Reply to Charging a parent for care when one sibling does nothing

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Reply to "Charging a parent for care when one sibling does nothing"

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[quote=Anonymous]I really don't think you should be spending as much time doing essentially menial labor for your mom. Apart from the bitterness and resentment towards your sister, which I agree is a separate issue, how much bitterness and resentment are you building up towards your mom? It is only going to get harder from here, not easier.

My mom just moved to a continuing care community in the DMV. I'm the local daughter -- my siblings are in NYC. Realistically, between kids and jobs, they can't visit more than once every 6-8 weeks, because that is a three-day trip to get stuff done. They both took a lot of time off, as did I, to get my mom through a surgery + rehab, plus all the work it took over the last year to get her cleaned out and moved down here and her house sold.

They do a lot from long distance and can do a lot of stuff that doesn't require them to be present -- my sibling who's best at money, for example, is dealing with consolidating my mom's accounts and figuring out financials (that should have been figured out a long time ago, but my mom is both terrible with money and ashamed at how terrible she is, so she concealed the whole picture and didn't let us know about it for decades. Lots to unravel there).

My other sibling is now in charge of stuff like Medicare and Tricare for Life benefits -- again, things she can do long distance.

We've all pulled together on all the jobs and we've used Google Drive and Notes extensively to be able to share information. But I realized that, given how many doctors' appointments my mom has with her health issues, I can't keep taking a day off work every time she needs to go to an appointment. It's not only the time but it's all the mental load of being the one in charge with communicating, and it's not great for my relationship with my mom because it's inevitably infantilizing to her.

So we hired an independent nurse from Independent You to go with my mom to doctors' appointments, etc. Yes, it's money, but it's money that's well spent on taking the time and mental load off me and on improving my relationship.

I also put a lot of work into getting my mom on 90-day mail order prescriptions on auto-renew wherever possible and cost-effective, and getting 90-day delivery prescriptions from her local independent pharmacy where that's more cost-effective. She's only got one script now that's monthly. It was a lot of work up front but so much less work than someone having to track all her scripts and refills on a monthly basis.

She's still mentally healthy enough that she can fill her own pillcases -- we ordered cases that have separate boxes for morning, lunch, evening each day of the week, and we ordered four of them so we can fill them assembly-line. In addition to her printed-out copy of the spreadsheet with each medication, dosage, times per day, pharmacy, refills, and last refilled date, she also has a page where I taped one pill of each medication and OTC med/vitamin she takes and labeled those so she has the visual to go by as well. If it's too much, then that's something the independent nurse can help her with as well. But just rationalizing scripts has been a huge load off everyone's mind and well worth the investment of time.[/quote]

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