u/StrongRecipe6408

I'm 40 and single by choice. My Chinese parents are both around 75 and have spend the last 40 years in semi-rural USA (Ohio).

During this time they have made no friends, have no family in the area, don't often leave the house, and essentially haven't integrated at all with the surrounding society and culture (poor English, don't listen to music, don't watch shows, don't eat non-Chinese food, don't hang out with others, no hobbies that involve leaving the house, etc).

My mom doesn't drive and essentially doesn't contribute anything anymore, not even loading dishes into the dishwasher or meal prep. My dad does all the household errands but there will come a time when he won't be able to handle things. Even now, driving himself and my mom to places like the city for doctor's visits is difficult as he easily gets confused with directions and sometimes even has difficulty navigating parking lots. Calling customer service to deal with different services is confusing and difficult.

Given this situation, I'm not too sure how I should care for them in the future. I have so many plans of traveling the entire world but I increasingly see this as impossible. I'll likely be spending the next 10 years of my life taking care of two aging parents who I don't share much in common with.

They also can't go into a local retirement community because it won't have the food they like and the language barrier will be extreme. Any outside help we find will be expensive, English-speaking, and unable to cook the food they like.

I've thought about going to China and finding an old-age community there, but they don't want to do anything besides keep staying in the house.

Anyone else single and in a similar predicament?

My mom is 76 and she's been a very absent-minded person essentially her entire life, but as she gets older it seems to be getting worse.

She does things like:

- Put a pot of food on the stove, turn it up to max, and just leave. And not come back. Just last night she was making a pot of oatmeal and turned the entire thing into a thick pile of black carbon (not just black at the bottom, but the *entire* contents), so it had been left burning for a very long time.

- Put a plate of food in the microwave, turn it on, and then just forget about it. Sometimes she doesn't even turn on the microwave after leaving food in it and leaving. This happens regularly.

- Take food out of the fridge and do nothing with it. And then leave with the fridge door open.

- Most of the time she's just on her phone listening to Chinese podcasters.

- In 5 months she has left the premises of the house about 8 times. 5 times for doctor's appointments. But even when much younger she was always a home body, made no friends in the 35 years we've lived here, and never went outside on her own for shopping, eating, going to the park, do errands, etc. She's also never had to buy groceries on her own, pay a bill, put gas in a car, drive anywhere besides to and from her office, etc. because my dad did all of that.

I'm wondering if this level of absent-mindedness is some sort of early-onset neurological problem, or just her natural personality just getting worse with age. Talks with neurologists and scans have been inconclusion.

Anyone else gone through this with their parents?

My parents have a 6x8 bed that they put blackberry plants into, without realizing they're rhizomes.

They don't like the blackberries and have cut away the bush, but the soil is absolutely filled with roots now. I suspect they're the roots of the blackberry bushes.

The concern now is that nothing will grow in this extremely fibrous root-filled soil.

Does anyone have any experience with growing things in an area that used to have blackberries?

How did it go? Were you able to get it permanently converted over to another crop?