I have shared in this forum previously about my MIL's issues with ALZ. Today this post is to share about me. I am 45 yrs. old with 11-year-old and 15-year-old kids. My MIL has been in stage 5, moderate for a very long time. She has been living with the disease for at least 9 years now. She is physically quite healthy and active for a 83 yr. old in spite of the uncontrolled diabetes she has had for 40 yrs. (no heart disease, pressure or any diabetes complications). So, she might carry on with ALZ for more years I guess. She spends 5 months each in our house and my husband’s brother. The sons will not put MIL in a nursing home due to cultural reasons. I have shared before with all of you of her cursing me and the other daughter in law 24/7 either for the food we cook or that we are stealing her clothes. We cook everyday dreading what yelling we will encounter. I am used to her calling me devil, who*e and other curse words all the time. Since the sight of me makes her go berserk, I am mostly huddled up in my room or I take my two kids out for activities and escape my house. I never have dinner with family because if I sit at the dinner table it is a nightmare, listening to the abuse about the food we cook. Our family has turned quite dysfunctional, only my husband and MIL eat together. Everybody else eats at their own time. Both me and husband work from home and have very busy jobs. I do most of the cooking and cleaning for the family. However, because my husband fears his mother hurling abuse about food (she thinks all cooked food is 6 months old or tastes bad), he whips up something fresh for her lunch and dinner every day. All she does is curse (swearing and curses that evil things happen to me or that I should get a disease and die, let someone shoot you, something falls on your head, let your kids illtreat you, etc.). Even in her sleep, and in her prayers, I can see her muttering to God to give me the worst suffering (I sometimes think it’s hilarious.). She does not curse her own children, it's only the daughter in-laws and her own mother-in-law, sister in laws etc., I used to be patient with her all the time, right from the beginning of this disease and never retort back, in part because my husband wouldn’t let me, and I wanted to keep family peace. Rarely when it used to get to my nerves, and I would say something he would swing right back at me in support his mother. Since we are both in the same house working from home, he is around all the time and if I say something, it will become an ugly fight between us which I don’t want my kids to endure. But in the last several months, I think something strange has happened to me. Even when my MIL is yelling like crazy onto my face, I don’t feel like saying anything in return. It’s like I have no energy to fight, or I feel frozen. I feel even if she attacks me, I will just stay frozen and not defend back. I was a highly organized, fast, multi-tasking person before. But now, I am noticing my office work is suffering, deadlines are missing, missing kid’s deadlines (like when they are absent at school, I am forgetting to call the school and the school staff is upset and calling me), forgetting about library books, forgetting to cancel extracurricular lessons, and getting non-refunds now, misplacing things in the house. I am turning forgetful, and I cannot multi-task like before. I can only do one thing at a time. I am on the internet countless hours searching non relevant stuff and office work is suffering. I used to take showers everyday but these days I don’t realize that I haven’t showered in like two or three days. I recently got an auto immune disorder Alopecia areata where I am losing hair in patches. I don’t know if it has something to do with my stress. I tried a few counselling sessions, but it didn’t help. I don’t think I am depressed. But something is wrong with me, and I cannot diagnose what and what I should do.
You won't change your husband, or your MIL so change the situation. At 83 she could live another 10-15 years and the situation won't improve.
"By keeping your mother here abusing me, our children, and family life, you are doing PERMANENT damage to our marriage and family."
Repeat it every single day, because it's true. Tell your sister-in-law to adopt the same technique with her husband.
There are options for her living situation, customs be d*mned. There is no reason why you have to accept her abuse, Alzheimers or not, and your husband is complicit in that abuse if he refuses to do anything about it.
He can care for his loved one by putting her in Memory Care where they know how to handle this behavior, and using the cultural reasons is a cop-out.
There are two choices here. The first one is MIL goes to live with her other children.
The other is she gets put into a nursing home/memory care.
If your husband is unwilling to choose his wife and children over his mother, you talk to a divorce lawyer and have him served.
Your account of abuse here is horrific to read. If this were my MIL I would drop her off at a hospital ER with a note pinned to her jacket and drive away.
You deserve better than to be treated with such abuse by your MIL and such neglect by your husband. Your children do not deserve to have their homelife and childhoods ruined by a mean, nasty, demented, abusive monster living in their home who torments their mother day and night.
You lay down the law with your husband today. Your man needs to be made to understand that by continuing to have his mother in your home, he is creating the perfect conditions for elder abuse to happen.
You show him this post. It's coming from someone who was in-home caregiver for 25 years. I've been in every kind of caregiving situation there is.
I have known many good DIL's who got physical with their elderly MIL or FIL because their husbands ignored a dangerous situation.
I worked for a miserable elderly woman. Her DIL became a good friend of mine. She was stuck with her 24/7 because she didn't work outside the home.
Her MIL was such a monster that being her caregiver drove her to a nervous breakdown. I showed up for work and that poor woman was in the garage with car running.
She was okay, her husband made other arrangements for his mother though.
You make your husband understand that either he chooses you and his kids over his mother, or he gets a second job. He's going to need it with all the alimony and child support he will have to pay.
If you have any family or friends you and your kids can stay with, you should go for a while. Make your husband deal with his mother. She is not your responsibility and you do not have to share your home with her.
She is his responsibility and his siblings.
I especially liked the part about dropping MIL off at the ER with a note pinned on her jacket, and then driving away.
Time to get your priorities straight, your children should be #1, either she goes or you go, taking your children with you.
You are burned out and this will not get better as long as you stay in this toxic enviornment.
Your current living conditions sound to me like a prisoner under torture. Nothing less than that.
I cannot imagine anyone living like this and maintaining either physical health or sanity.
I do understand the cultural dictate involved. But you seem to be sacrificing both your own mental and physical health to your MIL I wish you well, but this is beyond human indurance, and your venting it to us cannot help you I fear. Please see your medical doctor and your psychologist and show them a copy of what you have written here to us. The dreadful truth is that living in this manner may kill you. And when you are gone, this old world will just keep spinning without you. You MUST act for yourself.
When I listen to what you have written us I cannot help seeing your own MIL during the time she must have served out her own sentence to a tyrannical MIL. For, as you admit, this is cultural. People once did not live so long as they do now, so perhaps she survived it more easily.
Please see your PCP and get a referral to a psychologist or someone who can guide you out of this nightmare you have been living. You and the kids deserve so much more.
I'm so sorry for your valid struggles and pray you'll do something to change the situation. It's not impossible once you get your self esteem back that's been stripped away from you. God bless
Your mother in law DESERVES better medical treatment than she's getting. Your husband's family sound like a bunch of real jerks.
AND you, my poor, patient friend, have all the symptoms of very deep depression. Please get yourself to a psychiatrist, for the sake of your children if you can't see why you should go for yourself.
The damage that living with the loathing of your mother-in-law (and your husband's support of her abuse) is doing to your kids is immeasurable.
It teaches a daughter to expect abuse.
It teaches a son that it's okay to debase your partner.
You don't need to be a caregiver for this viper. No way. Your children are seeing how you're allowing yourself to be treated by their own father and his mother. This will really damage them if it continues. This is your marital home, shame on your husband. I would be out of there. I'm sorry you're being subjected to this by your husband. Simply awful of him.
Sadly, as long as this woman allows it, it will continue.
She needs to develop some self-worth / self-esteem to make a needed, obvious, decision. "GET OUT" and allow yourself and your children to heal.