If my mom and I have an outing planned,she is like my best friend! Happy,on the ball,very lucid. But if its just an everyday kinda day,she is nasty and critical trying to get me be angry at my husband,whiny,needing help to do everything,and making mental lists of tasks for me to complete for her. I s she really THIS manipulative?
get right in the elders ass when they mistreat you UNLESS they are ill with dementia. a dementia patient is truly helpless to control their moods and delusional thinking. its a maddening mental illness and can drag you down with it if you dont develop a helluva strategy. took my mom to town today to find something comfortable to sit in. not a chair in the store would work altho they were american made recliners from 225.00 to 250.00 . i know we wouldnt be buying a chair before we left the house but we went thru the charade anyway. on the way home instead of shoving her out of the car on a bridge i told her we could go back at any time and look at the chairs again. mine was the preferable strategy considering how much of a fuss is made over murder 1 in this country.
Set your boundaries, your mother will not get better with age. :)
Make a list of at-home things she needs to so do so she is not a loose ends. Keep it handy and add to it when you think of things.
Narcissists hate to be ignored. Hate it! They need an audience like the rest of us need oxygen. When my MIL started acting up on a recent visit and calling me some things that sounded very surprising coming from a genteel Southern lady of some eighty summers, my husband told her she couldn't speak to me that way, and if she did it again, we'd leave. She did it again and we left, much to her surprise. Set boundaries and enforce them gently but firmly, every single time. After awhile, they get the picture.
It's like training a puppy or a small child.
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