AGING PARENTS

It's a ways yet for me -- my folks are in their sixties and in good health still. But my dad is starting to slow down a touch -- kinda good that he's retired, officially -- and more than once I've wondered a bit about what the not-so-far-away-now future will mean.

Certainly I salute your patience with this all -- I'm not sure how I would react.

The patience is key, but it's really hard to keep it up. Can other siblings/capable family members come to visit to spell you for a bit?

If by 'graying', you mean 'balding', then yes, to some extent I am such a one.

At the moment the brunt of the responsibility has fallen to an older sister who lives much closer to my 81 year old mother than myself or my other siblings. She takes on the 'dutiful child' role, while the rest of us come in and put in a burst of assistance whenever the tide of troubles rises above a certain level, so my sister doesn't burn out.

My father died two years ago. During his last year and during the year immediately following his death, I drove the 75 mile round trip to see the two of them (later, just my mother) very often. There was so much that needed tending to.

My father, too, suffered from severe short term memory loss toward the end of his life, reducing him to a small shadow of the man he had been - because he became literally unable to encompass any activity that could not be completed within the two minutes or so that he was able to form and hold a single thought. He, too, was inclined to minimize or dismiss the severity of his problems. I finally realized that he understood very well the extent of his diminished capacity, but facing it was too great a threat to his sense of worth and happiness. Denial was how he held depression at bay.

Now that he has passed on, my mother has grasped the nettle of losing her companion and mainstay of 57 years with surprising firmness. I spent 8 months visiting her almost weekly during that transition. It helped a lot, I think, to have family members to talk to and grieve with, and help her form plans and carry them out.

I wish both you and your mother the best, but, as you no doubt know in your bones, even the best possible outcomes available to you and her are still damned difficult to embrace. The cost of love can be pretty steep sometimes, and the bills fall due with increasing frequency at this time. Good luck.

I just moved all of my (paternal) grandfather's stuff in with his, uh, 'friend' because he couldn't afford his truck payment and townhome rent and medicines and everything else at once. And since he's still part of the family cosntruction business I spend much of my day ensuring that he isn't overworking (or just screwing things up - he gets frustrated easily that his muscles and joints don't work like they used to).

My grandmother (maternal) has Alzheimer's (early-mid stage), and drove me kind of nuts before it was full-blown. Neither of my uncles, none of my ten cousins and my brother don't do shit. Anything not handled by my parents falls directly to me. The extent of the agonies here (some her fault, some not, mostly involving my useless uncles and their brood) is too long to list.

With both I'm always on-call to fix something or help out or figure out why the TV isn't working or why this bill didn't get paid. I can't say no, even when I want to, and the occasional feeling of being put-upon hasn't helped my relationship with my grandmother. (And, theoretically, I'd like to move north when my finances are sorted and my degree is finished - but I can't knowing that I'd leave anyone in the lurch.)

Only 20 years 'til my parents are in their late-70s...

It's a tricky situation as for whatever reason, mostly a weird sort of shame or embarassment, she is loathe to talk about her problems with my Dad or myself, or anyone really, my sister whom she is very close to can sometimes get a little discussion about it.

It's terrible because she grieves for her feet as things worsen, quite slowly, though the condition may one day lead to her being in a wheelchair. She grieves yet she never seems to get past the denial stage, she can't accept or discuss the problem.

So she will often cry kind of uncontrollably, it's awful to hear, but worse is that she won't allow you to help or even talk, my Dad sometimes just says to me "I have no idea what to do", which is also quite weird, it all feels kind of dysfunctional.

So I relate to the "denial" thing you mention Beth, my mother is much younger and this is a problem. I can only imagine what she'd think if she knew I was discussing this on a messageboard...I just wish I had some productive advice rather than just empathy...

Good luck Beth, and everyone else posting here. I've been really lucky so far, but the day isn't far off -- my mother will be 74 next month and my dad is 77. But my dad, Jesus, he heals quicker than Wolverine. He planted his garden this year, went in for quintuple bypass surgery, and was recovered enough to bring in the harvest himself.

The child unable to believe that the parent has lost power?

My mother (89) has had alzheimers for about 8 years. Her body has served her well, but her brain slowly went to bits shortly after my stepfather died. Unable to manage her house anymore, my brother and I moved her to an independent living center that guaranteed access to its nursing home if and when the time came. It came about two years after the move. I live 3 hours away, but my brother lives within walking distance and visits her several times a week and we included her in family events until about a year ago when she just became unable to feel comfortable outside of her nursing home environment.

She's now almost totally deaf and has never used a hearing aid which makes any serious communication impossible. I visited last week and found her doing a crossword puzzle. We did the puzzle together for a while, but her mind kept drifting all over the place.

My wife's father (82) has Parkinson's and fell down the stairs recently. Compression fractures of three vertebrae was the diagnosis. Surgeons injected some kind of cement in his spine and he was getting about with a walker after only a few days. My wife plans to care for him in his home in the near future. He suffers from dimentia, too, but is on so many meds that I think that may be a contributing factor. This guy was an infantryman in world war II, a radio and tv personality and has had a very good life. He is loved by many people and has had countless visitors at the hospital. He is very frail now and has told me, and I'm sure others, that he knows his life is at the very end.

These are two of the coolest people that I have ever known, both with precious little time left. One knows it and one doesn't seem to. They are both receiving the best care available, but y'know sometimes that don't mean a thing. My thoughts are with all of you.

This. Heavy shit, huh?

yep

In darker moments, I look at my folks now (esp. my Pa who is 75 this week) and feel like the wave of their good years is just on the cusp of breaking. Not really ready for it, not at all.

My mothers good years are most definitely past. This has become very evident as she's staying with me for a couple days and it's totally heart breaking. Also, there's some memory loss/disorientation stuff happening that's scaring the crap out of me.

so heavy i can't really talk about it

Yeah. I started trying to talk about it with someone at work and couldn't really hold myself together. This is really tough. :/

Good luck Erica... luckily my parents are still mostly 'together' and my dad's problems are a result of his alcoholism rather than real mental deterioration, but it's still awful to have to deal with this stuff.

yeah i'm going through this too. all the best, E x

and everyone else :/

This took up took up over 10 years of my life (from 1994 - 2008 in fact). Both my parents got ill in their early to mid-seventies, and both had dementia and a pretty terrible end in a nursing home in their late seventies.

I spend most of this period visiting at weekends, and other times - and in that rather mad space where you seem cut off from the concerns of normal life, unable to relax for a minute, and living a kind of nightmare existence that no-one else around you realises. (Nothing like the horrific life of a full-time career - but bad enough).

The only thing you can say about it is that it passes, and you realise that what felt like an endless enduring period was in the end just another temporary era.

Siblings help -- if you're lucky.

I'm an only child. This is the only time I've ever wished I had siblings tbh.

Thanks, guys. Things are OK and we had a really nice evening. She's staying with me until she flys back to FL on Wed. Ian - alcoholism is a factor here too in addition to a lot of other things. I guess I just really feel for my dad and am really saddened by realizing that it's only going to get worse from here and I'm afraid it's going to do so pretty quickly.

I feel for you, ENBB. I'm an only child too; my mom's 84 this year but still drives, takes care of her own stuff, is still sharp as ever (dad died in 2000). But I dread so deeply the coming of the signs. I can't even model it in my mind. Hugs.

my mom's 84 this year but still drives, takes care of her own stuff, is still sharp as ever

That's fantastic, good for her! Mine is 74 this year but she's an old 74 and hasn't driven in at least 5 years. Anyway, like I said, we had a lovely day today. It's just a really difficult process to watch and I worry about what will happen down the line.

pullin for you E - us only children gotta stick together. this terrifies me too - and is a big part of what motivates me to do what I do now - but hopefully there will be a good, long time before anything really happens.

You know you have my support as another only, but I'm too much of a weakling to talk about this stuff
In earnest
In public
Beyond this

But you know where to find me offboard if you wanna talk!!

i will say that my mom is pretty damn sharp in mind, but whenever i visit, i insist on driving EVERYWHERE. her driving scares the bejesus out of me, don't understand how she hasn't had her license taken away. and it only gets worse as she gets older.

yeah driving is often the "tipping point" of aging parents decline. really hard to give up.

my heart goes out to enbb,la lechera, ian and everybody facing this. all my middle-aged friends have ailing/aging parents right now, you guys are confronting it early like i did. these days my father in law is essentially dying, i was going to post this on the fuck cancer thread but it fits here too. he's 84, until a couple years ago was robust mentally and physically, the picture of how you'd hope to age. so it's shocking to see his rapid decline not just bodily but he's become very confused and withdrawn, barely a shell of his former self. chemotherapy is keeping him alive but at what cost? we just had our annual visit and my wife, her mom (who's a rock) and her two siblings are stressed out and struggling. not much else to say. but it's good to talk about it, in fact it's important for your - our - own mental health to let it out.

My dad had the driving decision taken out of his hands as he went blind in one eye at the start of the year, but he was getting to be quite a dangerous driver before than (he's 80) so we're really quite glad about it.

even though she knows she needs them, my mom refuses to get glasses because she thinks that they make her face look weird
she lives in fear of having her driver's license taken away from her because she is a very independent person and likes her alone time
:(

My mother-in-law has had quite serious dementia for the past six years or so. This started when she was in her early-to-mid 60s - one of the first events that really got us thinking that something was up was when she drove her car the wrong way round a large roundabout into oncoming traffic. At the moment she lives in a nursing home as is pretty much just a shell of her former self - she doesn't even know who her children are any more when they come to visit, but thankfully she does still appreciate the company which at least is one small positive that you can take away. Totally depressing though, so for anyone out there who is dealing with this right now, I can totally sympathise.

My mom, turning 80 next month, has been fighting the decline, bless her. Joined the hospital wellness center, has been selling and giving away decades' worth of my dad's accumulated packratcrap, still gets out there and mows her own lawn, etc. Next week she, my daughter and probably my wife are heading off to Biloxi to the casinos. But the decline is there...bad knees, bad feet, diabetes... My sympathies to everyone having a tough go of it these days.

My mum (68) has been dealing with my gran (88) for a long time; my gran has alzheimers. About six months ago she finally got her moved to a nursing home in the same town (200 miles from where my gran was before). Only now is she at the point where she can see any humour in the situation, which results in Facebook messages like this from my mum:

Today's visit to your gran!

G. (after a bit of mumbling and searching for words) Are you my daughter?

Me. Yes.

Gr. Are you really my daughter?

Me. Yes.

Gr. I can't remember. Am I your mother?

Me. Yes.

Gr. Where did we live?

So I started giving her a potted history of our life.

GR. How do you know you're my daughter?

A bit later on....

Gr, Haven't I got nice legs!

She thought it was quite funny that she couldn't remember things; seemed very happy and settled. The staff bore this out.

My mom and grandma live together with mom's "girlfriend", and I moved to be closer to them and my terminally ill Dad (they were separated). Grandma is sharp as a tack and well into her 90s. Of course I love Grandma, but mom is making seeing Grandma a miserable experience.

Like I said elsewhere she is getting into that old people thing of being passive-aggressive. I know I called her a "fascist" I didn't mean it, it's that her emotional state is kind of fascist.

It's her stupid family. She wasn't raised by her own mother, she was raised by her abusive and creepy grandmother and aunt and it really shows in how she deals with stuff like death and adult responsibilities.

If anything difficult happens in her life - death or whatever - she just escapes mentally. Her mom's family had a lot of money and stuff was handled for her all her life!! She doesn't understand why other people don't have it as easy. Because of her family, she feels she has a lot of power and I can't ever suspect her of having mental problems EVER.

My mom gave up driving last month. Kinda shocked, but pleased that she came to the decision herself. She's 88 and is in reasonably good health for her age - despite the piles of crap that she's hoarded (ongoing issue for her entire life). Sister is gone for several weeks so I'm on mom duty... it's extra frustrating because her hearing is so bad that she leaves the televisions on with the sound maxed-out and she can't hear the phone.

Vexing problem of the moment... Her sense of time and calendar dates are slipping, so making plans becomes a comedy of errors ("stop by this week" *does so* "what are you doing here, I said to come by next week") ad infinitum ad nauseum

wow, that sounds like a serious challenge. i'm sorry. i have this thread bookmarked and it popped up just as my parents arrived yesterday for their first visit in 3 years. they are aging. my mom is in great shape (in spite of some health issues this year) but my dad keeps looking and acting less like himself, which is thrown into stark relief when we look at old pictures together.

hmph.

I am going to visit my parents this weekend and I think that I'm actually going to have to ask them point blank what they want me to do for them if they ever get dementia or need care etc. My mom is in bad shape and her memory is already slipping and my biggest fear is that my dad dies first (though this is prob unlikely you never know) and I'm left to make decisions for/about her. I want to know now and while I know she's not going to want to talk about this I'm going to make them because I'm an only child and they have no other relatives here to help and I can't handle the stress and weight of this alone without knowing what they want.

Just to share my own personal woes on this thread --

My father nearly died last week; he collapsed on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The ambulance came and got him to a hospital and it turned out he had two massive ulcers in his stomach and large intestine. This comes about 6 weeks after a surgery to biopsy a growth in his spinal cord.

Yesterday morning, recovering from the emergency surgery to stitch up the ulcers, he had a major heart attack and is in the hospital with a breathing tube, heavily sedated etc. On our way up to Rhode Island yesterday our van broke down on the Triboro Bridge -- shocks gave out and started to rub against the front tires, causing lots of burnt rubber smoke. We got it towed back to your neighborhood (luckily we weren't halfway through connecticut) and it's going to be repaired this afternoon, $800 later. I'm incredibly worried about my dad. The doctors are not sure how to treat him; they can't give him the usual blood thinners and medications because of the ulcers and recent surgery. I wish so badly I was there. And now I'm worried about the drive up, even though the car is getting fixed, I have a strong distrust of automobiles... Just don't know what to do. It's bad when my aunt is telling me to go straight to the hospital and bring his 'paperwork' (read: living will.)

So scared :\

I'm sorry to hear all of that.

me too. suerte, ian.

You're most welcome. He's had to hold off a bit on full physical therapy until a shoulder operation on Wednesday -- a short one, thankfully -- and then after he's healed up from that, they'll get into things in full for both that and the larger balance issues.

One of the things I was taught for balance: walking in a straight line between floor tiles. The drunkwalk, yeah, and can see how this would be a bit tricky on or by roads, even cold sober; I still may have one wobble for every time I do it. But also can do it backwards, though neither way is any very lengthy length---maybe ehhh 16, 18 feet at most? Kind of fun, as exercises go.

Was talking to my dad about his cancer and he was exposed to a lot of agent orange in Vietnam. There are two people, including him, still alive from his platoon. Everyone else that made it home died of cancer.

Cow_Art, that is rough, but I also think I would be that way. People ask me how I am doing and if they don’t know about my past month or two I explain it all to them and their mouths drop open, like “what are you doing walking around and lifting weights and stuff?!!?? are you fucking crazy?” and the answer is yes. like, this isn’t a big deal.

but also, more topically: my parents are the same. my dad will call and he’ll be like “well mom was in the hospital last week because she broke her ankle” and i’m like “we moved twenty minutes away from you for this exact reason, please tell me this shit!!!” it’s bizarre

Not a problem with my parents — they sometimes tell me more than I want or need to know about physical ailments. Plus since they moved close to me they ask me to go to their doctor appointments with them (which I'm happy to do, because I get much less garbled information that way). Best wishes to your dad, Cow_Art.

My mom was hospitalized from being bit by a copperhead and I found out months later. And we had multiple conversations in that time! How would that not come up?

I got a "Went into the hospital, had a cancerous growth removed" text from my mom earlier this year. Of course this is the same woman who texted me "Got shot" when she first got the COVID vaccine.

A buddy was supposed to fly to NYC tomorrow to celebrate his 50th - fancy hotel, steak dinner, etc.

Now he's driving down to Santa Monica to check on his folks, both in their 80's... he didn't really say what prompted the cancellation, but he was really looking forward to this trip

Was talking to my dad about his cancer and he was exposed to a lot of agent orange in Vietnam.

In the last couple of years my dad started to understand, via a family friend, what the VA does for veterans in his situation who have his service record and have experienced health impacts over the course of their lives. Idk but they have a points system for where you were and what substances you were handling/exposed to, and it's such a damning/fascinating admission of them completely knowing that they sickened and killed their own people, but anyway he's had every health complication on the list and suddenly he's getting very good and completely FREE medical, supportive, and end of life care guaranteed. He's finally getting hearing aids!! I'm sure my mom is thrilled. ("What?")

One of my fears for them was that he would neglect his health and just get really depressed and hopeless as he becomes less capable, and my mom would spend years waiting on him and having a worse life. Now...I think that's all handled?!

Everyone should have this. It is completely possible, and we know how to do it.

My soon to be 74 year old father sent me an email saying he is adopting a kitten. Not sure that's the best course of action right now.

my mom turned 82 yesterday; finally reached her on the phone after several attempts and wished her the traditional Happy Sidney Crosby's Birthday, but she absolutely doesn't get the joke anymore.

she had a headache, but if she felt better today she was planning to drive home. except that she doesn't have a car or a house to drive home to and hasn't in over two years.

so now all of my conversations with her are: a) you are crazy and wrong about every basic fact you think you know about your life, and b) it's totally fine, your sister and i, whom you will soon forget, love you and are looking out for you

(yes i know it's not really a 'joek' but she and i are from pittsburgh and she once knew she shared a birthday with sid. were we from southern california (or new jersey) it might have instead been the traditional 'happy mike trout's birthday')

Xp Cow_Art & i.o. — my dad got compensated for agent orange cancer as well — it was weird because… over 50 years later y’know? They didn’t pay enough for a private room in the nursing home fwiw. Sometimes the VA isn’t the most responsive (according to my mom) and they actually continued to pay after he died, because DOGE cuts, and my mom was super anxious because she wanted them to take the money back so she could close that bank account.

I am happy that my mother enjoys the Hallmark Mysteries channel. But I am sick of that damn Matlock theme.

My mom is afraid of bluetooth … I was trying to explain why she doesn’t need to have a phone number for her ipad …

The NYT illustrated guide to elderproofing a house is pretty good… though some of the kitchen suggestions don’t take into consideration earthquake prone areas (it acknowledges this once though).

it's so hard to convince old people they are old

*hot-pre-old-person-tip* single floor housing

I am very glad my folks went that route when they bought their place in 1994…

it's so hard to convince old people they are old

ime it's pretty hard to convince children that their old people are (too) old

fortunately my mom wandering her property in her nightgown in (a past) february convinced everyone else

my folks have serviced their low maintenance property for 20 years and i couldn't be happier.

it's tough being married and knowing recommending that insults all of the other side.

xp i think it depends on age, but i'd wager most kids would remember some point when a parent was down.

perhaps a bit different when your mom's a widow and you're an only child and there's no one else available to make the call

she had told me that she couldn't live without her garden, and i lacked the fortitude to point out that she could also not live with it

anyway three years later she's still alive

when i talk to her, she mentions how if everything goes well, she'll drive home tomorrow. (both her car and her house were long ago sold)

for a while she was reading the harry potter series (yes, i know) over and over again, and occasionally claimed that she was reading a new one.

now i'm not sure she does much of anything.

it's really only a matter of time until she doesn't recognize me, or remember having had a child.

My mom qualified for hospice yesterday. No terminal illness diagnosed, but she is 86 and has been in escalating memory care for years. It's challenging to express my real feelings over this, because when it's you mom you are expected to feel a certain way - and I don't. She was abusive and remained so, to the max that she could be. Anyway - folks with difficult elderly parents, I see you.

Xp western — even with single floor houses (like my parents’ mom’s) there are still often steps, though it is actually feasible to install ramps… but not all ramps are equal … my mom had a “nice young man” put in plywood ramps over the few stairs she has … and I have suggested that she should have better ones, and that I can take care of this for her … but she “isn’t there yet”. I know her reticence is mostly about feeling like she can manage on her own.

My mom demonstrated today that she can more quickly search gmail for an email I sent two weeks ago than my former coworker who is my age and a former sysadmin. I am treasuring her competence as I know it won’t last.

!!! My mom has 10k unread emails and five-sixths of them are spam that I don't know how she got signed up for or why her gmail does nothing to protect her inbox (mine is fine???), and she's been this way for a decade and has all her marbles (at least the same amount as she had before) so count your blessings doubly.

My mom calls me and gets me to order things from Amazon. I tried to show her how to work a computer once. She was using the mouse and I told her to move it up (meaning the cursor on the screen) and she literally lifted the mouse up. When I tried to explain that’s not how it works she decided she was done with computers forever. If they ever stop making dumb-phones she will lose her mind.

My parents lost their internet connection for a few days from a lightning strike, so I went over there Friday to show them how to hotspot off their iPhones while they were waiting for the repairs. It took some time and a follow-up phone call a few hours later, but they did get online. Their technical cluelessness is sort of jarring to me, because my dad is pretty technically skilled with analog equipment, and my mom was an early internet adopter back in the early '90s. But they didn't keep up and things just passed them by.

My mom is not retired yet… I think that actually helps a lot with cognitive function. She definitely has problems with new technology though. She doesn’t do QR codes. She has trouble with the cloud based version of a software program she used the desktop version of for decades.

Lol I almost feel like a proud parent humble bragging about my clever child

My husband has crashed flip phones, and I frequently have to go in to the living room to get him past popups that he can't get by on the TV screen. It's deeply frustrating.

My dad is an retired electronic engineer and later a recruiter for the tech industries. He does a thing where he accidentally group calls the entrie family on Whatsapp every other day. We've tried to figure out how he's doing it, but no one can figure it out

My parents are both about to be...77 (!), and they are both utterly clueless when it comes to how most technology works, though they know how to *use* certain things, often to my horror.

For example, my dad doesn't understand streaming services like Spotify— he literally still thinks that you need to download every song to your computer, and gets frustrated when he can't find certain songs on Apple Music. He is very proud of the 200 songs in his ITunes library.

Back in 2015, my mom literally said incredulously, "you mean i can take photos with my iphone?" she is a lost cause, she'll never get it.

they also both refuse to give up their AOL email addresses that they've had for 30+ years now.

The one time I helped my dad install Chrome and get a Gmail account set up about a decade ago, his computer got wrecked by viruses (because he was looking at porn) and he blamed Chrome and Gmail and won't ever use anything except IE, his work email, and his AOL account. It's funny, but also really sad.

I think my parents are purely tablet- and phone-based now after they'd debated over a new laptop for a couple years, bought one and never set it up, and then passed it off to my sister

So now also imagine running a small subscription-based digital news outlet that of course has an older demographic (because guess who pays most attention to local news). We have a lot of AOL and Hotmail email addresses in our databases, and they are forever accidentally unsubscribing from our newsletter and then get flustered when it doesn’t show up. I do a lot of troubleshooting.

I too want to know how dog latin’s dad has hacked whatsapp lol

But one thing I have noticed is that mom doesn’t do well with screen clutter and sites that have both horizontal and vertical menus. The cloud software has both, and her problem is that she can’t find anything now.

The thing is, it is largely understandable. My Dad, who used (and even programmed) computers every day of his life up until about 20 years ago now struggles to access his gmail account. We went through it all together and I could tell it was exhausting for him.

When he feels intimidated or flustered, I keep wanting to say: "These things aren't designed to be confusing. People put a lot of time into making them easy even for young children to use".

But that's only half true. You turn away from technology for just a short while and everything's changed. When my dad set up his own business and started working from home in the late 90s, a whizkid from round the corner helped him set up Outlook so he could read his emails. And i remember a friend of the family showing us how to defrag the home PC.

One of rhe sadder things, I suppose, is when I asked him what he planned to use the laptop for, he started talking about this apparently great CRM system called Act! that he used at work in the 90s, now replaced in most cases by cloud-based systems like Salesforce.

When I asked him why he wanted to use Act, he said "It worked really well. It had everything on it, all my contacts".

He's been fixating on the past recently. He's started opening up about the divorce our family went through in the 2000s, something he weathered with silent stoicism at the time but now speaks of as if it were happening currently.

I'm surprised at how often we'll be speaking and I'll need to remind him that something someone said or did was 25 years ago, and he'll react with surprise.

I was also going to say that Instagram is a nightmare for me and there's allsorts going on in that app that baffles and confounds me, despite me having used social media for basically all my adult life

lol Instagram is terrible and I hate that it convinced a whole bunch of millennials that it's the best way to do lots of things that it's very bad at.

I was told that it was a great place to show art but I couldn't figure out how to format my stuff to get it on there and gave up.

Oh yeah unless you do everything exactly right from the get go it will totally fuck up your post, and with few exceptions you can't go back and change it. Plus since when are stamp-sized pictures you can't proeprly zoom in on a good way to look at anything?

"Can we get food from <restaurant>? I'm starving"

"You mean despite the fridge being full of food, you once again don't want to eat what we have, force yourself to eat a meager lunch using McDonald's rewards because you used up your money this week in 3 days because you eat out at restaurants every other day, and are now trying to use language to suggest I'm starving you despite me eating the groceries you do and having more than enough to eat?".

It doesn't matter who chooses the groceries (I pay for them all). Within 2 days of having them, she immediately doesn't want what's in the fridge, then spends 75% of her money on restaurant food, then is asking me for money by midweek.

Literally the diner across the street makes shit that is no better than shit we can make at home and charges $20 for it, by all means, eat there twice ir three times a week. Eat at McDonald's every day.

The main reason that I don't just give her half of my grocery budget to buy whatever she wants and worry only about my own half rather than buying ours together is if I handed her a large sum of money it'd be gone in 5 days.

We've had heated arguments about it. Every time she says I'm wrong about how much she soends on food until I add it up and she goes "w-w-w-what how is that possible " as if the rules of addition changed overnight

I have clients who have similar habits/ math problems

Super frustrating.

Is there something else she is getting by going out to eat? Social interaction? Relief for cabin fever if she is otherwise only at home?

that’s a good question, quincie

overall, this sounds like older person complaining where they just don’t
have the capability or concentration to do the whole food thing. we all pretty much go back to the phase where we want treats, the one in front of us isn’t good enough, etc

why yes I did eat a lunch with people in the late 80s to early 90s age range in the last month

Based on other posts Neando has made about his mom over the years, I don’t think it’s just that. The other option would be not to get any groceries for her if she only wants to get restaurant food.

But I also wanted to otm in orbit about her posts about her dad and his military experience in the liberal thread. I think I have already posted about my dad’s military experience