This last weekend, my eldest brother and younger sister came to visit Mum and (allegedly) give me a weekend off.
I was absolutely infuriated! Not only did they arrive and immediately start being snide about my not having done all the housework in my mother's big 4-bedroom house as well as keeping on top of my smallholding and livestock a few miles away, but rather than spending time with Mum they pitched straight into cleaning and rearranging her kitchen and bathroom - meaning my mother spent two days basically hiding in her bedroom and being talked over and told what she wanted and felt! At one point I was so incensed that my sister answered a question for my mother without even pausing to let her speak that I banged the kettle down and walked over to ask Mum if she wanted another cup of tea, to which my sister started to say no again and Mum hurriedly said yes please! Needless to say she got the tea.
Even when they weren't turning the house upside down in front of her eyes, my siblings talked to each other rather than to Mum, and when they did talk to her, they addressed her in slow, loud voices and put everything as statements - 'you'll like this won't you, it's nice and clean and we've moved the freezer, that's a better place for it'. (No it flipping wasn't - they'd moved it so it cramped the space around the sink and kettle, displacing the bin and recycling out of the room entirely!)
What really gets my goat is that when they arrived, my brother told me they (my siblings) had been discussing what to do with Mum's bank accounts and they'd decided that it would be best if she was given a small allowance each month, so she couldn't spend too much, and the rest would be put into a household bills account Mum wouldn't be allowed to touch. Now, my sister and I are attorneys for Mum, both financial and welfare, but my brother is not. He has no legal standing to involve himself and my sister should not be discussing it with him - we have a duty of confidentiality! Nor should they be intervening in how Mum's bank accounts are set up - she wants someone else to do all the tedious stuff with computers and things, but she knows her own mind when it comes to spending money, she never wastes a penny and she'd be absolutely devastated if she found someone had changed her banking arrangements! It's one of her particular satisfactions to watch over my shoulder as I go through her accounts each month and check every direct debit has gone on time, show her her various pensions arriving on the dot and check her invoices against her outgoings to be sure her bills are all paid.
Not once did they ask Mum - or even tell her it was a suggestion! At least they waited until she wasn't there and then told me behind her back.
Oh, and I didn't get my weekend off, either. I ended up cooking for them, running them to the tip twice because they'd filled my trailer with what they called rubbish (I pulled some of Mum's prized treasures out and put them away again!) and after they'd gone, Mum begged me to put her kitchen straight again so I then had to find and restore everything, under her supervision!
I'm now wondering if I should pop to the bank as soon as it opens in the new year and tell them not to change anything without my say-so! I'm certainly going to find someone who'll come in and sit with Mum and listen to her say what she wants to do with the future so I have an independent witness when I have the inevitable fight with my siblings (I already blew my top at my brother and told him to stop trying to run our lives - for some reason I gritted my teeth all the way to Sunday evening and then I was moving something of mine out of the shed into the trailer to take home and he asked if I wanted help, I said no, I'd rather do it myself, he said don't be silly, grabbed the other end and that was the straw that broke the camel's back) .... they're already talking about selling her house to fund her care home fees and she was only diagnosed a couple of months back, has said repeatedly she doesn't want to go into care (her mother died in respite when I was 7 and we'd gone on holiday) and I'm very willing to continue caring for her as long as possible - I helped Mum care for Dad in his last years, and I've been on hand and helping her out ever since - about the last 15 years or so. My siblings live hundreds of miles away and visit a few days a year at most).
In a way it kind of backfired on them, though - they put Mum's back up (she's very quiet, very polite and exceedingly stubborn) and she's now asking how soon she can move into my house, sell her house and then maybe look for another property in the area with a nicer house, more land and which we can share - my place is adequate but something of a fixer-upper and I've not been there long enough to do all the fixing-up yet. That, too, might be a backfire from my sister's domineering streak - her suggestion was I sell my place and Mum's and buy a place closer to her so she can take on more of the caring. Right now I have to say I'm seeing that the 'buy somewhere together' bit stuck but Mum's not on board with moving to the other side of the country, away from her remaining friends... particularly as my sister's area doesn't have suitable properties for my critters within even the most optimistic joint budget and Mum loves feeding my ducks and watching the geese! I'm not up for moving to the other side of the country either - my support network is where I am, I don't want to have to start building a new one when I want to be looking after Mum and caring for my critters!
Okay, vent over. Steam only trickling faintly out of my ears. Thanks for being a community where I can do this safely, and sorry I've inflicted it on you.
I was absolutely infuriated! Not only did they arrive and immediately start being snide about my not having done all the housework in my mother's big 4-bedroom house as well as keeping on top of my smallholding and livestock a few miles away, but rather than spending time with Mum they pitched straight into cleaning and rearranging her kitchen and bathroom - meaning my mother spent two days basically hiding in her bedroom and being talked over and told what she wanted and felt! At one point I was so incensed that my sister answered a question for my mother without even pausing to let her speak that I banged the kettle down and walked over to ask Mum if she wanted another cup of tea, to which my sister started to say no again and Mum hurriedly said yes please! Needless to say she got the tea.
Even when they weren't turning the house upside down in front of her eyes, my siblings talked to each other rather than to Mum, and when they did talk to her, they addressed her in slow, loud voices and put everything as statements - 'you'll like this won't you, it's nice and clean and we've moved the freezer, that's a better place for it'. (No it flipping wasn't - they'd moved it so it cramped the space around the sink and kettle, displacing the bin and recycling out of the room entirely!)
What really gets my goat is that when they arrived, my brother told me they (my siblings) had been discussing what to do with Mum's bank accounts and they'd decided that it would be best if she was given a small allowance each month, so she couldn't spend too much, and the rest would be put into a household bills account Mum wouldn't be allowed to touch. Now, my sister and I are attorneys for Mum, both financial and welfare, but my brother is not. He has no legal standing to involve himself and my sister should not be discussing it with him - we have a duty of confidentiality! Nor should they be intervening in how Mum's bank accounts are set up - she wants someone else to do all the tedious stuff with computers and things, but she knows her own mind when it comes to spending money, she never wastes a penny and she'd be absolutely devastated if she found someone had changed her banking arrangements! It's one of her particular satisfactions to watch over my shoulder as I go through her accounts each month and check every direct debit has gone on time, show her her various pensions arriving on the dot and check her invoices against her outgoings to be sure her bills are all paid.
Not once did they ask Mum - or even tell her it was a suggestion! At least they waited until she wasn't there and then told me behind her back.
Oh, and I didn't get my weekend off, either. I ended up cooking for them, running them to the tip twice because they'd filled my trailer with what they called rubbish (I pulled some of Mum's prized treasures out and put them away again!) and after they'd gone, Mum begged me to put her kitchen straight again so I then had to find and restore everything, under her supervision!
I'm now wondering if I should pop to the bank as soon as it opens in the new year and tell them not to change anything without my say-so! I'm certainly going to find someone who'll come in and sit with Mum and listen to her say what she wants to do with the future so I have an independent witness when I have the inevitable fight with my siblings (I already blew my top at my brother and told him to stop trying to run our lives - for some reason I gritted my teeth all the way to Sunday evening and then I was moving something of mine out of the shed into the trailer to take home and he asked if I wanted help, I said no, I'd rather do it myself, he said don't be silly, grabbed the other end and that was the straw that broke the camel's back) .... they're already talking about selling her house to fund her care home fees and she was only diagnosed a couple of months back, has said repeatedly she doesn't want to go into care (her mother died in respite when I was 7 and we'd gone on holiday) and I'm very willing to continue caring for her as long as possible - I helped Mum care for Dad in his last years, and I've been on hand and helping her out ever since - about the last 15 years or so. My siblings live hundreds of miles away and visit a few days a year at most).
In a way it kind of backfired on them, though - they put Mum's back up (she's very quiet, very polite and exceedingly stubborn) and she's now asking how soon she can move into my house, sell her house and then maybe look for another property in the area with a nicer house, more land and which we can share - my place is adequate but something of a fixer-upper and I've not been there long enough to do all the fixing-up yet. That, too, might be a backfire from my sister's domineering streak - her suggestion was I sell my place and Mum's and buy a place closer to her so she can take on more of the caring. Right now I have to say I'm seeing that the 'buy somewhere together' bit stuck but Mum's not on board with moving to the other side of the country, away from her remaining friends... particularly as my sister's area doesn't have suitable properties for my critters within even the most optimistic joint budget and Mum loves feeding my ducks and watching the geese! I'm not up for moving to the other side of the country either - my support network is where I am, I don't want to have to start building a new one when I want to be looking after Mum and caring for my critters!
Okay, vent over. Steam only trickling faintly out of my ears. Thanks for being a community where I can do this safely, and sorry I've inflicted it on you.