Pay Dirt: What Do I Do About My Mother?

[minoanmiss]

My 73-year-old mom had a stroke this summer and was told she could not live alone anymore. Rather than sending her to a nursing home, I offered to let her move in with me and my family.

I have a husband and two girls (8 and 9 years old). I modified my house to accommodate her needs and turned my formal dining room into a bedroom for her. I am currently working from home, so I am able to care for her. She can walk with a walker and use the bathroom on her own, but for everything else she needs my help. I am responsible for laundry, dressing her, preparing meals, supplying meds (crushed) three times a day, and many other things. I take time off of work to take her to doctor’s appointments, including physical therapy.

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After a few months of therapy, she made great progress and started to get careless. She decided she could walk inside the house without anyone helping her on the last step, and she fell. She broke her hip and needed a full hip replacement. Again, I was the one to care for her, including keeping her at home for five days waiting for a hospital bed.

Now she is on her road to recovery again, and I told her it was time to schedule an appointment to get a trust done to handle all items once she passes. She told me her plan for distributing her money. She wants to give my sister (out of state and completely absent) 50 percent, me 25 percent, and my two girls 12.5 percent each. My sister does not have children. She said she wants to make it fair between me and my sister.

I am upset because I am the one caring for her. I am the one making all the sacrifices, and my sister barely even calls her. I cannot even leave for a weekend getaway without making arrangements for someone to care for my mom while I’m away. I feel totally trapped and it’s hard. I tried to get a caregiver for several hours a day and my mom complained until I canceled those services. Now, with the labor shortage, I cannot find anyone to help at home. Between holding a professional full-time job, raising two children, running a household primarily by myself and caring for a senior, I have no time to myself.

Now that I found out my mom’s plan for her trust, I am so resentful. I am actually thinking about finding a nice assisted living facility for her. What would you do? This is a very hard position to be in.

—Tired of Sacrificing

Dear Tired,

That was very nice of you to step up and be your mother’s caregiver after she fell ill. Stroke victims usually need a lot of additional care, which can be draining—as you have found to be true. It sounds like you have gone above and beyond what any child should do for their aging parents. There are limits, and it sounds like you’ve hit yours. You’ve altered your whole reality to take on your mom and this has caused a lot of stress on you. The estate split sounds like it was the final straw.

You are not a bad person for wanting your mother to be in assisted living. You have two children to care for, and you need to be the best person you can be to raise them. This includes making sure your own needs are met and you aren’t in a permanent state of exhaustion trying to balance everything. An assisted living home has trained professionals with around-the-clock care that can better suit your mother’s ongoing needs.

Since you were the one to start the conversation about the trust, open that conversation back up and add that along with her trust, she needs to figure out what her next steps are in making sure she receives the ongoing medical care you currently provide. You can say that you understand why she felt the division of her estate was fair, but that she has not acknowledged the fact that you are financially supporting her without any financial help. Remind her that along with providing the financial support she needs, you have also been her caregiver, which has left you at a point where you are now exhausted, and now would be the time to find an assisted living facility.

The shitty part about all of this is she’s going to be hurt and will probably lash out at you, which might make you feel worse. As hard as it’s going to be, stand your ground and remind her that she has an option to go live with her other daughter if she does not want to go into a home. Caregiving is not meant to be a one-person job. I’m rooting for you.

Comments

[rmc28]

I love my mum dearly and I would not volunteer to get into this situation in the first place. Luckily she's had my stepdad when she's had need for caregiving recently (a nasty car accident a decade ago, a stroke this year), but if and when that stops being a workable solution, the conversation my stepsister and I will be having with our parents is what kind of facility and how will it be paid for, not whose house they will be moving into.

(and yes, we both have younger brothers, but as the eldest on each side and by temperament it'll be me and Stepsister who get things sorted; luckily we get on very well)

My advice to the LW would be to leave the planned money distribution entirely out of the discussion about how LW's mother will be looked after. It is enough to say "I am realising after these past months that caring for you on top of my other commitments is too much and I can't keep it up, so we need to find an assisted living facility for you, and discuss how it will be paid for." Given that the mother has previously complained even about in-home care for a few hours a day, I expect this will go down badly and be met with a lot of resistance and no doubt a bunch of guilt tripping about valuing her job over her mother, etc etc. LW needs to hold firm and keep repeating "this isn't working for me, we need to find you somewhere else to live by X date, and agree how it will be paid for" until it sinks in that she isn't budging. LW also needs to look into her legal standing for arranging a place in an assisted living facility with or without her mother's consent, and also for moving her out of her own home anyway. And to keep reminding herself that she is allowed to have a life of her own that is not subsumed into caring for her parent and offspring.

[ambyr]

My advice to the LW would be to leave the planned money distribution entirely out of the discussion about how LW's mother will be looked after.

THIS. I don't think the advice in the letter is a good idea--it makes it sound like going into assisted living is punitive, retribution for an undesired distribution of her assets, and, okay, maybe it is that in LW's head, but treating it that way is going to make it even harder to convince the mother to embrace assisted living.

[lemonsharks]

Tbh I'd have the "formal power of attorney" talk, then the assisted living community talk.

I'm also deep in elder millennial blue collar snark at "wow, LW's mom has an estate to leave that's significant enough to make LW pissy about future probate"