After having some time to sleep on my first responses, I have to say now that the parent-child relationship thing could well be the problem. Mom will be 78 in 2 weeks, and Grandma will be 99 in about 6 weeks...and they share a home at the family farm. Grandma still won't accept that Mom is an adult and capable of making her own decisions about things, and often when Mom calls she talks about how Grandma did this or that to upset her, or how Grandma won't let her run her own life. And all I can tell her is that Grandma is in the later stages of life, and she's entitled to her own opinions.
They're living together in the house they moved to when Mom was about 11 or 12, with Mom having moved back in about 4-5 years ago. Grandma has been spending winters in Texas with my uncle since the early 1970's, and the family decided it probably wasn't a good idea for the house to be unoccupied for the 5 or 6 months Grandma is gone.
But Mom and Grandma both have a possessive thing going on, whether it's about groceries or the TV or whatever. Neither wants to share. Mom still has what I call "packrat syndrome," and she never throws things away. The last time we hauled newspapers to recycling for her, she had enough to nearly fill the 7-foot bed of her pickup, for example. Grandma is always on Mom's case about storing stuff where it should be, and about cleaning up after herself better...and probably for good reason, from what I've seen.
But Mom has always had a problem with looking after herself...she can barely get to the post office to mail off her bill payments on time, but she's been a 4-H leader for 40 years; she's been an officer in the saddle club for 45 years [they finally "retired" her this year by finding other candidates to run for office]; she's been actively involved in the extension homemaker's club, the Royal Neighbors club, and she works 3-5 days a week at the Senior Citizens Center. She sings in the church choir, and she's involved in the ladies' group at the church. She can get on the phone and solicit donations from businesses for her charities, but she can't manage to call up a business and discuss a problem she may be having with them, or a service she's already paid for.
Not to mention that she's managed to keep in the horse business since Dad died in '91. So when she's not busy wth all her volunteer stuff, she's constantly repairing fences and running water. And of course she can't ever go anywhere to visit family or friends who are more than an hour's drive away, because she's tied down to [or by] the horses.
But if anyone suggests she cut back any of her volunteer activities in order to better look after herself, she reacts as if you'd told her she needed to amputate one of her own limbs without the benefit of anesthetic.
So perhaps I can understand a part of the dynamic you're describing between you and your mom.
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