Newbie here and I'm so grateful to have found this site. Thanks to all of you who have posted to make this an informative and comforting place to be.
My mother and I are part of a large church community and for the most part they have been very supportive. However, every now and again, someone (usually another elderly person) will "throw off" on my care giving role. I'm always angered/saddened that they would say something to dampen my spirits especially since I've never complained about my situation. In fact, I find it rewarding to care for my mother and she expresses such gratitude in return. But I'm always left to wonder are they saying things out of concern or are they jealous because their kids/grandkids would never care for them and or are they being nosey?
Just wish I could understand the why's but if not find a quick way to shut them down and move on.
Mom spent 7 decades perfecting her waif/victim persona, with a side order of control freak. Mom acted like she was destitute, when in truth she had ample financial resources. Mom wouldn’t let anyone perform a task (large or small) for her, unless they did it HER way.
Mom was so “private” that she assigned DPOA/HCPOA to someone who lived 100 miles away and had spent time with mom only 3 or 4 times during the last 10 years of mom’s life. (A kind and trustworthy person - to be fair. But that’s how determined mom was to maintain her privacy.)
**massive eyeroll**
Mom saw a doctor once in the last 20 years of her life. So NO diagnosis and NO treatment for her escalating defects with balance, mobility, mood, tiredness, dexterity.
Yet these “experts in our midst” genuinely expected me to be a saintly live-in amateur nurse with psychic abilities. And no needs of my own. No life of my own. No privacy. No career.
Incredible.
“Ignorance is bliss,” alright. For everyone who’s on the outside looking in.
My father had vascular dementia with serious judgement and executive function impacts but kept most of his long term memory so people who only visited occasionally and talked about "the old days" questioned whether he really needed a locked MC unit. I like to use the shock technique... "Yes, Dad is doing so well in MC and I can go back to being his daughter and let the MC staff deal with all the glasses of urine he puts on the window sill."
I would look them straight in the face and say "May The Lord bless you" and walk away.
Caregiving will thicken your skin or devour you. You can not take things personally in regard to your caregiving. I promise you that it gets more challenging as time goes by. Forewarned is forearmed.
Welcome to the forum. Great big welcome hug!
Put the two together and you get someone trying to control you dressed up in really nice clothing.
It is unsolicited and unwelcome.
Explain that you have a thousand friends (here) who will answer any questions you can come up with about caregiving. And walk away.
We also will have every "WHY" question answered when we get to heaven.
I stopped asking for prayer at my church because passing by a prayer team member in the vacant church, he stopped to ask me if I was feeling any better.
I did not know him, would not have confided in him, and prayer requests are supposed to be c o n f i d e n t i a l, not give a stranger power and privy into ones life. imo.
In other words, unsolicited, unwelcome, and none of their business.
When our house burned down in 2014 bushfires, people would say a few months later ‘I hope you’re getting back on your feet again now’. Well no, actually. It takes years to replace a few miles of fencing, let alone everything else. Once again, they want to feel good themselves. The comments are a wall to stop them feeling bad for you.
Perhaps the unsolicited advice comes from the same place – they want to think that they can give you a suggestion that will solve all your problems.
There is no need to be nasty, but it’s good to have an automatic response yourself: ‘We’re coping OK thanks. How are you going?’.
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