Mom lived alone self-sufficiently until recent years when things around the house - like stairs - started to get dangerous. Rather than have a real conversation in which being honest would involve disagreeing with her, I go into my fake, submissive, yes-woman persona to get through these visits. While I love my mother, there are times when I have to face the grim fact that I don’t enjoy her company. An ugly sludge builds in me during my days when I have to give half my work day over to caregiving. She doesn’t get this, and blithely calls at the last minute for help getting to long-standing appointments.Ĥ. To survive juggling a staff job for 30 years while parenting three children as a single mother - I had to kiss spontaneity goodbye in favor of planning, organizing, and scheduling. My mother didn’t work for a living and so has always prioritized spontaneity. “Okay, Mom, we’ll look into it,” I said and I canceled the doctor I’d just found.ģ. But then she decided it wasn’t her shoulder that hurt, it was her groin. I recently went to some effort at her request to find her a new orthopedist because she disliked how her original one rushed through appointments. Also, she eats only the gooey inside of a wedge of Camembert and leaves the rind for others.Ģ. Mom “forgets” her cane when I take her out in the world (she doesn’t want people to think she’s old, she once confessed) so she makes like an albatross on my elbow. Mom “forgets” to bring her wallet to restaurants, so I’m obliged to pay. Here’s my list of what I call the Four Stages of Hating Caring for an Aging Parent:ġ. Especially aged baby boomers who feel entitled. I used to do elder care, but I came to hate it because old people complain too much. I complimented her on how nice she sounded with them and she replied, “I like young people. “They were so polite and nice,” the cashier said to me. I was at the grocery store the other day in line behind two lovely teenage boys. To echo Nora Ephron, I feel so bad about my feelings! The kind of shame that wakes me at three in the morning to beat me up. When it blows over, I feel enormous shame about my anger. This dramatic meteorological phrase perfectly characterizes my category-five internal weather at times. I’m not talking garden-variety annoyance, though I experience that, too. Who could say such things about her own mother? How My Aging Mother Provokes Me From my point of view, she’s self-absorbed and inexcusably dependent has been her whole life. She’s 92, and bravely facing her twilight, a widow just doing her best to get by in the familiar comfort of her home of 40 years. “My first resolution for 2019 is to stop complaining so much about my fucking mother,” I said to my significant other on New Year’s Day this year.
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