You’d have to be superhuman not to be struggling. You had a sort of adrenaline that got you through getting your mom settled in and getting yourself through the wedding. Now that’s worn off.
Do you have a therapist you’ve used in the past you could call?
No one called me nor mom for the holiday. By “no one” I mean not any siblings, not any of the grand kids–not even my cool niece. Mom is going through the hardest time of her life DURING THE HOLIDAYS and no one called.
My adopted sister (that distinction isn’t callous, it’s due to her last message to me claiming dad cheated on mom and she’s his illegitimate kid…no quarter to anyone defaming my dead father’s morality)…anyway she called today while we were out doing pretty important stuff. It stirred mom up after we got home and I told her and had her listen to the voicemail.
“This is all so hard on us and I’m sure it’s hard on you too (through crying) and we just want to spend time with you.”
No one has asked to see mom. No one called to see what the plans were for Thanksgiving. MOM SPENT THE DAY IN BED BECAUSE SHE WAS SICK.
I called her back, against all fibers of judgment. Mom really wanted to because she was like “what’s this nonsense–no one calls then she calls crying like she’s trying to have a relationship?” So we called back.
No one answered.
I just spent the last 40 minutes or so sitting in bed talking to mom. I walked by and asked her how she was doing, and she said she was concerned about that call.
No…God. Oh no…she remembers the call…
This is no good. No good.
She said “I’m just a little concerned–why’s she calling now? What happened…what’s she up to? She hasn’t cared or called and now she calls boo-hooin’? Something’s not right…”
So I asked her what she felt like we should do.
“Well I feel like we should make a point to call her back tomorrow. I think I should tell her, you know…if she had been calling to apologize for some of the stuff she’s done, that’d be one thing–but she hasn’t called, at all–now she’s crying making me feel bad like I did something wrong?”
Mom–no–please, she’s not mentally stable. You didn’t do anything at all…
“Well I know, I just don’t like it. So what I think I should tell her is I’m sorry, but you’ve decided to…go that way…and I don’t agree with it but I think it’s high-time that I started moving forward.
–and if she has anything ugly to say after that I think I’ll tell her OK Then I think we just shouldn’t communicate at all.”
At that point I brought up for the first time to mom that I would like to have a mediator involved were any of us siblings to have to communicate on a regular basis. She agreed. We agree that even when they play nice for a little while, it will just turn to shit at some point, and it’s time we tried a different tack, we’ve done that one over and over and it never works out.
It was a really, really great conversation. We talked about our future, her place in my life, our family…
I told her she earned a full sugar cookie after that serious talk (she only eats low carb but LOVES real treats, so she perked up and said “oh well I DO deserve a little treat…”
I went to the kitchen to get her a slice of heaven and she ran out behind me and found my wife and said “thank you for sharing my son with me…”
She’s so adorable.
Yes, she is. A total winner.
Your mom really is a honey. I can only imagine how hard it is to have your own children behave the way most of hers do.
The mediator sounds like a good idea, but do you really think your relatives would agree to that? Would they actually commit and follow through? If the answers to all three of those questions is “Yes,” yay! Your family doesn’t seem to communicate very well, and mediation could help a lot. (Oh. Also, who pays?)
I wouldn’t be too upset about them not calling on Thanksgiving. I mean, given that they are who they are, a Thanksgiving call wouldn’t necessarily be a pleasant thing. In an ideal world, they’d all be nice mentally and ethically healthy people who’d call just to cheer up your mom and with no ulterior motives. But you’ve been in a situation for quite awhile where their calls upset you or your mom or both.
I"m not saying your mom shouldn’t call your adopted sister if she wants to. I guess I’m just saying that especially if moderation is a no-go, it might be a good idea to decide what you and your mom really need and really want.
I guess there’s some miscommunication here. No, absolutely not–the other siblings would never agree to a mediator. It would spook them off for good. THAT is what mom and I both want.
She wants nothing to do with them. She’s already written them off. It’s been years before her memory started to sleep when she solidified her opinions.
My issue is I am not sure if we have the right to just shut the door on them for good.
I’m being told by various professionals to both get a VPO against them and be done, but also I should call them voluntarily to just pump them info they are not asking for “to avoid any conflict down the road.”
So to make my point perfectly clear: I feel like we are not allowed to say “no one wants to have an ongoing relationship and we think it would be best to part ways” without some kind of recourse coming down on myself and I’ll be full of regrets for bring it upon myself.
So if we aren’t allowed to say leave us alone, then we have to allow them some access…that’s my understanding.
And if that’s the case, then I say I have every right to insist that such communication would go through a mediator. I would insist on the siblings splitting the cost 3 ways.
We want to be done. I’m just afraid they’ll regroup and claim I’m keeping them from access.
We have reached the point of no return with mom’s health professional team.
Her PCP took almost a month to get the documents sent over for adult day care. The center personally was calling daily and relaying to me the run-around they were getting. The doc would say they need to speak to me first, so I would call and they said no no one needs to ask me questions.
They claimed at first mom wasn’t even their patient. Now they are saying she hasn’t been in since March (we were in 3 times THREE TIMES in August).
Furthermore, mom’s neurologist still can’t get the neuro-psych evaluation. That doctor seems to have fallen off the planet–seriously I wonder if she’s dead or something, such a major ball to drop.
So yeah we’re dumping the whole lot of them. Don’t know what direction to go but I know they are not reliable or even adequate.
Regarding the evaluation–is there a medical board or some authority to whom I can lodge a complaint?
Argh. Sorry if I’m trying your patience, but I’m still confused. This is where I’m hung up, I think:
The first bit seems to me to say that you’d like a mediator involved if it became necessary for you and your siblings to communicate regularly. The second seems to say that the purpose of getting a mediator would be to spook them off for good so you don’t have to communicate with them.
Also, how could you have a protective order AND contact them to pump them information? Those two things are mutually exclusive. If your attorney and these other professionals are giving you conflicting advice, I hope you can get clarification (or a new attorney). Though IANAL, it seems to me that trying to do both those things or splitting the difference could get very messy, legally speaking.
No worries I have figured out how to be really patient lately 
Let’s just start over–
I don’t know how much communication will be happening with the siblings. Right now, no one really calls except for your errant events like Sunday, the weird, stray call from an emotionally distraught sibling. She has drinking problems and emotional instability, so I figured it was a night of emotion and as I thought, she hasn’t followed up.
The problem on my side is this: Don’t call mom all boo-hooing and crying after 5:30 pm. We have rules, need rules.
The siblings apparently believe they can do and say anything they want with no recourse. I don’t know if they don’t consider mom a regular human or if they just bank on her forgetting everything, but let’s run it back:
The last communication I had with my sister was her demanding I give her that car. When I said no, she called me all kinds of names and started in about how dad had an affair and she’s a blood sibling too (all lies) as an insane attempt to provide leverage of her entitlement to dad’s estate.
That accusation of an affair was followed by 4 other texts saying psychotic stuff, insults, etc.
Then the holidays come, no one gives a shit, then suddenly she’s calling acting like Nooooooooone of that bullshit happened.
This is what I am getting at: If I just let them have the level of access they have now, they’ll scream and rant and throw jars of piss then turn around a few weeks later and go “what…THAT? That’s in the past.”
And it will just happen over, and over, and over.
I feel like I should have some say-so about these disruptions.
So it would be something like this: “Due to the ongoing hostility and accusations and demands, I don’t feel like any of us siblings can reasonably communicate without some kind of professional mediator. There’s too much bitterness and every exchange turns toxic. For those reason mom and I feel like our conversations should be witnessed by a mediator.”
Something like that.
Lawyer won’t do it–just doesn’t want to go down that route.
So my options appear to be allow them to keep doing what they are doing, or say “if you want to talk we’ll have to find a mediator because you all say awful stuff then act like it never happened.” To which they will not agree simply because they don’t want to have to face the consequences of having a professional in on their ugliness.
But it’s a perfectly reasonable request on my end!
Because as I see it the other option is for me to hire my own lawyer just to deal with when these lizard people crawl out from under rocks.
If they want to be adults and have rational relationships, then they will have to start being accountable for what they do and say.
If mom had her way, she’d call them and say to go away forever. But I’ve been told over and over that we can’t or shouldn’t do that (by the lawyer) but the APS agent says we should do the VPO.
Mom’s lawyer is fantastic at estate law. She is not a family bickering lawyer. I get why she won’t touch it.
But I also feel like I should be able to call some kind of family crisis service, lay out the situation, and have some reprieve from the family contacting us.
If I don’t have a right as an adult to say “fuck off for good and don’t call,”
if mom isn’t mentally capable of having HER decisions for them to go away upheld,
what options do I have?
I think the miscommunication is this: I don’t expect any regular communication, nor want it, but if THEY do, the circumstances would likely have to involve a mediator, something I feel like at this point is reasonable for me to ask. I don’t anticipate they’ll want that, which would result in them probably backing off further.
If we had our druthers, we’d just tell them to go away and be done with it.
Now that the sun is low in the sky, I’m realizing that on gloomy days, Sundowning can start in the morning and last all day then double Sundowning after dark .
I really wish the neuropsychologist didn’t flake out on us…she said mom needs to be on an antidepressant and I bet if she was she wouldn’t be crying right now.
I hate her doctors. We are so, so finding a better team.
There should be a state licensing board you can complain to.
To be fair, a neuropsychologist cannot prescribe antidepressants. A psychiatrist or internal medicine or family practitioner would need to do that. Pursue an appt with one of them.
If you paid for a neuropsych evaluation and didn’t receive the results, by all means report that to the appropriate licensing board. Your mom might have to be the one to request the results, depending on when the HCPOA were signed.
Would it make sense to get a stopgap antidepressant prescription, for something to give her a little help until you find a psychiatrist and a better team? If this is something you want to explore, you might look for an urgent care psychiatric clinic.
For example here’s one that used to be called “Mindful Urgent Care”: https://mindful.care/, or another: https://urgentcarepsych.com/
And here’s the NAMI website with some suggestions for finding treatment: Getting Treatment During a Crisis | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness
Real quick because I want to be done with this today–
Digging in, looks like mom has Medicare A & B plus she has Aetna Premier Plan (HMO) + Medicare RX…
Our Medicare contact fell through (not a big deal) and I’ve spent all day digging in–I don’t see any real reason to change things for this year. I mean I’d love to see ways we can find an improved plan, but based off what I read in JohnT’s thread, she seems to have pretty solid coverage.
There’s so much to consider, such as what county we might live in this time next year, or what specific needs we will have, etc–
–AND unbelievably, mom has already lived with me a quarter of a year. Next year will be here plenty quick.
I hope to just keep what she has.
It’s two, two, two slumps in one :(.
We (all the adult kids, plus spouses) are finally going to take a more active role in managing my in-laws, as MIL is definitely showing signs of slippage. I’d vented about scammers in the minirants thread (MIL reached out to us due to some banking shenanigans) and when talking to her later that day, she didn’t remember having talked to the bank or having GONE TO THE DOCTOR.
As you can imagine, I’m re-reading this thread (and your original one) with great interest. At least in our situation, there is nothing like the truly amazingly awful family dynamics at play.
You’re very lucky to have a family who is all stepping up. Make sure you keep everyone on the same page, spread the responsibility out as evenly as you can, and (IMHO) try to make sure everyone is in accord regarding treatment and decisions so there is no animosity.
My MIL bought and read Alzheimer’s Through the Stages by Mary Moller before handing it off for me to read.
It’s a quick read and I’m only into the second paragraph, but it’s very helpful so far.
For example, I can easily place mom between stages 4 and 5 based on the panoply of symptoms. And it’s encouraging all these lifestyle changes may be beneficial to mitigating advancement–more exercise–blood flow to the brain is helpful, more leaving the house/adventures/new experiences/new people, better nutrition, healthier food, more conversations, etc etc.
Godspeed to your loved one and your family.
Thanks for that recommendation - it’s available from Kindle Unlimited and I’ve just downloaded it.
Big news in the works.
What if we are transitioning out of “crisis mode” onto smoother waters…? What if something good might actually happen?
Not to be vague but I don’t want to put my cart before the horse.
Sending good vibes for this vague possibility!