I don’t usually post about anything on reddit but I did want some perspective on this situation I’ve been dealing with regarding my mom.
First some background information: I, (26f) grew up in a typical suburban household with my mom (64f), dad, older sister (29f), and older brother (twin w/ older sister). However, when I was in high school, my dad was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis in connection with his Crohn’s Disease. It was a really tough time. He was put on oxygen, he lost a ton of weight, then he became wheelchair bound because he couldn’t walk without becoming out of breath. When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the strongest man in the world, he was my hero and it was like I was just watching him waste away slowly.
Finally, in October of 2018, during my freshman year of college, my dad passed away. I took the loss very hard and became extremely depressed. My grades slipped and this all eventually culminated in me dropping out of college to move back in with my mom and my older brother. (My older sister had moved halfway across the country to go to college and decided to stay out there post graduation).
Flash forward to 2022 and our family was yet again completely upended when my older brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. He’d lost control of his new bike coming home from a friend’s house and hit a car head on. It was devastating. My brother and I had always had our issues, as my brother had always been something of a troublemaker but he’d really stepped up after our dad died and it seemed like he’d really been turning things around. His death was really hard on my mom. She’s been in therapy for the last several years to help process the grief.
After that, it was just me and my mom living at home for a while. I finally landed a good job and did my best to step up like my brother did after our dad died and we started to heal. Obviously our family will never be whole again but we’re doing alright all things considered.
The problem is, awhile back, my uncle (60m), my mother’s younger brother, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (Ik, the men in my family have the shittiest luck) and a couple of years ago it became apparent that he was starting to get to the point where he could no longer safely live on his own. At the time he had been living on the opposite coast from us with only my mom and uncle’s step family nearby. So my mom invited him to come and live with us.
I, admittedly, wasn’t thrilled about the idea. We had just lost the two men of our immediate family and I barely knew my uncle. While he was technically my family, I’d only met the man a handful of times in my life, most of which I was too young to remember and he seemed to have little to no interest in building a relationship with me or my siblings. So, cruel as it might sound, the last thing I wanted was to get involved with another dying man just to end up grieving again in a few years.
I told my mother as much and she reassured me this was a temporary situation, that she also had no intention of being a caretaker to my uncle like she’d been with my father, that once he got to the point where he needed help taking care of himself, they’d look for alternative living situations for him, that this arrangement was mainly just so that someone would be there if he were to slip and fall in the shower or something along those lines.
It’s now been a couple years since he moved in and my uncle is… an interesting character. He and I are cordial for the most part. However a plethora aof issues have arisen between him and my mom.
For starters, my uncle is a bit of a slob, and while some of that is on account of his disability, another part is just that he doesn’t pick up after himself. He leaves used napkins everywhere in the kitchen and food scraps sitting out on the counters. Another issue, though this one is neither of their faults is that he mumbles everything he says and with my mother being hard of hearing, she can’t understand a word he says and I constantly get called on to translate. Additionally, he’s also super stingy about money, which I understand, except he acts as though my mom is trying to rip him off, despite her having let him live with us rent free for the first year until he started getting paid disability. And overall he just makes a lot of snippy, passive aggressive comments towards my mom that I don’t appreciate but if I say anything about it my mom ends up defending him.
Overall, I get the sense that growing up they had a very Parentified Older Sister and Coddled Younger Brother dynamic that my uncle never quite grew out of.
But the main issue I’m getting at in this post is that most of this is stuff I only know because, rather than address any of this with my uncle directly, my mom instead choses to constantly come to me to complain about it, as well as give me constant updates about his doctor’s appointments and issues he’s experiencing. It’s gotten to the point where I feel like it’s all she talks to me about anymore. And it’s hard for me because every time she talks to me about his Parkinson’s, it’s like I’m right back in high school listening to my mom make doctors appointments for my dad and being given updates on his gradual decline and it makes my anxiety skyrocket.
I just want to tell her that I don’t want to hear it anymore. That if she has a problem, she should either bring it up to him directly or tell her therapist about it but to stop bringing it to me. I get that she’s probably under a lot of stress and wants someone she can rely on to share the load, so it feels selfish to tell her to stop, like I’d be telling her to just deal with it herself. But I also kinda feel like I didn’t ask for this. She’s the one who invited him to move across the country to live with us. So would I be the asshole if I told my mom to stop complaining to me about the situation she created??