What are your thoughts on caring for parents as they age when they were 'pretty rubbish' parents when you were growing up?

[Leapoffaith00]

Exactly that really?
How much are you supposed to give/care/visit? When you had an awful upbringing due to their selfish decisions. Not just immediate decisions but on going ones for 25 years.

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive to me and my brother (and our father, but he passed away in 1980). Our mother was in the beginning stages of dementia at 92, and she and I had been estranged for decades. When my older brother told me she had been in a single car accident (still driving and living independently at 92, her anger fueled her longetivity), and despite her abuse of him back when he was a child too, we decided that we would "take care" of her in her final months/years because it was the right thing to do (for us) because we didn't want to look back on our lives with any regrets.

And, because we have mostly healed from her past abuse (I was 45 at the time, he was 62), we felt that we could handle her emotional abuse, which only increased exponentially with dementia. Even though she tried to strangle my brother while he was caring for her overnight, when she finally passed at 93, we have zero regrets about our decision. We treated her like another human being - not like a "mother", because she sucked as a mother. But as a human being, we felt she deserved to be well taken care of and spent her final year being pampered. ONLY because she was a human being.

My only advice to you is to do what YOU feel comfortable with. You are the only one having to live with whatever decision you make, and there should be NO judgment by ANYONE on that decision. Looking at it that way, my brother and I were selfish in our actions, because after decades of therapy, the last thing we wanted to deal with is any guilt, real or perceived, that we would bestow on ourselves for not taking care of our mother's needs until the end.

I hope this helps. It's a crappy place to be in, I know.

I can't edit my post, but just to clarify, when our mother had dementia, I was 45 and my brother was 62. The abuse we endured was from when we were both toddlers until we were in our early 20s and went NC, before NC was a thing.

I honestly don't know. I've been thinking about this recently as the women in my family live loooong. My father cut contact and had a second family years ago so I don't have to engage there. My mother was a narc bitch when I grew up. I was clothed and fed, that box was ticked. In fact from the outside everything looked great. But behind the door. We were screamed at afterwards if we spoke publicly, so we looked polite. Silent mealtimes, hitting, screaming in face, locked out, her using me as a therapist when in primrary, sexual abuse from father etc etc
I was scared most of the time.
Now, she has spent last few years slagging me off to my brothers, they told me this, they've eventually stopped contact with me.
But she's a good grandmother.
I don't like her. I physically feel rattled and boderline crazy when around her as she doesn't shut up.
She has doted on my brothers but they're both utterly self-absorbed so I can't see them stepping in.
I don't know.

This is tough. My father was abusive to my mother and unpleasant to us - to put it mildly. she eventually left him. The fall out was....horrendous.
He now has advanced dementia and is in full time care. I visit him. He is a nicer person now that he has forgotten how to be cruel and vindictive. My mother visits.It upsets her enormously, and my brother who is NC with my father has told her to stop going. Asked her why she bothers, given what he put her through.
She says, “ I can’t change the past. it is what it is. But I can affect the present and change the future. I won’t see any human lonely and afraid and confused, not least one who fathered my children. Because without him, I wouldn’t have you.”

I go every now and then out of a sense of pity, I suppose. Because hating him achieves nothing. It’s like holding a burning coal with the intent of throwing it at someone. It’s only you that gets burnt.

@flamingnoravera you seem to be me. When I visit my mum she does this whole sentimental thing about how wonderful I am and how she loves me. Which is hideous. My brother and I can't bear it. And I can barely bring myself to touch her. I used to go every two weeks...then three...then four. Now I can go up to six weeks without feeling I should go. I live 80 miles away, and also have my late husband's mother (who I adore) to visit 150 miles away. This year I'm not going to do a Christmas visit to my mum until the 27th. My brother still goes most weeks, as he only lives 10 minutes away from her care facility. But I've told him to cut down too.

I will cut back but her husband (a nasty man) died on Saturday so I can't pull away quite yet, once the funeral is out of the way (after xmas) I'm going to scale back my visits and take a holiday. Until then I'm stuck with the excruciating and painful visits twice a week with phone calls in between. Once he's buried I can withdraw gradually.