Anonymous wrote:Overall Op, accept that it is your time now to be the competent adult. It comes to everyone. The roles are reversed. You do not really have the luxury to wallowing in pity for yourself.

As another poster stated it really is not wallowing in pity. It is far more complex. You have to be the parent to someone who refuses to be parented often and you often have to allow someone to completely self-destruct. Then at a moment's notice suddenly they need and beg you to jump in and often that is when you have your own crisis or emergency. It is so hard to set boundaries with aging parents and balance things and prioritize and not self-destruct yourself. "Wallowing in self pity" is actually a very heartless way to put it. You imply the person is selfish and emotionally fragile. Often people are quite selfless in their attempts to help parents and reach them and be there for them and it takes great strength to get help, figure out your limits, give grace, but also not let them suck the life out of you.

Anonymous wrote:Overall Op, accept that it is your time now to be the competent adult. It comes to everyone. The roles are reversed. You do not really have the luxury to wallowing in pity for yourself.

I'm not the OP, but the PP-I can tell you, it's not wallowing in pity, I understand what the op means. It's not that, what it is is accepting that you sort of have to start parenting your parents, who have always parented you. It is definitely a weird feeling and it's hard to know when to take over and want to step back. And it's hard to navigate because the parents May do things or make decisions that you just know or not right, but they're your parents I mean come on.

Overall Op, accept that it is your time now to be the competent adult. It comes to everyone. The roles are reversed. You do not really have the luxury to wallowing in pity for yourself.

I'm the pp whose dad may have a UTI, I took it upon myself to call the VA nurse, he gets VA healthcare, and they recommended I take him to the emergency room at the VA hospital so Mom actually agreed to let me take them! Thank goodness. I think she just needed me to step up and do that. As soon as I get out of work I'm going to drive an hour home and get him and drive 45 minutes back down to the hospital, but that's okay.

In addition to accepting that they are adults, try to give so much grace to the spouse who is healthier or doing more caregiving. It’s so, so hard and I think the vast majority of humans can’t do it without deploying delusion and denial. Otherwise they’d breakdown. And a breakdown does often happen to the caregiver - mental or physical or both.

The PP is frustrated that their mom won’t take their Dad for a UTI appointment but she may just not have the capacity and she’s convinced herself it’ll go away. It’s really frustrating to deal with someone refusing reality, I know! Denial is a POWERFUL drug but it can be all they have so sometimes instead of fighting it you have to just hear it as “I absolutely don’t have the bandwidth to accept that fact staring me in the face” and decide if it’s important enough for you to step in and find away to accommodate the denial.