TLDR…mother making me physically drained
My mother is 82 and I was devoted to her for many years. Probably 7-8 years ago there was a catalyst behavior and I prepared her for the fact I was going to move 3-4 hours away.
So, six years ago I was able to put some distance from her.
She still drives and a couple of months ago I had to follow her for 60+ miles. She does…okay. I’m as confident as you can be with anyone driving that she probably won’t cause an accident.
She has had mobility issues. August of 2020, things just quit working and she was in pain. Her friends called me and said I needed to come, she went into care/rehab for a month, home for a couple of weeks and then private pay rehab in a facility for a month.
In November of 2021 she had back surgery. In her defense, her surgery was scheduled before I put my house on the market. I found/bought a starter home, sold my two story home because I needed to free up the equity. BUT, she told me the doctor said she would need help for at LEAST 15 days after she was discharged and she also told me her insurance wouldn’t cover rehab and/or we wouldn’t find out if insurance would cover rehab. In hindsight, she misdirected a lot when I asked to talk to the doctor.
A sibling was supposed to handle the day before and day of surgery, but through a rookie fluke of them not leaving their cell number, the doctor called me after surgery. When I asked him when we would find out about rehab eligibility, his response was, “I was told in-patient rehab was not an option she was willing to do.”
So, during the worst possible time of my life, she lied to me. I was away from work I NEEDED to do to take care of her 24/7 for 15 days.
I got my house sold, moved into the starter house, knowing it wouldn’t be forever. I think I did two other trips to her in December and had the joy of running all of her errands…right after I had run mine. She won’t pay to have her meds delivered, it is “easier” to send me to pick them up.
Since August of 2020, she has become more and more demanding. When I am with her, it is a non-stop barrage.
This last weekend I came close to tears. Of all things, I found my final house back in April. I didn’t think it would happen that fast. I closed on it early in May. I’ve been moving stuff in carloads and last week my furniture was delivered.
My mom wanted to come for a family thing about an hour away on Friday last week. She knew she couldn’t drive over and back in the same day. She was nervous about staying in a hotel by herself. I bit the bullet and said, “You will have a soft place to sleep, you will have a soft place to sit, you will have the Internet and you will be able to shower at my place. But that is it. I don’t know how I will be able to feed you.”
I swear I said….”I have a lot of work to do between the two places.”
Kids, she ran me absolutely ragged. She refuses to learn the AppleTV remote, so she would screw that up at LEAST twice an hour. My keurig is a different model than hers, so she couldn’t figure it out (EXACT same process). My kitchen was trashed before she got here and now it is worse. One time she interrupted me three times in 20 minutes while I was working to wait on her. I try to tell myself she isn’t intentionally sabotaging me, but I think on some level she is. I’m hoping I don’t need to detail every single demand here.
I figure I got 20% of the work done I needed to get done while meeting 100% of her wants and needs during the last four days. NOTHING could go smoothly while she was here…and she wanted to go places. Then she lost her credit card.
I am exhausted. I’m actually paying an organizer to come out and work on helping me unpack for three hours tomorrow. I need to unload things from a load I got from the starter home today, mow the yard, clear a path for the organizer, fold a load of laundry, feed myself and I don’t want to get out of bed.
The place you want to get to, is where you no longer fear "setting mom off".
Mom gets angry. Yell, screams, cries.
So?
So what? Her behavior can't hurt you. And ultimately, she needs you a heck of a lot more than you need her right now.
No. No there is not. Do not even consider this!
I'm a long time poster here; I had a wonderful mom who planner her old age well and I am also blessed with two wonderful brothers. And still, we fumbled through this stuff at the beginning.
As folks age, they sometimes lose cognitive skills in ways that aren't really noticeable. With my mom (and down the line, it turned out that she'd had a stroke that had taken out her reasoning abilities) this decline manifested as EVERYTHING being an emergency that had to be taken care of IMMEDIATELY.
After bro and I came running three days in a row, we said "Nuh-uh, we're not doing this any more; we won't have jobs". She pushed back half-heartedly, but she knew we were right. She went to a lovely Independent Living Facility; on site geriatrics doc and geri-psychiatrist; transport to her dentist. Only the eye doctor remained; we got rid of all of the specialists.
She perpetuated a pretty elaborate lie in regards to her surgery. Again, I live 200 miles away from her, so she was able to maintain the lie that “insurance wouldn’t cover rehab”.
When I said, “that can’t be right, if the doctor is ordering it, they pretty much have to cover it. What is the doctor’s name and number?” She told me there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
My siblings have NEVER covered or been the point person on a procedure or surgery before this one, yet she had one of them cover it. If my sibling had given their cell number instead of their home phone number (yes, some people still have those), I wouldn’t have talked to the doctor at all. Best guess is to him she said, “I don’t want to go to rehab. Is there any reason why my non-medical daughter can’t take care of me?”
At 82 Mom is on Medicare. So the first 20 days of Rehab were paid 100%. The last 10/11 Medicare paid 50%. Not sure what the day rate is now but when Mom was in her 50% was $150 so for 11 days her out of pocket would have beem $1650 unless the suppliment paid partial or fully. Since there was over a year between Rehab I am pretty sure Medicare would have paid for Rehab. And even if Mom turned it down, there was still time to set her up when you said "She must go to Rehab because I cannot care for her or take the time off from work. Rehab is for physical therapy which she probably should have had".
Either your Mom has no idea how everything works or she is a manipulator. You can always tell Scial Workers "No, not caring for her, other arrangements have to be made" Never believe SWs when they say they can get help you help. Never enough and they will do everything they can to get family to take on the responsibility.
I am not being smart here but you really need to start asking questions. Do not believe what comes out of Moms mouth. Even if this is not a manipulation she was very mistaken about how this all works. Just remember, you do not ever have to be made to take Mom home. You say No and if so, that releasing her back home is an "unsafe discharge". If you don't want the responsibility, never let them talk you into temporary POA or guardianship. If your relationship with Mom is not all that good, the State can always take over her care.
She’s a bit of an anomaly. Grandparents and her parents died in their sleep, at home, going full bore up until right before they went to bed for the night or to take a nap. My dad wasn’t feeling well and was throwing up. He went to take a nap as well and that was it.
This was just a holiday weekend trip. Going to see her isn’t a very relaxing time, either.
I did tell her in April I would not be coming to her for at least two months while I do the whole buy, sell, move thing.
I do think she perpetuated a rather elaborate scam because she didn’t WANT to go to rehab. She wanted to be in her own home, own bed, etc.
I now have a ranch house, rather than a two story. IF she has another episode, there’s potential that she would recover here rather than at her place. Part of me wonders if that is why she was so demanding, to pre-teach me what it would be like if she was forced into that option. She ain’t no picnic at her place, either. There was one night she got me up four times in six hours (she couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself). I’m not 30 anymore, I don’t recover from those ‘wild’ nights like I used to.
Until 2001, I lived 1000 miles away. Over the last 21 years we have morphed into this as she has aged from 61-82.
From a young, young age, it was expected that I ‘fetch’ for others. I think it is both because I was female and the youngest. This may not translate well, but I’m also descended from bigamist, Fundamental Mormons and I think the expectations of what a daughter/woman does still run deep. In some ways, I was probably groomed for this.
This visit, she didn’t see my basement - it’s a disaster area. At one point, I said, “the next time you come, you can see the basement.” And she said, “the next time I come, I hope to be a new woman.”
I need to find a way to communicate that she is too much work, too demanding, too hard on me whether I am at her place or she is at mine. But I can’t say it like that, because that will just set her off.
I hope the moving goes smoothly.
There's a book called Boundaries by Townsend and Cloud. Get it. Read it.
The fact that your mother "needs" something does not equate to you having to provide it.
You could have told the surgeon "she has to go to rehab; there is no one to care for her at her home".
When mom said she was nervous about being in a hotel alone, you could have said "I'm sorry you won't get to go to the party".
Your mother sounds as though her cognitive skills are failing. She also sounds like a lifelong manipulator.
Decide how much you want to get involved and arrange for case management and/or a geriatric care manager to sort out her needs.