Reply to Drawing A Line With MIL

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Letting a senior citizen stay alone in an un-air conditioned house in a head wave is elder abuse.

I would tell her to hire a handyman in the future but I would send her to a hotel until she did so. I would not want someone’s death on my conscience no matter how spoiled they were.[/quote]

I had a distant relative die of dehydration in her own home during a heat wave. What matters is monitoring. OP's wife can check up by phone, and visits and if she seems disoriented, call 911. On her dime.
To be clear, I'm assuming OP's MIL is in the DC area where last weekend it was still non-life threatening to live in a house without A/C for a person who is mobile and can cool themselves down with water and pull down the blinds. My relative fell, couldn't get up again, and passed away in a 45C degree heat wave in southern Europe. Not the same sort of heat at all.[/quote]

NP. We don't know where the MIL live but "monitoring" is too little too late in many cases. By the time MIL "seems disoriented" she might be far along the path to her body shutting down, depending on her physical condition. And many of us, OP's wife included, aren't trained in what to look for. Just going by whether mom seems disoriented is not good advice.

OP, sounds like your MIL is not thinking straight and/or does not grasp (no matter how much you explain it) the fact that her habit of a lifetime -- the windows open-- is the reason she's killing these AC units. Instead of expending your energy being mad at her, your wife should be the one to get a third party to come talk to her. Some older people respond much better to hearing things, from a doctor, handyman, a professional AC installer, their pastor/priest, a home visitor from the county services for the elderly, than they do to hearing from their own adult children and in-laws. Your MIL is your wife's to handle and your wife should get on the ball to tell, not ask, her mom to stop this, and should enlist someone your mom will listen to, to reinforce the message. Frankly this heat is nothing compared to what's coming when summer really hits, and your MIL is actually at risk here. But you are too pi$$3d (with very understandable reason, OP!) to keep dealing with it. And your wife needs to realize she has to step up or she may get a call in August one day about her mom being found in a hellishly hot house and rushed to a hospital.

Note: I say it's the wife's job because I think that it's the role of the adult child to handle their own parent. I'd say the same if the adult child were OP, a man, and iit was his parent who was being this way about the AC. [/quote]

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