Last March, my 91-year-old mother-in-law who lives alone, had a heart attack and stroke. My husband and I drove down and stayed at her house for a week when she was coming out of rehab. My husband was on Spring break from teaching at a college. We were looking into assisted living places for her. All of that changed when my husband's school went to remote learning due to Covid-19. It made sense to stay at her house where he could teach online and take care of her. Plus, there is high risk of getting Covid-19 in care facilities. Prior to this, I was recovering from cancer treatments and was just starting to get back to work at a good job. My job could not be remote, so I stopped working. This situation caused me to become the primary caretaker to my husband, his mother and her home, her dog, and our two cats. In August, we moved out of our Chicago apartment permanently. My mother-in-law has remained weak and often feels sick, especially in the morning. She can dress and shower herself but often skips those things. She sits most of the day in front of the TV. At first, I wanted to be helpful, so I threw myself into the role, managing everything, making the meals, being in charge of pills and doc appointments, cleaning her cluttered house, doing yard work, feeding the birds, caring for the pets, etc. Over time, I couldn’t keep up and I became angry and sad. Sometimes I cry. I feel I have lost my life in order to keep hers going, and this was supposed to be my year of freedom and celebration from beating cancer and getting out of a toxic job (another story). Through the stress, my husband, and I have become distant. I am unhappy and he is fed up with me. The worst part is that his mother has a domineering personality. She can be sweet and loving but is often critical, controlling, and manipulative. My husband recognizes this and gets frustrated with her as well, but they are close, and he is an only child. We have completely isolated ourselves and stay strictly quarantined in the house to protect ourselves from the virus. We do not want to bring in workers for fear of the virus. I don’t see family or friends who live out of state. Anyway, I need my husband to help more even though he is working, and I am not. He doesn’t understand the heavy emotional and physical burdens he has put on me. He thinks I should be happy and like it here! When I tell him that I am unhappy and need help he gets mad and says he does help. He says I should just let everything go. He does jump in periodically to do some of the housework, but it is not consistent and is not enough. I worked on a chore list, but he only scoffed at it. I feel angry because this is not my house and not my mother! He sits at the computer all day and night. Or he works on side projects on the computer or inside/outside this house, which only distances us more. He contributes to the messes. It’s like a dump here and everything keeps breaking. How can I get my husband to really understand my plight, sympathize with me, and be my team partner to tackle the never-ending workload and responsibilities?
There is ONE person whose behavior and emotions you have control over.
Yours.
You will not convince your enmeshed husband of anything, I fear. He needs to be shown how much work is involved in his mother's care.
Can you take a trip for a week or two to (safely) visit family or friends, or just stay at a hotel? Rest and recharge and consider your options?
Let him see what his mom needs (and to be sure, they may find that the two of them together get along just fine) and you will have an answer one way or another.
I am afraid you are going to have to simply stop. It is about the only way at this point to be heard. As you said, your husband has already disengaged so he doesn't have to hear you.
I would sit my husband down and say "Dear, I take ALL the responsibility for doing this ALL WRONG. I thought I could do this. I thought I could beat cancer, give up a job, get a new one, move from my home and take care of your mother. The fact is, I was wrong. I can't. Now we are in a pickle, having given up our home and etc. We will have now to discuss a plan, to discuss what we can do about this. If we cannot do that, I am afraid I am just going to have to leave. I have been faced down with a real message, that my life can in fact be forfeit at any moment to any thing. I have beaten cancer for now. I am unwilling to give my life to you and your mother. I would hate to lose you. But I fear that I may have to. I am so sorry. I will give you a few days to consider all I have said to you. Then we can sit down and talk. We can either make plans together of getting our lives into a managible order, or we will may have to go our separate ways, understanding that while we do care about one another, sometimes that is just not enough".
Something like that. OR you can continue to sacrifice your own life and that of your family to mother in law. The fact that these moves are made is going to make this VERY VERY VERY difficult to uncomb. It will not be done without time, planning and suffering on the part of ALL involved. I am so very sorry for all you are all going through. Truly, it sounds utterly impossible.
You, my friend, have signed up for a very, very unmanageable situation out of the goodness of your heart. Not understanding the co-dependent relationship your husband has with his mother, who will continue to be 'sick' and 'needy' for the rest of her life so she can keep you right there with her, waiting on her hand & foot, and ruining YOUR life and YOUR marriage in the process. What's the difference? Her needs are being met. She's been able, so far, to lay on the FOG *Fear Obligation & Guilt* tactics thickly enough to where her son is perfectly comfortable staying put. Having YOU managing everyone's lives for them! And then he can get mad & remind you of all he 'does' to help YOU, while he's actually doing nothing!
You lose here, no matter what. If you complain, they get mad. The only way you win is if you give up your entire LIFE to doing everything for THEM. While they are two perfectly capable human beings, qualified to care for themselves! YOU are the one who's had and survived cancer.........who helped YOU? Did your MIL come over to wait on YOU hand and foot? What about hubby?
You're the backbone of this family. The guts of it. Without you, they fall apart.
Let them.
Move out for a while. Go get a nice hotel room on hubby's credit card and let the TWO of them see what it feels like to be alone. Let hubby see exactly what it feels like to be a momma's boy 24/7, without a dutiful wife to actually be DOING everything for BOTH of them.
After the hotel stay is over, THEN you can sit down and have a Come to Jesus meeting with hubby. Until then, he thinks your job is silly. You don't do much of anything to be complaining about to BEGIN with.
Show him the error of his ways.
And, if he STILL doesn't 'get it' when you come back home, leave for good.
Wishing you the best of luck moving on with YOUR life. You deserve to
Give them notice.
Then take a week's absence (two even better).
Have a real think about the future you want.
Discuss what you want with your husband when you return. How does it align with his goals/plans? Is there a shared future or not?
Very best of luck.
This question is raised periodically when a wife becomes stuck caring for a husband's parent(s), and he seems quite content to allow the situation to continue. My personal feeling is that the husband is being inconsiderate to his wife, and if he doesn't understand and isn't willing to change, the marriage is heading into more friction, if not dissolution.
Your husband is a mama’s boy, unfortunately. The wife will lose. The question is not how to get him to help more; it’s how to get your life back. If, after you leave, he still doesn’t see how he helped ruin your marriage... it’s over. You’re better off without him. He had a choice and he picked Mommy.
This sounds like the posts from someone from another culture, where DH expects mother to be cared for, and doesn’t expect to do any of it himself. Is that relevant here?
I think... You had better dust off your resumé, land a job you like, and go to it. Make 2021 your year of freedom and recovery instead.
You do not need anyone else's permission to do this, by the way.
Find a plausible story, build on it and stick to it and start pack a winter & spring wardrobe, all your good jewelry. Keep it on the down low. Although Hubs sounds pretty self absorbed, he probably won’t notice. I’d probably pack a box or two or 5 and ship ahead of my drive out. Less stress. Take the cats.
Please please realize that she can move into a facility. Covid is not a total excuse on not doing this. The LTC residents and staff are going to be the most vaccinated group by late spring for the US.
Was money a factor in this? Did she ever pay for in home care?
I’m going to be way more pragmatic in my suggestions... Do you think if you went away for 3-5 weeks anything would change or would it only bind Sonny to mom even more? If he won’t change and get the situation restructured, like y’all rent a nearby apt his moms for a year lease, do have your own bank accounts? Your own income? Is hubs a signatory on any of these?. Or are all your funds commingled? Car in your name? If you don’t have your totally own stash, you need to do this. I’d clear out at least 6 mos of living costs, 50% of the remaining house sale $ and maybe an extra 5-10k for $ to have to get a good divorce atty. With $ into a new bank. Forget being equitable; his mom is going to poison that well.
Yeah he’ll be mad. But really Your in a better position to negotiate than he is. He’s not going to find another female to do all that you’ve done. I’d give him 3 months to have an epiphany. Or you file. Life’s too short to spend future years at his moms house with or without her. I bet it’s depressing interior design hellscape. Guys like this, I’m of the opinion you have to be no white flags on dealing with. He can retreat back to free living at Mommy’s & he will unless you get a pit bull divorce atty.
My hesitation on going this route would be over concerns about your health insurance. Is your policy portable to another State? Or do you need to stay in state? Or is it tied to hubs job? If there's health insurance issues, and you still have post cancer related care to deal with, I’d get that planned out & solid before leaving. Even if it adds a couple of months onto your timetable. Best of luck. You can do this!
Could you tell him that the two of you need to sit down and have a conversation about what is going on, not just about MIL caregiving but also how this is tearing your marriage apart? I feel your frustration from what you've written in your post. Is there a way to get a job, even part time to get you out and put more of her care on him? Is she eligible for hospice care? A cna will come 2x a week for bathing, weekly nurse visits, she can have a chaplain and social worker visit also, this is paid for by medicare. If he refuses to help out more or recognize the strain this situation is putting on you physically and emotionally, take a 2 week vacation from it all (take the cats with you), recharge yourself, when you return, revisit the conversation to see if his opinion and outlook has changed since he's been the one having to do it all for her. If not, you need to figure out what course of action you want to take, as the Ramones said, should I stay or should I go.
My younger sister did learn something from my situation, she told her husband that she's not me, it's HIS mom and she's NOT going to be her MIL caregiver, his mom, his responsibility, when he moved his mom in (colon cancer, surgery and chemotherapy). We really don't know what we're getting into at first and think about everything that this entails and how the list grows rapidly and becomes neverending. Check with senior services in your area, they do have many programs that help, some even have tradesmen who will do repairs to an elders home at a greatly reduced cost, their way of giving back or paying it forward, just make sure to use mom's money, not yours, to pay for it. Can she afford to pay for a cleaning service to come in and do a deep cleaning on her home, walls, windows, cabinets, oven, behind fridge, etc., then weekly or bimonthly maintenance to help you out? Much easier to keep it clean once everything has been done initially, this may also help with husband picking up his messes too. Good luck to you, keep us updated on how you are doing, it's not easy.
My sainted MIL was an absolute wild woman, but I fell in love with my husband anyway, and finally loved him enough to tell him that it would be either HER or ME.
Your spouse has chosen her.
You can’t even have a cogent perspective about what you might POTENTIALLY do to address this swamp you’ve landed in until you walk away from it.
Your husband may or may not come to his senses if presented with an abrupt jolt, or he may not. But you are responsible for YOUR HAPPINESS or YOUR MISERY right now, and from what you say, he shows no sense of awareness of either.
Address your tangible assets, call an Uber or the Cavalry or the local Woman’s Shelter and evacuate.
Keep us in your loop. I’ve walked in your shoes and I hope YOU will stop walking in them as soon as you can arrange to do so.
People are coping with these times and their restrictions each in their own way. OP's husband has hung on tight to his job and is making that, and his mother's needs, work as well as he can. He has found a way that is just about tolerable to him - don't forget, he gets frustrated with his mother too, he is probably feeling pretty claustrophobic too - but he is ignoring the impact on the OP.
Well, he feels under an obligation to his mother; but he's taking for granted that the OP will actually do the carrying of it. I feel she could usefully show him that he is mistaken. That she is a free agent, at liberty to find her own way through this ghastly crisis, with no equivalent obligation to MIL; and so she is.
None of this has to mean permanent changes forced on them all by what - God forbid otherwise - is a temporary (if seriously dragging) problem. By drawing a line and resuming her own direction, OP will demonstrate to her DH and MIL that they are going to have to find another major domo. That's all.
I would have done the same thing if I wasn't working, getting everything spic and span. I think though you may have disabled MIL. At 91, yes a heart attack would take a lot out of her. A younger person I think it takes 6 months to start feeling yourself. So 9 months she maybe still weak. She may still be weak, though, because she does nothing. If she can dress and shower herself, there should be other things she can do. Does she go to the bathroom by herself? If she can dress herself, shower and toilet herself you actually are lucky there. To do these tasks for my Mom took a lot out of me at 65. (She doesn't need to shower everyday, 3x acweek is enough but she should get dressed. Makes u feel better)
What are you doing now that you didn't do before when you two lived on ur own and u worked? Have you always "cared" for DH. Cleaned up his messes? So no different now, right. Are you a little OCD? Does the house need to be spotless. I stopped worrying about that long ago. Since you did an initial deep cleaning, it should be just upkeep now. I love the Swifer products. Use the dusters and dry mop a lot. The animals, feeding wouldn't bother me but taking them out to do their business at all hours and in bad weather I would not do. DH could do that.
My DH has an Aunt that uses bath towels only once. They use them to wipe the shower/tub down and wipe the bathroom down after "every" shower they take. My DH went to the bathroom one time we visited and his Uncle went in behind him to clean up. Believe me, my DH can hit the toilet. My MIL kept her house spotless but thought her sister was a little over the top.
First thing I would do is ask MILs PCP if he can order physical therapy for Mom in the home. Medicare does allow for it periodically. Tell the nurse that admits her that you would like her evaluated to see what MILs strengths and weaknesses are. When you find that out, then you can start having her do what she is capable of. Then maybe look for a job. Doesn't have to be f/t. DH should be capable of getting he and his Mom breakfast and lunch.
Think about it, if you had continued to work, he would have had to do for himself anyway. Maybe that is ur problem. You probably worked and came home and did everything. Now you have time on your hands you don't know how to just sit and enjoy it. Like reading a good book. And COVID hasn't helped.
I know, COVID. We are all living it. For me, I am a homebody but for my daughter its like a prison. Hopefully with the introduction of the vaccine things will quickly turn around and we can all get on with our lives. In the meantime, I would not make any hasty decisions. Get out of the house. Take a walk, a drive. From what you wrote, MIL doesn't need you 24/7.
I think you have had a LOT of changes in the last year. Cancer and the treatments have zapped your energy. Even if the job was stressful, you were used to having one, now u don't. (Jobs define u) You lost your home to move into someone elses and it will always be MILs so you can't make it your own. I probably would cry too. And as sweet as my DH is, he just does not understand the "women not being able to live with each other" thing.
"She can be sweet and loving but is often critical, controlling, and manipulative" Maybe she didn't appreciate you cleaning out her house. What is she critical of, the way you clean, then don't clean. If she likes things done a certain way, can you just do it her way. Or, tell her you won't do it at all so she can do it her way. She can't controll you or manipulate you if you don't let her. Like I said if she can dress, bathe and toilet herself she can do other things too.
If you can't leave....get a job...any job. He may not like that you are leaving the house but if you continue to stay you will be worse off. My husband is high risk but I am only 53 and still have to work. Use the excuse that since you work you cannot be around MIL. Or at least not until after you have showered and washed your clothing.
This is not your job to do. It is nice that you can help out but the burden of this needs to be on your husband.