Has anyone found ageing parents become unable to hold a two way conversation

[Blackberryandcherry]

Let me preface this by saying I adore my mum and she is so kind and would do anything for me. But, as she’s become older (she’s 70) she seems to have lost the inability to have a two way conversation.

If I meet up with her I tend to get a monologue about various (I think minor) things which have been happening either that day or that week. I can often see her and say almost nothing as I just get talked at.

If I’ve been on holiday, she’ll likely remember to ask how it was, but then with no follow up questions about how was the food, or the hotels or any of the usual things one might ask (for example).

I’ve had a few things going on in my life recently and she’ll never ask about them. She never asks about my friends, or what I’ve been up to. For example I may say I met up with X friend at the weekend but she’d never think to ask what we got up to, or how they were, it’s just straight into her next topic.

I can’t work out if she’s not interested, not listening or too busy thinking of what she’ll talk about next.

It’s odd because my grandmother got like this when she was older and my mum complained bitterly about it at the time.

Can anyone relate to this? I have no idea if I should try and address it, or just put it down to older age. I have just been feeling increasingly drained and frustrated with it recently.

Interesting to hear a lot of posters say family members have become like this as their worlds have got smaller.

My grandmother is in her 90s. When she retired, she took up volunteering and several continuing education classes including languages (I understand learning languages is particularly protective for the brain). She still does all this. She also reads widely. She is not at all self-centred in conversation and very interesting to talk to. I will be taking her approach as a model for retirement!

Quite possibly! We're very close and she calls me every day and we see each other frequently but I think I'm very much a bit player in her life at this stage.

Her life is so full - university then work, travelling, socialising, boyfriend, fitness and on and on. Then she'll remember to pause and ask " how's your new boss?" "Did you have a nice time with X?" then it's back to her 😂

I think the difference is that her chatter is mainly positive whereas the examples in this thread are of parents with negative attitudes or self-centredness.

My FIL isn't like that. Mid 80s and he's still very engaged with life and loves to hear what everyone's up to and share his news.

My dad's 76 and has never been very outgoing, but hearing loss has made it a lot worse. He'll still get animated about the stuff he cares about, but he's never been one for smalltalk anyway. I do feel sad for him because he's always very quiet and withdrawn in a loud, busy room now because he can't hear properly, even if he was never one for chat.

I think it must be a personality tendency thing. No one in my family does this, on either side, 70s and 80s. It would drive me mad! I think if it happened a few times I would call it out

I think it depends I am friendly with a woman the same age is my mum(74), my friend is always busy with this and that, listens and converses when we meet up

My mum doesn't no much she is a carer for her husband her world shrunk.and she doesn't seem to be able to hold a conversation beyond how are you, then its a stream of her talking at me.

It just seems so depressing that people can get like this in their 70s!! My ILs are mid 70s and are like this, but I put it down to them being uninterested and not very conversationally skilled generally. My parents are the same age and are a little better.
But my! I’m in my 50s so it all seems too soon to become a self-absorbed monologer!

That's normal conversation, isn't it

My mum is much the same, love her to bits but her world has become very small and she spends little time with anyone outside her friends who are from similar backgrounds. She’s just lost the ability to relate to others and understand other people’s lives.

My dad's always been like this. Although with him you just get lectured on politics. He can't even be arsed talking to his gc. Then he wonders why we don't phone him.

Thing is, although your fundamental health issues are bigger and deserve acknowledgment, the detail of your childcare woes sound extremely tedious. I’d be swerving that with thoughts of gardening too!

So maybe part of this is us all being self-absorbed and entrenched in the detail of our own lives; combined with a power-shift, from us being ‘the children’ who must always be listened to, supported and take parental attention for granted, to us being ‘the adults’ who do the listening, supporting and being taken for granted.

How good are we at conversation ourselves? A lot of ‘conversation’ is just people battling to talk about themselves. Works ok if the adversaries are equal. Fails when they’re not.

What I see with people getting older is them becoming ‘more themselves’, a distilled version. I suspect we could all work on what we are now, that will be distilled later. Scary!

Both my Dad and MIL are like this. Every now and then they do ask about what we have going on but usually it’s endless stories about people we don’t know and how wonderful they are in forensic detail. On repeat. But to be fair with some comical attention to detail that I often have to bite my tongue at. ‘Obviously gay’ or ‘lovely lady… black’ are ones that I always wonder at but have learned to let slide for the sake of argument. Never said with a hint of malice but just so irrelevant to whatever is actually being discussed!
Like other posters have said when your world gets smaller these things must just feel bigger to you. Your every day.

My mum has dementia and this was the earliest sign. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested but she had lost the ability to think on her feet with follow up questions. So I might tell her something on a call and she would appear disinterested because she wouldn’t say anything other than “oh” but then a couple of hours later she would call my sister and excitedly relay what I had told her because she had time to process what I said. I found it very sad and now I feel so guilty that I was irritated at the repetitive monologue as she can’t do that anymore.

My mum is like this and combined with other behaviour its led to us being very low contact. She has no interest in her grandchildren, that's her loss.

Such an interesting thread. It reminded me of my (late) maternal grandmother, and the time I brought my father to visit her in her care facility. She must have been in the late 80s or early 90s. My dad was only about 10 years younger, as he was in his 40s when I was born. Between her one-way conversation, and his stubbornness to ensure he got a word in, it was at times like having two radios turned on, each tuned to a different station.

It struck me how many of the examples in this thread relate to this issue in females. A couple of posters have already suggested that this is a manifestation of cognitive decline, and I do wonder whether post-menopausal women are more susceptible. Women are more likely to suffer dementia when compared with men; and it has been suggested that this is not just because we live longer, but because we miss the protective effects of oestrogen for decades. Is this another example, but one that gets written off as 'just an old person thing' or a product of social isolation, and therefore not seen as a medical issue.

Yes, but mine were always like this.

@Kindling1970 my mum is terrible on the healthcare stuff re: your heart attack example.

I had a traumatic first birth, and was very worried about my second - and her contribution to this across the course of ~3 years was ‘our local hospital is so much better than yours, if you lived where I lived you’d get much better medical treatment’.

No actually empathy just… ‘my hospital is better and that wouldn’t happen there.’ Then onto the classic ‘Steve from next door has actually just had his knee done’ etc etc.

I did eventually crack on this issue and tell her off.

Yes I think a lot of it is social isolation. I’ve seen young people get like this, needing to download all their thoughts before they can engage.

Whereas the older people I meet regularly are engaged and interesting. That’s because they’re a self-selected sample of people who are out and about doing things - which is how I meet them.

You sound like a joy to be around...

I think when the person concerned also becomes nasty and spiteful it’s even harder.

My MIL got like this in her 80s as she got deafer, it was a way of hiding that she couldn't hear. She was OK one to one in a quiet space when she could hear and was very social all her life but the loss of hearing hit her hard. If your parents are just recently becoming like this I'd assume hearing loss as the most likely cause.

I also think some people can become quite isolated in old age as well and so there's a need to blurt everything out because they haven't had a conversation recently.

Wow. This is almost my exact experience, particularly the phone going down, as soon as we talk about anything that is not to do with her. It really is a thing with old people.

I'm genuinely surprised that this has not been the subject of social or medical research. There must be shrinkage/cell death in the amygdala/cerebral cortex.

My mum was NEVER particularly maternal, or even nice to us as kids, so I'm not mourning the "loss" of her at all. But even for her, the complete disinterest in me, my sibling and the kids is remarkable and they have felt quite sad about it.

It would be reassuring to know why mums turn into facsimilies with fake smiles and no soul.

For around 6 months I visited my mother, listened to her drone on, not a single question or any crumb of interest in me, my life or my kids (pretty much how it’s always been) so I stopped talking. Stopped offering any information to maybe carry on the conversation.

She never even noticed.

Id say hello and goodbye, that’s it.

Then I stopped visiting. It’s been a year since I’ve seen her now. Again, she hasn’t noticed. Not a phone call, text or anything.

Just to add, she has no friends at all, not much family contact, and has no social life either.

She literally couldn’t give a flying shit about us so I don’t miss her at all.

My mum does all of these things too but still can’t converse anymore!

This is how my mum’s dementia was first noticeable, she would ring up with a list of statements for example I have just started art classes but then would get hugely frustrated if I replied with a question like what sort of art or how many weeks.

She just didn’t have the capacity for a two way chat anymore.

What makes you think this hasn’t been the subject of research?