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.

Don't get me started on the female-default for daughters being expected to jump through hoops while the very important or totally useless brothers swerve all responsibilities and must not be inconvenienced.

Yes, I guess some of it is a generational inbuilt sexism thing, but I think jealousy can also come into play. Why should our generation of women be allowed to get away with NOT DOING THEIR DUTY?

Fuck that. Sideways.

@BlueLegume thanks so much for your response. I'm so happy for you that you've been able to take a step back and put some boundaries in place. Your mother and MIL could be sisters! They seem so similar in a lot of ways and how they communicate.

As you say everyone thinks my MIL is great- she's a horrid woman who mocks others, laughs ya t their misfortune and thinks she better than everyone else.

She's never outright said she plans to live with us rather than a home but it is inferred. She did actually ask to move in with us once when we bought a new home. I flat out said no in shocked horror and she hasn't mentioned it since but I firmly believe she thinks I will care for her once she needs it. As I said, our marriage could not survive.

General conversation is so difficult as it's full of insults, refusal to answer me if I speak to her (she pretends she hasn't heard me) and offhand remarks. Then theres the pressure she puts on my DH; 'you never have time for me', 'I always come last' etc etc. my poor DH works 70-80 hours per week and has two young children. He doesn't have time for himself never mind his DM.

I always remember my Nan saying everyone thinks old people are so sweet, but young arseholes grow old and turn into old arseholes so don't be fooled 😂😂😂

I'd find it quite hard hard to fill in much of DH's life before he was married, and he's now the oldest in his family, with no surviving childhood friends. It will be even more difficult for my centenarian father.

Just to offer encouragement - my DF moved closer to us when he was slightly older than yours. He worked hard to create a new life for himself, joining various civic and historical groups and doing lots of research for them, going to Chapel where he picked up a friend with whom he used to got to lectures all across the city, getting a ticket for the university library. Took a wee while to settle in, but once he settled he was really happy, and glad he'd made the move.

I am in my early fifties. I am the only child of a foul mother (adoptive) who wanted a freshly-minted female baby to play dress-up with and be best friends with. Like a doll.

I was independent and I liked sport and maths, not shopping and fashion. I wasn’t what she had ordered. She didn’t let me forget it.

She had no friends and to be fair she worked hard in the home (huge old cottage with coal fires, very clean, meals cooked from scratch) but had no outside job. I felt stifled.

My childhood was marred by her tantrums and bile. My late adoptive father was a bit scared of her and took the line of least resistance. The sort of man who’d write pompous letters to the council about parking and public footpaths but wouldn’t address the issue of his wife’s volatility and spite. He was hectoring and opinionated but not where it mattered. I partially blame him.

She’d whack me and then say, “stop grizzling or I’ll give you something to grizzle about”. She’d say, “take my advice, don’t ever have children”.

I have wonderful adult children, good health and a kind partner. I enjoy my work and my social life with friends. I see the old woman rarely. She’s now in a bungalow. Everything is outsourced to carers and cleaners (who think she’s nice!) except finance/admin. She has no friends and no bio family living. She has made her bed, sadly. I will not miss her when she dies. Her Alzheimer’s is not the reason for her nastiness - she was always a nasty piece of work.

My advice to anyone with a despicable parent is to step away and take care of yourself. “Choose life” as a pp said. You only have one!

@BlueLegume A technique I use is to try to observe, rather than have a relationship. Stand back a bit, tick off responses in my mind. I think its what carers do. An unpleasant remark is greeted as "she's in a grumpy mood this morning" rather than taken personally. You're not going to find favour, or at least, she's never going to let you know it even if she does feel any flicker of gratitude, so stop looking for it. Act like a scientist observing the behaviour of a lab rat.

This is a great tactic I find. I think I may have got it from mumsnet. Observe like a social experiment and it does kind of remove you from the emotional involvement of it somehow.

I remember a schoolfriend who was a victim of this. Brother was having money saved for him for house deposit, was given expensive presents. Daughter was given crap Christmas presents, for example a single nylon sheet, with the promise that the pillowcases would follow for her birthday in March.

@MereDintofPandiculation I think my FIL will be like this- he's moving from a village in an area that's not great and was his now deceased partners area- to an area with great countryside but lots more to join and do

But you could at least write about professional qualifications, where they worked, hobbies, sports, even just what jobs they do around the home. My mum failed to put anything in, unless she was part of it.

That is uncannily like my gran used to be! Right down to the refusing to leave in a taxi on her own and especially the deciding that she wasn't going to attend the event/ come for Christmas at the last minute,so that someone will beg and plead with her to.
I wonder if some women in the early 20th century were trained to do this? It certainly seems too widespread to be accidental.

Yes, true

@Septoctwed @MereDintofPandiculation but my Mother did know about my father. At every event opportunity she retold tales of their youth and how they met and where they went and on an on and on - like no one had ever had a ‘boyfriend’. We have tried suggesting some form of grief counselling - anticipatory grief perhaps. She has made it clear that what has happened to our father is ‘not how she had planned tings’. Do I think she is in shock, maybe. Do I think she is behaving as she always has done when things don’t go her way. Absolutely. She has always dug her heels in when she is not happy with a situation or occurrence. Everyone has tended to then pander to her and let her have her own way. Only this time we can’t do anything about our father and his illness. We have got to let the professionals at the nursing home look after him. So unfortunately she cannot get her own way. Sadly it appears she doesn’t have the coping skills to accept this. Before anyone throws in ‘it must be hard seeing the love of your life’ card - they were never particularly affectionate and Dad was very much ‘under the thumb’. It sadly needs to accepted this situation was somewhat inevitable.

@BlueLegume The run up to my Dad going into a home was horrible - we had a long period of him going in and out of hospital, my DM kept insisting he was going to stay at home then would try and get him admitted, or would get really martyred and be angry that I and my sister didn't want to provide personal care; I remember one Christmas (my kids were quite little) she didn't ask outright but tried to passively aggressively guilt trip me into going down and providing care so "the carers could get a break".

They'd known for ages that DF was likely to end up in a care home but seemed to have made no plans beyond trying to dump on their kids and by extension their grandkids. I did go down a lot but drew the line at personal care.

DF's illness had been weaponised for quite a few years to basically let her do whatever she wanted - create whatever fuss she wanted, cancel or rearrange things at the last minute. When DF finally got hospital and then residential care she just kept doing this anyway!

My DF refused counselling or antidepressants (I think she thought they made her look weak, although would happily accept sleeping pills).

Her absolute worst, most manipulative and attention seeking behaviour would often surface just after a crisis, generally when people felt they couldn't stand up to her/were really struggling themselves and if anyone said anything afterwards she'd say she was "in shock".

This has been used as an excuse for at least the last 30 years and I guess is one of the reasons I'm now NC. I know her behaviour is going to be off the scale awful when my DF finally dies, I've already had two close family bereavements, and hard as it sound I just don't want to keep making myself sick being her emotional support monkey any more. I've got other people who rely on me being well.

@HoraceGoesBonkers goodness - again I could have written some of that. What is the ‘in shock’ thing? My mother does this as well whenever something doesn’t go her way. I got a ‘bad’ school report once and she took to her bed in about 1979. She was ‘in shock’ that a teacher had written I was ‘reticent in class’…..no joke. It is apparent she has no coping skills.

OP, Please put your family and yourself first. Decide what you can manage without fraying at the edges and being run ragged. Offer that amount of help and no more. Firm boundaries. Remind yourself they will always demand more, even if you are skivvying unpaid 24/7. My parents were that generation too and utterly selfish and self absorbed - prided themselves on their financial genius of buying a house for a few grand that they then sold for 3/4 million, with no appreciation that they lucked out.Raised children in the heyday of the welfare state, so never paid a penny towards our schooling, uni, dentistry, healthcare, optical care. Retired at 55 on brilliant pensions. And felt perpetually hard done by! Expected me to drop everything at all times and do four hour round trips to take them to hospital appointments that had been cancelled weeks earlier (this happened half a dozen times). Or to take them to hospital appointments - I'd arrive, having woken at 5.30 and neglected young kids to make the train to get to them only for them to casually say that a friend had offered to drive them but could I do some shopping for them. Etc etc.I did it for years and then I suddenly stopped. I never regretted putting up boundaries. And weirdly, they didn't care much either. They just wanted a lackey and when I stopped being one they found another.

Put yourself first. Set boundaries. Stick to them and step back. Never ever prioritise their needs over your own. Get professional care in. Ensure your work and family schedules cannot be overridden by their demands.

@Autumnweddingguest thanks - I have stepped right back as we currently speak. I/we have offered to organise professional assistance but our mother refuses so we are stuck. We have all stepped back for now. When the crisis happens we will reassess what we can do.

Ha! Just wondering what she’d have done if you’d have had a report like any of mine

I think that is the best and healthiest thing, for your own mental well-being, to do.

I suspect my mother refused outside help was a) pride - which I can sort of get, because she was always extremely conscious of her public image. She carefully manufactured this perception of grandeur, elitism and snobbishness and was very judgmental of anyone who relied on public services, despite coming from an incredibly poor background herself and being fortunate to marry my father who was from a comfortable one.
And b) By denying assistance, she had leverage and could play the victim role perfectly. I had all the guilt tripping with, “Daughters should look after their mothers” and “You clearly don’t care about me” because I wouldn’t or couldn’t drop everything to drive 2 hours to take her shopping despite arranging home deliveries etc. I even paid for a carer service to take her to the supermarket and help her put her groceries away afterwards, but she would dismiss them and tell them they were not required.

Interesting point about a generational attitude though. She was obsessed with ‘girls who got themselves in trouble’ (despite being pregnant with me when she married dad) Unmarried couples living together and shockingly, when the Savile story broke, she actually said, “You’d think these people coming forward would be ashamed, wouldn’t you?” I was so angry with her about that comment and she responded with, “Well least said, soonest mended” as though it could all be dismissed and brushed under the carpet.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas wow…very many similarities.

@Autumnweddingguest Mine did the cancelling thing. My sister arranged carers leave to go down and see Dad, did the 4 hour round trip a couple of times then turned up to discover DM had organised him to go to a daycare centre the same day of the week my sister had booked time off her work.

Also, DM once asked me to drive her to a routine hospital appointment and I said yes. Hospital appointment was in the afternoon - fine although it needed me to take time off work. I asked her to confirm with the hospital when it was likely to finish as either I needed to get back in time for the school/nursery run or I'd need to organise for my husband to get time off work too. She acted like this was a massively unreasonable of me. I didn't do it in the end.

@HoraceGoesBonkers your post really resonates with me. I took dread how my M will ramp up her bad behaviour when my F passes away. He is 86 with end stage heart failure but she hasn't eased up at all on her demands to be driven all over the country and to fly on cheap holidays.

It can't be a surprise to reach extreme old age to think your husband or you may pass away. But nothing, nada has been planned, sorted, adjusted. I have regular nightmares about what she will be like when dad dies.

Do these difficult mothers become just even more demanding? How do they cope without their enabling husbands?

@BlueLegume yes to the declining all solutions such as click and collect, Tesco home delivery, freezer full of markies meals. Etc etc etc It is endless and she is relentless.

Today my sister's and I received an email with a photo of F with the tag " dad is still alive and well" FFS sent at one am, likely drunk. I've ignored it

I've had many pointed pictures of Dad sent to me, including one with another relative with his head slumped down on his chest and it looked like he was dead - lovely thing to get unexpectedly.

I've posted about this before but DM also had a thing about forcing me into situations where I had to speak to him on the phone, like the phone would go and I would answer then Dad would slur a few words, which I couldn't hear if I was taking my kids to the park or in the supermarket. Or once when we met up, she was keeping Dad on the phone and immediately shoved it at me when I got to the place we were meeting up.

Dad can't actually speak very well at all now, he can maybe manage a few mumbled or slurred words, and I have to go somewhere quiet and really concentrate to hear. She got angry when I asked her to stop the phone calls as it was "difficult to cope" - but it's the usual thing that her apparent coping mechanism is to do something horrible to someone else. She kept doing it even though I asked her to stop, one of the last times I rang her she immediately put my Dad on.

We also used to get early morning and late night DF updates, it took several attempts to stop them.

She also, of course, expected us to keep the phones on at all times in case there was an emergency; but didn't seem to see the flip side of that expectation was not to abuse it with messages very early in the morning or late at night.

Mine also used to rant on about "girls who got themselves pregnant"! I eventually pointed out that they could not in fact do this all by themselves. JFC.