Dear Prudence: My FIL and SIL are awful.

[minoanmiss]

Dear Prudence,
My father-in-law was a miserable old hoot while my mother-in-law was alive.

He is worse now that she is gone. We were lucky he totaled his car running into a neighbor’s mailbox and not their kid. He refuses to cook, and my husband, my sister-in-law, and I live about two hours away and come up only a few times a week. We are lucky there is a grocery store within walking distance of him. An employee was kind enough to offer to cook cut-up chicken without seasoning for my FIL if the order was placed 24 hours in advance. My FIL could walk over there and basically pick up a hot meal every day.

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Instead, my FIL and sister-in-law treated this poor employee as their personal server. My FIL made himself a pest because this employee would not drop everything to cook for him or stop to talk to him. My SIL couldn’t be bothered to remember to call in the order or remind her father when he had to pick up the food. Then this poor person had the “audacity” to go on vacation, and the replacement refused to take their crap—so my SIL tried to get the employee and their manager fired! My husband and I got told this story over the holiday with my sister- and father-in-law ranting in their delusional self-righteousness.

I am a manager in retail and have to deal with terrible customers like them every day. I lost my temper and told them they tried to ruin this poor person’s life because they were too lazy and stupid to pick up the phone and follow a reasonable rule. My FIL launched into another racist rant, and I left the table. Afterward, I told my husband I was done dealing with this. We have been bending over backward trying to help, only to receive no thanks and worse behavior. He is now upset with me. I’m just tired. I really want to call or email the company to apologize on behalf of my FIL. What should I do?

—No Good Deed

Dear No Good Deed,

You need to have a serious talk with your husband about the real issue at hand: Your father-in-law is unable to take care of himself. He lives alone, seems to have some trouble driving, and either can’t or won’t cook. This isn’t simply a case of a boomer being a nuisance but a sign of an untenable situation. Your husband (with or without his sister, who seems remarkably unhelpful) needs to make some hard decisions about caring for an aging parent. It frankly sounds as if this man shouldn’t be living on his own.

I think it may be worth a little effort to get in contact with the grocery employee, not only to apologize on behalf of your father-in-law but also to get intel from someone who’s had frequent enough contact with this man, in order to form a complete picture of his state of mind and health. The larger conversation about your father-in-law’s well-being might freak your husband out or upset him, but the longer he’s in denial about the real gravity of this problem, the worse it will become for everyone involved.

—Delia

Comments

[frenzy]

>My FIL launched into another racist rant

I am frustrated Prudence just... ignored this part? At one point do folks decide that no one deserves to experience the racist tirade. Especially if LW is a PoC themselves.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, this man can't take care of himself and his family is in denial.

His abuse to grocery store people is the tip of the iceberg.

[tielan]

...if husband wants to continue the relationship with his father, he can continue the relationship with his father. LW does not need to participate in the relationship. All communications go through husband. All arrangements. All support and encouragement. Through husband.

Have fun, LW's husband! He's your blood, therefore your problem!

[melannen]

There are ways to feed yourself that don't involve cooking? Or abusing vulnerable retail employees, in theory? If he can go to the grocery store to pick up precooked chicken cubes he can pick up bread, milk, cereal, carrot sticks, and lunchmeat, and if he's too much of an ass to learn how to heat up a can of soup he can live on cold sandwiches.

Like maybe Delia's right and he's actually unable to care for himself due to age/health, but it sounds more like he just likes having an excuse to be waited on hand and foot, and the solution is more likely to be "stop doing that", and if SIL wants to do it all by herself, she's welcome to.

[full_metal_ox]

I’m starting to need that sort of help—-and if a grocery clerk were willing to cook me chicken to pre-order, I would cultivate the hell out of her. I’d thank her effusively (regardless of her affect—-a Customer Service Smile isn’t something she owes me, and service workers have a thousand and three things to be grumpy about.) I’d inquire about her well-being, when her time and attention permitted (i.e., not when there’s a line behind me—-which would be another way to behave as if I were the protagonist of that grocery.) I would do this without presuming any relationship beyond that of customer to provider; she’d be the protagonist of her whole own life in which I’d be merely a walk-on, and which would be none of my business except inasmuch as she, on her own initiative, might choose to confide in me. I’d do the same for her replacement. (And I’d put something in the tip jar, if one exists.)

[melannen]

Yeah, based on the story it's possible he does need to not be living alone - for example if he's having the kind of memory problems where he truly needs to be given a phone call to tell him to go get dinner now or he won't be able to eat, then he probably needs to be in some kind of assisted living, and that's the kind of thing can that be really well hidden until somebody is suddenly widowed. (It could even excuse the being horrible to the employee, tbh, though it sure doesn't excuse SIL - short-term memory issues can cause huge social problems and trying to mask them ineptly can make it even worse.)

But LW doesn't seem to think that's the situation; if it really is that bad, to the point he can't be medically trusted to do something like turn on the stove to heat up soup twice a day, that's a much worse problem that LW really should have confronted before writing this letter.

[minoanmiss]

I think... "Explain" is different than "excuse", and LW really shouldn't be held responsible for FIL especially if SIL and Husband are going to defend his awfulnesses. (Edited to pare down first version which came off grumpier than I meant it) And the advice didn't really address LW's understandable feelings of solidarity with the supermarket staff. I think she knows they'd treat her like this and that Husband would let them get away with it.

[melannen]

That's true, but at some point with dementia sufferers (and memory/brain injury problems generally) I'm willing to go all the way to "excuse". (eta ...sorry, I should have pared this down too probably...)

Dementia patients who don't have the insight to know that their memory is bad do, in fact, live in a world where it seems like people are constantly lying to them, jerking them around, and being rude for no reason. Getting grumpy when a store tells you to come in at a certain time, you come in, and they don't have what you need and claim they never told you to come, and this happens all the time, is excusable to me! If he is having memory problems, when he goes into the store and gets upset that there's no chicken waiting for him, it's possibly because he's operating at a level where to the best of his knowledge, he went at the correct time to pick up the chicken, and they're just lying to him about it repeatedly; and he may be confusing the worker with a good friend or family member and be deeply upset that they aren't treating him the way the person he thinks they are always treated him before.

Some people respond to that level of ongoing confusion by becoming quiet and compliant but some don't, and you can't always predict which it will be based on how they were before. They can't learn better past the point where they can only do limited kinds of learning at all.

I say all this as a customer service professional who does have to deal with these kinds of issues with customers fairly often. And was given training for it, because knowing how to recognize and respond when customers aren't operating under the same rules of reality as you is an accessibility need, and one that's really hard to meet. It's not wrong to get angry if a disabled customer treats you that way and if someone's being disruptive and abusive to the whole space every time they come, then you may not be able to provide reasonable accommodations that allow you to serve them, but it's still useful to have a framework to remind yourself it's nobody's fault.

And carers vary wildly in how well they understand this, too. If FIL *is* having serious memory problems it's very possible that SIL is far more aware than LW of issues LW is still in denial about, and LW is writing off anger about service workers yelling at a confused old man until he panics as SIL being an asshole about staff. Even if SIL has repeatedly tried to explain about the memory problems. We've gotten that a few times too, where people we've never met before try to apologize at length for relatives who we know well and apparently know their needs better than this person visiting from out of state.

The original advice seems to be based on an assumption that something like this may be happening, and if that's the case than butting out probably is the best thing for LW to do. I'm not convinced that contacting the company would do anything useful, since the attempt at firing doesn't seem to have gone anywhere and it doesn't sound like LW has interacted with the store before.

HOWEVER all that said if FIL and SIL have a long history of that kind of assholery - and it really sounds like they do - then it's extremely likely none of the above apply, they'd be acting like that whether he was sick or not, the original advice is going in completely the wrong direction, and he should try living on cold baloney sandwiches for awhile.

Also, like, nobody is obliged to sit around and list to racist rants, dementia patient or not. If he's doing that to random customer service workers, and it's something he knew better than do to before, he's past the point where he needs to be interacting only with well-paid professional carers. If it's something he's been doing his whole life, LW needs to just excuse herself from the care team at this point frankly, beyond offering to help pay professionals maybe.

[minoanmiss]

word.