about telling anyone that I screamed in your face and gave you a good slap’.

They are all street angels, but house devils.

@reesewithoutaspoon brilliant - love that

Very much this.

The instructions I regularly received in my childhood were always, “No one needs to know our business”

Which actually translated to exactly the same meaning as yours.

I've just remembered taking a bus trip with my parents on an urban route in the big post industrial city I studied at.

Inexplicably my mum skipped on, sat right at the front (in the seats normally for older people) and started swinging her legs and going "whee" and giggling. Because look at her doing something as novel as getting on a bus through a working class bit of the city... it was excruciating.

Yep
"No one needs to know our business"
"Dont air your dirty laundry in public"
"What will the neighbours think" was also a common phrase.
Warnings to be on our best behaviour wherever we went and not to show her up.
Always about the image she projected.
Proud of the fact she could control her kids with 'a look' because if you ignored that look you got a hiding when you got home.
I spent my childhood on pins, never knowing when she would next explode.

This is all sounding so depressingly familiar. So much of my childhood was about creating a look and not showing her up.

It does feel like it's beginning to fall apart now though. Partly, she's beginning to forget who she's told what and inconsistencies have emerged. Partly it must be becoming obvious to her friends that she isn't a hands on grandparent with a close family as she likes to pretend!

Ironic isn’t it. Do as I say but I will also say what I want to everyone about you and your life.
As @EmotionalBlackmail said it does eventually fall - it is a giant house of cards.

Oh gosh yes all they want it soundbites to pass onto people they want to impress. No real interest or desire for any relationship or conversation of any depth. I feed them bland and uncontroversial facts. I show no weakness or vulnerability as it is used against me.

And of my yes to the phone voice and acting if there is a suitable audience. The shrill, fake accent and voice. Often copying an accent of an area they admire, utterly crazy.

@BlueLegume that round robin sounds vile, your poor husband. Mine are obsessed with people's weight and openly criticise all. Despite being chunky now themselves

@BlueLegume poor you haven't to deal with your M this week. Please post updates and we can hopefully offer support. X

@Lexy70 thank you that means a lot. Incredibly anxious today not helped by the fact my sister is having an operation this week and I am worried for her and brother has suddenly decided that of the 3 of us I am not ‘caring’ enough. Nothing I do is right for him yet he has taken on this holier than thou attitude. Adding to all this the star of the show should be my Dad who is actually doing ok in the nursing facility. He won’t recover but I am pleased he is settled and the staff are pleased with this. I feel like my mother has sabotaged Dad’s final life left if that make sense by making everything about herself. Boundaries, boundaries and more boundaries this week. Love to all going through this. Reflecting on what my parents were doing at my age - i.e. child free, parent free, free to do whatever they wanted is not helpful. Oh and I remind myself I also have my own family. What a mess.

@BlueLegume you have so much on your plate and rightfully worried about your sister's op. Your brother is just the gift that keeps giving. Just when you feel stressed and overwhelmed he makes everything worse. I wonder what you would have to do to be caring enough in his eyes, unbelievable x

Totally get about your mum making it all about her when really the focus should have been on your very unwell dad. My D isn't allowed to be ill, if he complains of anything she will up him with a new complaint, awful.

I hope the week is uneventful however your M likely will sense a shift of focus onto your sister and no doubt will up the ante. These folk are nothing but predictable.

Stay strong, much love xxx

I’ve posted before, but I could never watch Keeping Up Appearances because it was too close to home and therefore not very amusing to me.

Hyacinth was my mother - even the way she dressed and her hairstyle - the pretentiousness, the oneupmanship, the artificially created persona and the constant concern that the neighbours needed to perceive her as upper middle class when really everyone else had too busy lives to even care.

I'm not in quite the same situation, however my mother wants me to visit every day. I'm a similar age to you and suffer with a chronic illness that will never improve, so I'm trying to live my life while I still can. She doesn't need me every day, lives in a mess because she won't throw things away (not quite hoarding but just millions of magazines, books, catalogues and cards.). It all drives me mad after about five minutes there, I can't imagine going every day. I currently manage twice a week for an afternoon.

@Imatorturedpoet another ‘what my mother wants’ - what about us adults who have had our lives utterly sabotaged by ‘what they want’. It isn’t my fault my mother has no friends or hobbies. As @JohnPrescottsPyjamas said re Hyacinth Bucket - that with bells on. I also live with a managed long term illness and stress is not good for said illness. It is horrible feeling the same emotions of emotional blackmail same as she did when I was a kid. Frankly if this was a relationship my own mother would have called it toxic. Dreading the upcoming week but I want my sister to be able to focus on her own health.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas yes too close to home Hyacinth for me too, unbearable to watch.

Funny I am also chronically ill with a neurological condition, perhaps linked to all of us being emotionally abused as daughters from birth?

PS Mother doesn't give a shiny sh*t about my illness

@Lexy70 please take care - they don’t, it’s an inconvenience in their own drama.

Totally.

Whatever you’re suffering from, according to these parents, you’re either being over dramatic and/or they’ve got it ‘far worse’!

There is no doubt in my mind that my hyper vigilance is as a result of a childhood spent in constant fear and anticipation of extreme physical and emotional punishment for normal childhood mistakes. I was never naughty because I was genuinely too scared to be.

Yes my illness is the same, should avoid stress, but how?! The thing is, she had a really close relationship with her mother, so she expects us to be the same. She still calls her long passed parents mummy and daddy and told me multiple times that she cried about leaving her parents when she got married! I'm sure she thinks it's all done between us, but I'm tired of listening to her incessant talk about nothing - people I don't know, tv shows I'm not interested in etc etc, all repeated to many times to count.

Septoctwed, blue legume, John Prescott, lexy, and everyone else..
so sorry you are all going through such twittery. It does seem like ‘ I took you to stately homes ‘ thread part 2. I , have been catching up with the thread and you are all right - they have SUCH similar behavior! It’s shocking and my heart goes out to everyone .
I’m so glad you started this thread OP, it’s so unbelievably helpful to learn from everyone, to share, and to know we are not alone. Thank you so much.

My youngest, who is at very early primary school, has asked a few times about seeing granny and I'm not sure what to do.

I have quiet enjoyed having a more peaceful life and my daughter is too little to see the emotional manipulation for what it is.

My mum will, for example, spend time telling the kids what a wonderful place her home country is and so I then have to explain to the kids that no, we're not visiting there (it's ££££ to get there and has a high violent crime rate so not somewhere I want to go back to). When I asked her to stop it she pretended she was not in fact trying to push the kids to ask for a really expensive, difficult to organise holiday.

There is a LOT of banging on about her old country and how wonderful it is - she was meant to be helping out with teaching over lockdown but used this as an opportunity to wang on about her favourite subject.

There' a family meet up over Christmas but I've got something else on so gave that as an excuse.

I cannot thank everyone enough for sharing their experiences and the wonderful support contained in this thread.

I am bowing out of here now- my time is up. I could take the narcissism and batshittery no more and I have walked away. I hope you all have the most gentle of journeys and continue being support for each other.