I wonder if anybody has some advice about this. My elderly Mum has secondary bc, diagnosed about 18 months ago. The whole family has rallied around to support her, with the main support being from my Dad.
My sister & I have just spent the weekend with them & had the most awful time. It was all going OK until we pleaded my Dad’s cause to ask her to invite his nephew over to lunch & Mum went ape.
The results of us trying to gently suggest she asks the nephew over led to tears, recriminations, tales of snubs in the past from her in-laws, followed by “I’m ill & you expect me to be standing in the kitchen, cooking”. After this blowup, she sent my sister & I to Coventry, wouldn’t even sit in the same room as us & is hardly speaking to Dad. When we left last night, she barely even acknowledged us, never mind saying goodbye, even though the weather was bad & we had a long drive ahead.
Dad says she has been very difficult these past few weeks, dredging up incidents between them from the past & throwing them in his face with a lot of very hurtful comments. It is driving a huge wedge between them & it’s just destroying us. We have the stress of her being ill in the first place & now we don’t know what to do right for doing wrong.
Mum has always been very stubborn & will argue black is white, even if her logic borders on the absurd, & there is absolutely no reasoning with her once she’s made her mind up about something but I haven’t seen anything like this before.
I know it’s the stress & strain of having bc that has brought this on but it feels like she has been brooding about the past over these last few months but has chosen to remember only the bad things, not the good. Although she is the one who is ill, she doesn’t seem to be giving any consideration to the idea that the family is under strain with the situation too.
I know my parents would never consider talking to somebody like a counsellor but I don’t know what else we can do, especially if she’s now decided that her (close, we thought) family, is all against her. I don’t even know if she’ll speak to us on the phone but I’m guessing not.
Help!!
Psyche