Please helm me with my relationship with my mum - talk to me of older women and drama queenery

[TheSmallClanger]

I've posted about this before, and I apologise if I posted and ran on the old thread. I promise I won't do it again.

Mum and I have always had quite a good relationship, despite some differences. However, lately, in the past couple of years certain negative aspects of her behaviour have escalated badly, and I'm finding her a little difficult to deal with.

The best description I can give of the behaviour as a whole is over-reacting, a lot. It's not usually to personal things - often it is fairly ordinary things. She has always over-reacted to being ill, as I have posted about before, and this over-reaction has a nasty habit of denigrating or downplaying others' problems. For example, she bent my ear for half an hour last night about a cold, all the while stressing how she is soldiering into work still, yet will outright deny that I have a dodgy foot to anyone who is listening - my crappy gait is all my own fault for not standing properly, apparently.

This over-reaction extends to going off into rants about things on the TV ("I cannot STAND magicians! You are going to HAVE to turn it over! Load of nonsense!"), normal behaviour in others that she doesn't appreciate, and seemingly normal, pleasant behaviour from her friends. For example, she regularly rails against her friend who runs the ladies' tenpin bowling club for assuming that she wants to come out for a drink, when doesn't Julia KNOW that she can't be bothered, and there's nothing she likes less than hanging around with a bunch of WOMEN?
There is also a current incident running involving a funeral of a family friend, and she is now insisting she has some sort of morbid phobia of funerals, and complaining loudly about having to go. I tried to say that you aren't supposed to enjoy funerals, but she insisted that she had a particular, special antipathy to them.
The other big thing that sends her into a tailspin is travelling anywhere. A couple of years ago, she developed a thing about going out in the car - I suspect she had an accident that she has managed to conceal from Dad somehow. After that, she started refusing to drive on motorways, refusing to drive after dark, refusing to drive long distances. This has now expanded to getting hysterical when in the car with others driving. I now refuse to drive her anywhere, as does my brother, and my dad would like to. This means that her visits to our house become a long round of drama, where she will not drive, then tries to catch a train, always forgetting that we live nowhere near a station, and usually ends up somewhere a long way away from me, so I have to go and fetch her. If the train is delayed, she has been known to have a tantrum and go home.
If she does come and see us and go out with us, she will usually make a show of walking really slowly, then accuse DD and I of walking too fast. This is not true; DH is always taking the piss out of me for being a snail!
Sorry this is a bit ranty, but the phonecall last night left me drained and irritated. I could do with some coping strategies, and I'm also a little bit worried about her.
Dad tends to vacillate between pandering to her completely, and getting really annoyed and complaining to me about her. I believe my brother is spared this.
If anyone has any words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

Should be help in the title!

I must stress that the tantrums are usually interspersed with quite long periods of normal behaviour, when we get on fine. She manages to hold down quite a responsible full-time job, and other people get on with her quite well.
It's just that last week, I have dealt with one rant after another, and I need to break the pattern. I want to be able to say "call me back when you've calmed down".

I have to laugh really, because this sounds just like my mum in her later years.

The walking bit especially... she would go slow.. so I would go slow to keep pace with her, so she would slow down even more.. to the point we were almost going backwards..

It must be mentioned here, that this woman was going out ballroom dancing at least twice a week, and could do a quickstep with the best of them.

She would moan and be critical of all the neighbours... if ever any of them was ill, in her view, they were putting it on... but when she was ill it was deaths door....

A lot of it was jealousy, not that she would ever admit to that.

Even years ago, when my eldest cousin got married, she had a hissy and spent the day scowling and muttering because she felt that she should have been on the top table.. (her sister, cousins mother, had died years before and mums BIL had never remarried, but did have a ladyfriend, and my mother would just blank her completely).

She often reminded me of Blanche off Corrie.. and I miss her very much as she died 3 years ago, but she really was hard work at times.

all sounds very familiar. like you my mum can have long periods of being absolutely fine. then she will go off on one. i don't know how to deal with it either. the periods of normality tend to lull you into thinking it's all fine and that you can just get on with life and then...bang!

also she does a lot of gaslighting.

it's complicated by the fact my dad will allow her to be like this and will apologise to us in private afterwards but his reaction makes you feel guilty for 'triggering' her outbursts or discussing her difficult behaviour - as if ignoring it or walking on eggshells is the only solution. i tried to discuss it recently (well maybe 18mths ago) and it all went very ugly.

My mum was very very passive/aggressive.

A prime example would be on her birthday.

Building up to it each year would be "dont bother getting me anything, a card will do" ...

One year the card arrived a day late in the post (I live down south, she was up north).. I ring her up to wish her a happy birthday on the day, had sent flowers too, and had given up waiting for her to ring me to let me know they had arrived.. oh no.. it was down to ME to ring HER apparently... lol..

And all I got was "well if the card turns up tomorrow, I can always save it till next year". and yes, she was being bitchy and serious.

She would come to stay with us a couple of times a year, and it was always a bloody nightmare. She was so picky about food it was almost impossible to give her anything that she liked. Yet take her to a restaurant and there would be no problem...

The health thing rings bells with me. My parents have become obsessed with theirs. Every time I speak to them I am given lengthy and gloomy updates. It's sort of like a very depressing hobby and keeps them, esp my mother firmly centre stage.

Not so ill that they don't do what they want, but potentially ill - it's a control mechanism to me I suspect.

Hilariously my dad was bemoaning a friend of theirs the other day as 'the biggest hypochonriac he knew..' My jaw fell open. What can you say?? If anyone else is ill them seem only vaguley aware.

Yup...mine collect ailments too.

...and negativity with a divide and rule ethos amongst their children...it has stopped at the grandchildren though...I won't allow it.

Funny old feeling to stand back and watch your parents replaying the games of 30 years ago with your own children...it really did show me how ingrained their behaviour is and hoping for change is futile.

My mother is into competitive illness too - and always has been. I've never had a ... (insert ailment here) as bad as the one she had ... (insert a date here). If she doesn't think she can win , like on the couple of occasions when I have had serious health problems, then she just ignores me completely; including no offers to help or look after me.

She was even like this when I was a child. One nasty sporting injury I had sustained wasn't deemed bad enough because I wasn't making much fuss. If I hadn't been in so much flippin' pain I would have laughed.

My sister, on the other hand, gets heaps of sympathy from her for all sorts of nonsense, such as on a shopping trip, not being able to find a pair of trousers she liked. So I think in my case the problem is down to the scapegoat/golden child thing.

Oh yes. My mum has suffered, you know? Whereas we put it on for effect...

She also tries to do that divide and rule thing with my sister and me, also with our children - she says some terrible things to me about my nephews and nieces but I'm pretty sure that my sister hears terrible things about DD, if that makes sense? She seems to think we don't talk to one another, and DSis and I now laugh about it, because she is such a stirrer - "ooh, dont tell DSis I said this about her, but..." to each of us in turn!

She also has this idea that I and she are 'so alike' - actually, we're not. We have very different viewpoints but because, unlike my sister, I don't go out of my way to argue my points with her (waste of time, tbh), she thinks we are kindred souls and then reacts like I've done some massive betrayal if I refuse to agree with her...

As for the drama... I'll never forget we went out en famille to the pub and DH went to the bar while we got seats, asking me to go find out what drinks people wanted. I asked her and you'd have thought I'd have told her to go pole-dance in the middle of the lounge... rears up in her seat, glaring "You KNOW I don't drink!" in a very loud, icy voice.

It was so random (especially as she does drink wine and Baileys at home!) I'm afraid I involuntarily laughed at her and said 'what, so you're going to sit there and not have anything at all? Not even a glass of water?'

My sister heard for the next week about how awful I'd been to her, showing her up in the pub....

I'm afraid I have no practical advice, as your mum sounds far worse than mine. Her only intransigence is that on Fridays she does her food shop. Doesn't matter that DD and I have taken a day off and travelled 250 miles to see her and thought she might like a day out somewhere nice, no, she's going to spend 3 hours trawling around the individual local shops before we can even think about doing anything!

I'm afraid I don't really have any useful advice either, but I know how you feel; sometimes I think it's comforting to know that you're not alone. The fault isn't with you, it's with your mum - that's how I cope. I've suffered so long with low self-esteem, thinking it was all my fault, that I was somehow unloveable because my mum can't seem to care about what I do. At least not to my face. That I know of.

I've just got off the phone with my mum after a particularly disappointing and frustrating attempt to wish her a happy birthday. I usually send a handmade card (it's a hobby of mine), but with 3 kids and all the attendant activities that entails with the added complication of ill health (mine and the children), card making isn't happening at the moment. And since I don't want to pass on my germs to them (and more particularly my dad, who's very frail) I thought a phone call would be appreciated. How wrong was I?

I managed to interject a "happy birthday" fairly near the start of the call, which prompted a long rant about all the reasons why it wasn't. About 20 minutes into the 'conversation' (if you can ever call it that - she talks, I listen), she actually thinks to ask how I am.

No sooner have the words left her mouth when she starts off on another rant. I certainly didn't get any sympathy; she just went on about how their carer wasn't well and the poor dear tried to struggle on with her work but had to go home and got nothing but abuse from her co-workers when she phoned in....

She manages to make me feel so unrelated; I feel like a stranger.

My brother has the right idea - he stays away, doesn't offer to help, doesn't phone. When he's ill, she gets the carer (not me, the carer) to take her over to see him, phones the doctor for him, buys food for him and phones me to get me to check up on him (and no, I didn't phone him because I knew he wouldn't want me to).

I always tell her if she needs anything she just needs to call, and me and my DH have sorted out lots of things for her, but always she says "oh nobody ever does anything for me". OK mum, I'm obviously nobody then.

Normally I'd ignore it, but I think I'm feeling a bit sensitive today because I'm not feeling well and my resistance is low.

I basically don't listen; I just hear her talking and make occasional appropriate sounds in the right places and let go of whatever it was she was going on about. My mum is deeply frustrated with her life and has to vent somewhere; unfortunately she just saves it up for me.

At the end of the day it's her problem, not mine. If she wants to wallow in misery, that's her decision; I can't change her. All the things she moans about can be solved, some easily, some with a bit of effort yet she chooses not to. She's always had a 'poor me' attitude, it's just got worse as we've got old (or maybe I just notice it more now).

The way I deal with it is I try not to identify with any of it; I know that I do all I can for her, it would be nice to be appreciated / acknowledged but I know that isn't going to happen. I also limit contact - to be totally honest I only visit so I can see my dad (and he does appreciate everything we do).