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.

Sadly, I have come across a number of well off pensioners pretending they are hard up and losing the winter fuel allowance will mean they freeze or starve. Its strange, why pretend? Why pretend to be victims, when they aren't, there are many much worse off. Perhaps selfishness? Greed?

I read your other thread @BlueLegume but have nothing of use to add. It’s easy to throw out ‘just don’t answer your phone’ but I know it’s not that easy. I’m sure I read something on here recently about a care assessment refusal could trigger a mental health intervention/detention but these mothers of ours can be so wily.

FIL loves to play the victim. Anything for attention. He spends more on food each week (on top of meals on wheels) than the entire winter fuel allowance but it’s still a cruel measure designed solely to finish him off- not MIL or anyone else, just him.

@SockFluffInTheBath this whole WFA thing really cheeses me off- if pensioners are purely on state pension and rent- then the chances are they are getting help towards rent ( unless it's incredibly low) and will still be entitled- if income is low but they own their house outright then they need to look at some equity release if things are that tight that £300 makes a difference. I do think it might have been set higher at say £20k household income but many of those moaning have far higher income than this plus outright owned houses from the luck of a buoyant market

I have had to listen to a conversation between my FIL and a close relative of his with the relative moaning about it-the guy has almost a million in liquid assets- plus a house -to his credit my 85 years old FIL totally agrees with the gvt on this

My 26 years old son in London with GF who just about get by and yet are on £70k a year between them don't get any benefits at all and aren't really getting a chance to build assets- why should some very comfortably off folks get it and they don't? - especially the kind that like to go on about 'benefit recipients' and read the telegraph like the aforementioned relative.

@BlueLegume one of the issues we had with ours was when my M agreed to look after my sister's dog while she went away for a week. M is perfectly capable of doing this and had even been talking about getting a dog, DS does a lot for her.

About 48 hours before my DS was due to leave M phoned my sister saying she wasn't feeling well, might not be able to look after dog after all but would let her know the next day.

DS then had to run about organising another family member to stay, fill freezer etc.

M then seemed to expect my DS would go and visit, and not have organised anything else for the dog!? I think she had some sort of mad script in her head about what would happen.

I follow M's church on FB and the same day she was claiming to be ill there was a photo of her at a church social!

I stopped asking her to look after our pet, who is very low maintenance, on holiday years ago because we once went away for a UK break and got a string of passive aggressive messages about how much work it was. This was after many, many trips up and down to see her, a couple of hotel stays and takeaways when visiting my parents.

I have had a two day hangover that started form my mother.

I was getting ready for my day on Sunday morning. I was booked for babysitting. My mother broke into a massive rant and anger to me on Sunday morning because apparantly her room smelled of cat piss.

If her room smells of cat piss she only has herself to blame and no one else. She is obsessed with opening windows for ventilation and leaving them open all day long. There is a stray cat that comes in sometimes. But then also the home is so cold and damp and it's possible she's smelling dampness and mold and just confusing it with cat piss.

But anyways she decided to shout at me. No blaming me but just rageful at the idea of cat piss in her room. She had no care in the world for my day ahead and it seemed as if she was resentful of the family that I was going babysitting for without saying any of those words.

So my Sunday started awful and I was sick to my stomach after that. She was really f*cking delusional and she had no right to use me as a verbal punch bag.

I then went babysitting and they are usually good and I am not angry at the children because they are only small and learning but I swear to god they tested my patience and it was all day shouting and screaming.

From start so for about 8 hours yesterday, it was all just a day of abuse and shouting to me.

I am so so so sick with a migraine that just won't go and it was akin to my head just being hammered without anyone taking a hammer to my head.

@Canjo not sure where you are in the World - is there an emergency or SOS number for mental health services you could call?

A migraine for me is debilitating for days and means time in a dark place - room not the internet 🤗

My dad is out of my Life he's psychotic abusive alcoholic

That quote speaks a truth

What a fascinating thread. I have just come off a phone call with one of mums carers, who has never heard a mother speak so negatively about her daughter (me)as my mother does about me, she knows what i do but it still hurts.
mother has always tried to control and micromanage my life. She does nothing at all and expects me to do everything. As an only child who has been in the “parent” role for decades i have started to take a step back from her. However she now tells so many jackanory stories about me that it is getting silly. All of her lies are incendiary and totally rubbish, things like i dont visit ( i go every day for meds), she has given me everything i have, ( i have actually funded her lifestyle for many years) and i am withholding money from her (she hides cash and has lost her card). What really annoys me is that people believe her, she has vascular dementia and i am so sick of being the villian, that i am starting to think i might as well play the villan as i am no better thought of! They really are disgraceful people aren’t they?!

God their antics not nice. Mine is very calculating no money in grandson's card unless he gives her lift. Not said directly but implied. I dont play her games now. Hurtful though. 80s

I live at home with my mother due to a bad housing crisis and I always liked to help at home. She always had a poor tone towards me. I think it was the ways she was raised herself. She was raised at a time where men were glorified and women were like dirt. She carried that with her. She always had a soft tone with all of my brothers. She never said boo to them. No matter what they did. They could have got drunk a lot and got into trouble with the law when they were younger or there was so much more too. She never said anything. But she would flip so easily to me. One brother was a proper dick who was clearly on drugs. The only time she was never able to tolerate him was when he had a girlfriend because eshe hated her and viewed her as a threat. She never said it but that's what it was.

She always had a dislike towards women.

A few years ago I found a strange behaviour. I found some of my underwear amongst her laundry as if they were hers. I tried to understand that and I thought maybe it go mixed up around the home. We always kept our laundry separate and she never washed my laundry nor do I expect her to do that by the way. Weeks and months passed and there were more of my underwear appearing.

Then at one stage I found some of my underwear and it was something I didn't wear for a while because I considered it the good collection. She only would have got that by going into my room and snooping and taking it. I couldn't believe it. We are completely different sizes too by the way. So why was she taking my underwear.

After that episode where she had underwear from my food collection, I put a lock on my door just to stop her from going into my room and snooping and taking.

As time went on I discovered she was taking more and more and more of my belongings. Notebooks, hair clips, other stuff.

Just recently I had medicine in my bag that was swiped. Because it's vanished. When she wasn't at home I dipped into her room and there was that medicine in her bedroom locker. Fucking snooping and swiping it from my bag.

She is completely computer and internet illerate and lately she wants me to find her hair dye because she can't find it in a pharmacy in town.

I used to help her and now I just can't stomach it. She has no respect for me.

She will be a waiting for a cold day in hell before I help her and shop for hair dye for her. I'm not denying her straight out and telling her no because she won't be able tof that but I am just making excuses - I can't find it. The card services is down due to bank maintainance etc.

I'm utterly disgusted with what she did. Snooping, rooting and taking. She is just so idle.

Mine does that . She steals things from me if she gets a chance at my own house and if i
am staying with her. She rifles through my stuff. My daughter stayed with her for a few weeks and she did the same to her. It’s so bizarre/

Is that a dementia behaviour? Or is it just a case of lacking any respect.

Lacking any respect. She’s done it for years.

For me the whole lack of respect thing was a red line.

My "D"M was hellbent on sending my DF to a very expensive nursing home that was in the middle of nowhere with nothing round about it. I kept asking her not to (bear in mind I was one of Dad's POAs) because it would be awkward to get to, none of his friends would travel, it would be a total hostage to fortune if she got ill or had to stop driving.

Rather than just saying she had decided to send him there, she completely gaslit me saying it was on a "temporary" basis and that he'd get moved into the one in town whenever there was space. I didn't believe her but there was no point arguing, and anyway she more or less immediately told my sister she'd bought an enormous chair for the home Dad was being sent to that wouldn't fit in the other one.

I had a boundary about not meeting her at the home which she hated and kept trying to invite herself along - I found it quite stressful doing joint visits anyway because she'd start blowing up my phone when I was clearly going to be getting the kids ready for school or driving down (as mentioned upthread she always wants things to start earlier than agreed - even if there's a good reason they can't).

Also, if my sister went on a joint visit she'd insist they stay for hours. From the visitor book she doesn't stay that long herself. DF is mostly asleep.

Anytime over a couple of years I asked her about the home in town she was really evasive. She seemed to have been going in and actively winding up the manager, who had snapped and said there was only one way beds were freed up.

Meanwhile she started having arguments about the care home fees at the place she had put dad in which were much higher than the one in town.

I then got this garbled story about how she hadn't understood how to apply for the care home in town. I asked if she could apply and then decide if a place came up and just got a load of waffle. "The rooms are very small", "Dad can't see", "Oh but I've got to go to the room"; "Oh we'll see".

She hummed and haed and evaded but just couldn't bring herself to outright say he was going to be in the out of town home permanently and explain her reasoning.

It was the dishonesty and gasightng that really pissed me off. And the expectation that she could tell me a pack of lies but it'd still keep spending hours driving up and down to see her and being a 24/7 support line. No way.

Well my lovely FIL who I posted about on here as a ‘poster boy’ recently moved 160 miles at 85 - well he has now started with some bits of aggression- it’s mainly towards call centre staff when he’s frustrated that things don’t work ‘as they used to’ - he has total distrust of apps of any kind and I’ve heard him do the ‘you don’t understand, you aren’t listening’ with my H too. When the only person who isn’t listening and getting his knickers in a twist is him- I thought we were going to get off very lightly as he’s always been quite an amenable chap but seems time is now catching up with him- he’s always calling my H during the workday too to discuss every little phone call he’s had with one of these places. He moved for very practical reasons that totally make sense but it seems it has indeed freaked him out in terms of the amount of admin involved both on the sale/buy and the post move aftermath.

<sigh> I nearly started a new thread about this but it all hinges on the backstory.

My Mum has, since I went NC, been sending us "presents" once a month; there's four of us and between birthdays and holidays it normally works out as monthly. They're always low value crappy stuff (I mean, not that that particularly matters) and I try and charity shop them quickly.

My birthday one was a couple of months ago and I had a stupidly sentimental card with a note about how she wanted me to bring the kids to have lunch with her. The Easter eggs were tricky as she's scrawled all over them so I can't food bank them.

This month it was DC2's birthday. We got back from holiday to find a note saying our neighbours had a parcel. I didn't think so got DC1 to pick it up.

Of course it was from her, addressed to the kids in MASSIVE writing so DC2 could read it, so I had to hand it over.

As well as the usual bits and pieces, there was a pre-stamped addressed postcard which the kids were clearly meant to send back. Put that in the recycling.

I'd let her have DC1's number at the time which I had some misgivings about. It turned out she'd messaged him to ask if he'd got the presents - he'd replied thanking her. She'd then asked him what we were up to and he'd ignored this, thankfully.

It just feels like I'm stuck in a horrible position with this. It feels like if I send the stuff back or ask her to stop she will have gotten a reaction and will see that as a win.

I'm absolutely going to have to block her on DC1's phone because I feel like things are going to escalate into her trying to get him to meet her behind my back. It's his birthday next month. He's got autism, which she doesn't know about (largely because she's got a lengthy track history of being horrible with other people's medical stuff).

I said when we last spoke that she needed to get professional counselling and have a plan for her housing (she of course lives in a too big, badly adapted, out of the way house that she fully expects other family members to help her with). I'm not holding out hope she will but that's a clear boundary.

She's going around telling relatives she has no idea why I won't speak to her.

DC1 is old enough to understand a bit about why we don't see her, DC2 is just too little.

DH is saying to ignore her but I'm frankly worried about what she's going to do next - she has previously turned up at our house to drop crap off but stopped when I said it was massively intrusive.

She's got previous for making up daft reasons to be in the vicinity so she can "just pop by" with a random item at massively inconvenient times, the most bonkers one was at the hospital when I was in the operating theatre giving birth.

My late sister had loads of mental problems and she used to do more or less the same to her then complain my sister wasn't more welcoming. She genuinely doesn't seem to understand that it's really quite creepy.

I felt happy a few months ago when we had a row and I told her not to contact me again (she tried within a day of course), but it's like at every fucking turn she finds a new way to try and bludgeon my mental health...

Sorry for the rant, but it's a few days on from the parcel and I'm just feeling so down.

@HoraceGoesBonkers that does sound creepy - it looks ‘normal’ but is really all about eroding your boundaries and grasping for control.

@HoraceGoesBonkers @FiniteSagacity control. As ever we re convene and we’ll support each other.

@HoraceGoesBonkers sadly we are just good people.

Thanks @BlueLegume and @Finitesagacity...

I just don't know what to do apart from block her on my son's phone.

I had wondered about contacting her GP but he's already intervened with getting my Dad into a home and she sometimes tries to doorstep him at his surgery and one of her big attention seeking strategies is inappropriate use of the NHS.

I know it sounds mad. If she managed to send a missive apologising and saying she realised things had gone wrong and wanted to fix things that'd be different. But it's like she thinks if she keeps going it will all go back to the way it was...

They very rarely admit they are in the wrong.
What she's probably hoping for is that the presents mean you will respond by acknowledging them and then she gets to pretend everything is Ok without actually facing up to her behaviour.
In 50 years I have had multiple falling outs with my mother caused by her behaviour and inevitably after 6 months or so I would get a call asking if I wanted to go for lunch or a coffee etc. I thought I should be the bigger person and accept the olive branch but she would invariably turn up, start chatting like nothing had happened, and never mention whatever caused the falling out ever again.
Anything but accept that she was in the wrong.

@reesewithoutaspoon yup, I think this is exactly what she wants. And for me to go back to being her support monkey. It's not been easy but I don't want to crack!

She had a caravan really close to my sister and used to go there then moaned my sister didn't want to see her. And also claimed to be "helping" with my sisters kids. I didn't have kids myself then and thought my sister was overreacting or it was her poor mental health talking when she used to keep ranting about her for apparently inoffensive things. 😥