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.

Some of your descriptions resonate. My parents were born in the 1930s and had very deprived upbringings. The 60s and 70s when sis and I were children were party time. My mother's social life was none stop, 7 nights a week. They seldom knew what we were doing or where we were. They went abroad on holiday leaving us at home when we were about 14.
I did all the housework and most of the cooking from about 12.

I got on better with them when I had children (quite late) but it really hit me how little parenting they had done. My parenting as a result was very different.

Once old age and ill health became a problem my sister and I spoke for the first time about what awful parents they had been.
Mum was not unpleasant like others on here though she was sweetly demanding.

I shouldn’t be roaring with laughter but I am @Septoctwed you should have a podcast.
Deals with Tony Soprano?

@Septoctwed our mother has been ‘rewriting’ her version of her past for years and years. Thirty odd years ago she got more and more drunk at a lovely meal my paternal grandmother had made and proceeded to slag my grandma off because she had to get married as she was expecting my DF ‘out of wedlock’. Yes my grandparents did have to get married but they remained married and were delightful, jolly and fully embraced the boom years of the 1950s - both had served as very young people in WW2. She went on a rant about how she herself was truly a ‘virgin bride’ and therefore would get a free pass to ‘Heaven’. Honestly. It was beyond cringe and when I challenged her the next day she told me basically to get back in my box and that I was a slut like my grandmother. My Dad sat by and watched all this. So many stories over the years. Some were funny but these days I just look back with sadness at the utter ridiculousness of her always justifying appalling ‘I just tell it like it is’ attitude.

@BlueLegume wow reading your posts has made me sit here with your mouth open. That's shocking behaviour from your Mother, I am sorry you have to deal with all that. I think it is time to restrict contact a little bit for your own sanity.

@thequeenoftarts thanks. I do think that you just grow up with this behaviour so it messes with your head when they react to you questioning anything with ‘you’re too sensitive’ ‘how dare you?’ Etc. Etc. Etc. I had crippling low self esteem as a child and her response was always to be bewildered as to why my confidence was so low. I am trying to step back but, and I know this sounds stupid I genuinely think there might be a glimmer of hope in her reaction of help when she tells me she ‘can’t cope’. Simple things like a cleaner would really help - her and us. She won’t entertain one. Food delivery - again would help her and us. She won’t entertain one. That one really rankles me as it means in order to ensure she has food we have to drive an hour to deliver food. Honestly I do listen and understand people being aghast and suggesting I walk away my sister and I do try to keep each other sane. Unfortunately our brother is quite like our mother. What ever we do he will always have the opposite opinion. Last year my sister and I did take things in hand with our DF situation and we were left to it by our brother. Loads of paperwork, finding appropriate setting for DF, taking parents to meetings with DF consultants meaning a 2 hour drive each way etc. He left us to it. Cut to a few months later and us having a serious conversation with our mother about her not eating - she has always done this when it suits - we have a mutual friend who is a nutritionist in a clinical setting who gave us some great ideas to help her. We got a snotty message from him telling him to butt out and stop getting ‘random’ advice off ‘random’ friends. Our ‘friend’ has known our mother for all our life so has a very clear knowledge of her personality. Whatever we do he has an opinion and is full of hot air. It helps to vent on here.

Food delivery - again would help her and us. She won’t entertain one. That one really rankles me as it means in order to ensure she has food we have to drive an hour to deliver food.

NEWSFLASH - You dont HAVE to do anything. honestly. Let her chose for herself if she wants food or not. If she wants to eat toast all day - let her.

She has got to her grand old age making her own choices and decisions without your help. So she can carry on.

Stop being an option.

(all the above is sent with a hug knowing how hard it is 😘but also knowing you have to stop kowtowing to her selfishness)

@SnoozyTeaBags completely understand and agree. If I am honest I think she gets a buzz seeing my sister and I, and my brother to a lesser extent, anxious and trying to help her….attention is attention after all. Thanks it all makes me feel I am not being a terrible person.

Exactly, she wont starve in 24 hours or so.
If she has capacity and money you don't HAVE to get food for her

@BlueLegume problem solved right there. Your brother can take over her care since her understands her so much.

I really sympathise OP and you're not a terrible person. My mother is in her 80s and is being a bit difficult.

She refuses to go into a care home and has told her (temporary) carers not to bother coming back, but then complains that she can't do things.

She has a lovely neighbour, who would check on her and help her with things but she's convinced that anyone who tries to help her is 'bossing her around' and the neighbour is now described by my mother as 'a bossy boots'.

She is practically housebound, can't clean, can barely cook or look after herself so it falls to me and my DP to run errands and try to support her.

My brother is useless and despite living less than five miles away from her, refuses to see her. When I offered to pick him up, take him to see mum (he was always the golden boy) and drop him back home, he asked whether she was dying. When I told him that she wasn't, he completely lost interest.

DP and I both work, have three kids (one with ASC) and I only just about manage as I never fully recovered from my Covid infection in 2020.

Last week, I contacted a care company for mum and they matched her with a carer who lives in the next village. She's meeting mum today and I'm currently sitting here dreading a call from my mother.

Yes, you are feeding (ironically) into her selfishness. Only YOU can stop this, she won't. As has often been said, you can't control other's behaviour, only your own.

My daughter says "no child should be born with a job". I think that is quite profound. What she means is some people are born to make sure the parent has help in later life, some born to give a sibling company, some born to "fix" a broken relationship etc etc. Totally unfair.

Some of us are born to fulfil a need that a parent has. We can't. It is not up to us to do that.

@JessiesHuman good luck. We have abandoned even trying to get her to engage with anyone. Fingers crossed your mother will see sense and give you some respite.

@BlueLegume the sexual morals of the war time generations were much more complex than the stories of the 1960s would have us believe. I can thoroughly recommend the Cazalets if anyone wants a great through the generation read.

My mum also has that weird, boomer, virgin purity thing going on. (My grandparents all had honeymoon babies)
Unhelpfully she brought that baggage into the 80s &90s, expressing her broad mindedness that unmarried girls could use tampons. That at 22, my long term boyfriend should be in separate room yet it was healthy for my brother to work those urges out before settling down.
It's was a big part of why I chose not to marry in white, hated the symbolism of it.

She has calmed down about modern norms but relatives that got divorced in the 90s still get referred to as she ran off, he's just celebrated 25 years with the new wife, like it happened yesterday.

My father, always quite a selfish & quick-tempered character, became positively nasty towards me in the final years of his life. I understand it is difficult being old and I was doing my best for him but he was self-centred & unappreciative. The last Christmas he ever spent with us he was really quite spiteful towards me, including our final conversation just before he was leaving on the 200-mile journey home (my DH was driving him). Apparently they had the most massive row en route because my DH felt so angry on my behalf. My father was defiant and refused to accept he was behaving badly towards me.

After that we spoke on the phone but I never actually saw him again because the pandemic arrived keeping us apart and he died later that year (though not of covid). I did love my father so on a certain level felt sad his death had come about under those circumstances. But I also felt a profound sense of relief it was finally over

Even if she had been a fantastic, kind and supportive mother, you don't have to make your own life unbearable trying to make her happy. And you know that whatever you do she won't be happy. Despite all you are doing you still feel guilty.

I know it is easy to say and feels impossible to do but you need to put some limits in place. It is difficult to accept aging, needing help and having to get assistance from strangers in your home but she has no choice. Think what will happen if you make yourself ill. At least you and your sister have each other's back.

@StiffyByngsDogBartholomew @itwasnevermine My mother is like this. Always pleading poverty. When she was temporarily in care home after a fall, she asked me to get her loads of things over the course of around three months.

When we picked her up from the care home she got all crappy in the car because we wouldn't allow her to smoke and she offered to pay me back the near £300 I'd spent but kept going on about how poor she was, so I told her not to worry about it and I took the financial hit that I couldn't afford.

A couple of weeks later, she sent me out on errands. I always get the receipts for everything I get for her, as otherwise she doesn't seem to 'understand' how expensive things are. She asked me to get some money from the cashpoint for her, so like always, I got the receipt. She had thousands and thousands in her current account. I honestly felt like a complete mug.

Great - just had a text from the carer they matched with my mother. They're not a match.

@JessiesHuman oh dear - but I doubt you are surprised?

Why are you bothering to maintain a relationship? There's nothing that says you're obligated to. Stop wasting mental energy over it. Leave them to it and let social services pick it up.

Interesting question: why are you bothering?

Because it's a bit boiling frog
Because I truly didn't see it clearly till I had my own teenagers
Because I want my conscience to be clear that I did more than enough
Because she surely can't carry on for much longer
Because of the inheritance and what that means for my kids

Hi, can just say as a 75 year old with a 78 year old husband that your problems are that you don’t have a willy. These spoilt old people only ever respect people with Willy’s and never expect them to do anything for them. It’s the environment they grew up in. Also not just the old and retired, much younger generations also have the same mindset.

My husband and I are lucky we have one middle aged son each and will never have the luxury of making them feel obliged or guilty for not caring for us. Sorry but it make me laugh the way you poor females are making yourselves ill jumping through the hoops of boring old farts who cannot entertain themselves.

Very interesting question @Machiavellian and very interesting response @Septoctwed . Yes to your first 3 points. Point 4 - I think she has at least another 10-15 years in her, no ailments no meds so no reason for any sudden death. Inheritance - I will sound a total idiot here but genuinely it won’t change my life at all. It won’t change my adult children’s lives either. As crass as that may sound it really will not. Yes a few treats maybe but no amount of money will ever make good for my mother’s behaviour. Ready to be flamed but these are the facts.

Another interesting question is:what boundaries

I don't share much information about my life or the kids
I don't phone unless it's a time to get major glory points - death of a relative, perfect, listen, AHH and umm, note how long it takes to do from weepy, to the story where my mum was the hero to proper bitching about the deceased's hobbies/house keeping/parenting if a woman or godlike properties if a man.
Standard call once a week, timed so EastEnders starts within 20 minutes.
What's app - emoticons to most, cultivate busy at work for long days plus fictitious evening obligations.

I need to find my own strategies to stop ruminating over the interactions I do have.

@70Cats fabulous response!! If I wasn’t allergic to cats we would get on very well - you made me 😊

Cross posted with @70cats but the divide between the sexes is clear