u/VioletFeyreh

It’s one of six homes for sale in this neighborhood, which hasn’t seen anything move in over a year. Every buyer who came through has commented that it’s nicer than the others nearby of similar size, but their feedback has been “kitchen too small” (most common feedback), this one is a second or third choice, or they just want more house.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/115-Rose-Creek-Dr-Covington-GA-30014/69864665\_zpid/?utm\_campaign=iosappmessage&utm\_medium=referral&utm\_source=txtshare

I moved my 85-year-old grandma in with me because none of her kids want her, and even though she lived five miles from two of her sons, they’d only visit once a week max. There were no city services or transit options there. Her son was resistant and constantly complaining about taking her to the doctor because it wasn’t convenient to him, and one of her doctors was more than 30 miles away. She had chronic bronchitis for over a year.

Once she moved in with me, we would have family meals all the time I took her to a bunch of doctors, she got better, the bronchitis is gone. Swelling in her legs and feet is gone. She is signed up for all sorts of benefits and elderly services, including city subsidized Paratransit, grocery shuttles, and taxis, and we’ve talked about all of the different things that my city has to offer for elderly. I’ve taken her to church many times and encouraged her to talk to elderly there; an elder fitness class where the instructor was 90, and a senior center. Her doctors are mostly <2mi away, some of the super specialists are 6mi away - although I take her to every visit, she could get there on her own if I wasn’t available.

But she’s not interested in living here or using any of these services, she complained a lot to her eldest son on a recent visit, and now he wants to move her into a nursing home, which he calls assisted living, because he thinks she will be happier if there are other elderly around. (There is no money for assisted living, and he thinks calling Medicaid nursing homes “assisted living” somehow makes it assisted living.) Grandma hinted several times before coming back that she would be leaving, and she told me definitively on her second day back that she’d be moving away soon.

My read of the situation is that she thinks if he moves her to something near enough to his house then she will be able to complain enough to get him to move her out and into his house. He has been very clear with me — He does not want her living with him, in any of the three spare bedrooms in his house. Grandma does not press him or ask questions, nor can she be convinced to. Things are strained at home. I feel rejected, personally, and I think she will whither once she moves into a nursing home. She will see family once a week at most instead of every day. There will be no more weekly or twice weekly restaurant visits, gardening, and ability to go outside daily. It would be a move from SF to southern New Hampshire (her son says she won’t stop complaining about the cold here).

What do I do?

*Grandma’s prior housing: a house I bought and paid for grandma to live with my mother. My mother abandoned her back in September in the middle of the night. My mother is now estranged.
**Finances: grandma has $8k to her name, no other assets, and <$2k/mo SSI. She has minimal expenses but seems to mail a lot of cash and is defensive about how much and how often.
***Needs: all of grandma’s needs are taken care of, and I recently got a caretaker to be here four days a week to spend time with her and help her, but she’s really independent and capable of taking care of herself except for lifting more than 10-15 pounds.

My mom has never been good with money. She’s a bitter woman, a rage-a-holic, and an insomniac. Sis says she filed for bankruptcy about a decade ago. She’s rented rooms from people. Told me her landlord was gonna sell the house and she was trying to get on a trailer park waitlist.

My nonna (her mom) is in her 80s. She grew up in a village in a poor country, left school in fourth grade, and worked in factories from her early 40s until age 72 - the most she ever earned was $11.75/hour. Lived with her youngest son, who yelled at her a lot. He got married and the new wife took over a lot of roles that nonna had played, like meal prep and decorating. It wasn’t an ideal living situation for any of them, and there was constant tension and nonna feeling sidelined.

So I bought them both a house (yes, a whole ass house), paid to move mom’s stuff, and flew across the country to drive mom a couple thousand miles to her new home a short distance from two of her brothers. Mom has always had beef with nonna (despite relying on her a LOT to help raise me and my sister) but agreed to live with her nonetheless. Mom agreed at every step - nothing was imposed upon her, though I’m sure she felt she felt she was choosing between a free ride and homelessness. The house I bought is a gorgeous single level brick-walled 2400 sq ft 4bd 3ba in a safe suburb near family, but thousands of miles from where I live. I sold my condo to make the down payment and paid for everything, including utilities and landscaping. Any issue, I found a handyman or specialist to fix it right away. I even bought them an oven with knobs in front and two ovens inside so they could reach the controls easy and not have to fight over oven use. It is - by far - the nicest home and nicest neighborhood my mom has ever lived in.

After mom moved into her new home, she told me not to tell anyone that nonna would be living with her. Fine. Mom has always been obsessed with secrets and telling me not to tell people things. (Meanwhile in my life, I’m an open book.) Then she told me she needed a month of living alone before nonna moved in. She used that month to fill the house with her decorations, leaving no space for nonna to put her own decorations except her own room. Mom was insistent nonna not move all of her stuff into the house, so some stayed behind at my uncle’s. Once nonna moved in, mom was unbelievably controlling, and it became a huge source of tension whenever I visited. First thing in the morning whenever nonna went to make her tea, mom would start in a harsh tone “make your tea, have you made your tea yet?” Never offered to make her tea or breakfast, and nonna withered to 120 pounds - there was no nurturing or encouraging at home to make sure nonna was eating enough protein and generally getting nutrition. Making sure that old people eat is geriatrics 101, but mom didn’t care. Nonna put her many medications on her (own) bathroom counter, but mom hid them under the sink because she “doesn’t like clutter.” Meanwhile I’m renting a room in California that’s smaller than my mom’s master bathroom in her side of the house. (This is not an exaggeration, mom has a big bathroom and my room was minuscule.) Mom left no place for nonna to put her groceries and relegated her kitchen cabinet space to a low lying cabinets that nonna would have to get on the ground to access her things. I asked mom to drive nonna to church on sundays, and only recently learned that mom would dump nonna in the parking lot before the church opened, leaving her to wait there until someone would come to let her in. These are a few examples but the control, indifference, and rudeness were constant. After every time I visited, mom would yell at nonna and tell her that nonna was a trouble maker and the reason I didn’t visit more often.

Flash forward to last summer - mom said her physical and mental health couldn’t handle living with nonna. She would not provide any more info or explain what nonna did other than existing, and I know that nonna did nothing. They barely saw each other, with my mom eating meals in her bedroom and avoiding being at home. Nonna is in her 80s and decently independent, but needs supervision and help with minor things, most of which her two sons handle since they live close by. So mom said she’d be moving out January. A month later, mom said she’d be moving out in October.

On September 13, mom moved out in the dead of night. No warning. No notice. Grandma heard noise during the move, and when she got up to see who was robbing them, mom yelled at her for “being nosy” and told her to go back to her room. Nonna called me the next day to tell me what had happened. Not a word from mom about the secret move for a week. She refused to even give me her new address. Nonna felt a deep sense of shame and didn’t tell any of the church ladies or friends in far flung places what was going on in her life.

Nonna can’t live by herself. She has a first grade vocabulary and reading comprehension. She doesn’t drive. She doesn’t know the names of her meds or health conditions, and can’t make a doctor appointment. She often tells the doctors the wrong thing, saying “yes” because she thinks that’s the answer they want. Fortunately, she knows how to organize her pills and take them at the right time. Nonna has five kids, none of which want her to live with them. Her husband abandoned her when she was 60 - I was in high school living with her at the time and found the goodbye note written on a junk mail envelope on her bed, in grandpa’s characteristic scrawl. (Call back to my mom being bad with money - I lived with different family members bouncing around throughout high school.)

After mom abandoned nonna, I bought a house in my expensive af city with a nice space downstairs for nonna to call her own, and I moved her in with me six months after mom abandoned her. All of the kids were supportive, but it’s been a tough transition for nonna. Since moving in with me, she’s tried all sorts of new foods and had new experiences, met dozens of my friends, and her yearlong bronchitis and cough that kept her up at night have resolved. Fluid build up in her legs is gone. She does whacky things that lead to minor conflicts - small wasteful things she does out of boredom, like take individual fruit and put them in ziploc bags, water plants that have saturated soil leading to root rot and a proliferation of mushrooms that she thinks I planted, boil a whole kettle of water to hand wash a single medium size Tupperware that had pasta in it to “take out the fat,” small loads of laundry four times a week - but we spend a lot of time together and eat as a family quite a lot. She didn’t really have any of this for the last decade. Oh, and my husband is a champ and very supportive of nonna living with us. We just got married, and nonna walked us down the aisle together.

I haven’t spoken to mom in over a year. I put the house up for sale six months ago, but there’s no interest aside from low balling corporations that want to pay half of asking. Mom and I have exchanged a few perfunctory texts. I sent her an (obligatory) invite to my wedding, but she didn’t RSVP or in any way acknowledge the invitation. To be perfectly transparent, my husband suggested the wedding location, and I said yes in part because I knew mom would never go there - we had the wedding in her country of birth, which she calls a “backwards” place that she’ll never return to. She sent a wedding card a week before the wedding and a text the morning of. I don’t want to talk to her.

Big picture, I’m at a loss of what to do, both now and in the future when she needs help. I’ve sent her money in the past to pay for medical stuff, but I don’t want to give her anything anymore. At some point she will become destitute, frail, and in need of a family member to help her with the day to day. She’s currently 65, with bad knees and arthritis. She moved into a one bedroom apartment she can barely afford. Whenever I saw her mistreating nonna, I told her time and time again “you should treat nonna the way you want your kids to treat you.” She’d always retort “I don’t care how you treat me.” Oh, and I have a sibling who’s estranged because many years ago, my sister was friends with a gay woman who my mom was projecting some shit on. Mom went to the woman’s car at my sister’s apartment complex and left a note to the woman ordering her to stay away from her daughter because she was ruining her marriage. My sister completely cut mom out after that.

My mom is secretly gay and raised me with a woman from when I was 7 until I was 14, at which point the woman left without saying goodbye. (A couple years later I went to live with her for a year bc mom couldn’t afford a place for me to live with my own bedroom.) Oh, and I know mom’s gay because I read her emails during that break up, figured out what was going on, and confirmed it through her girlfriend’s new lady, who I met on a video game the three of us played. I never told the rest of my family, but boy have I told a bunch of therapists.

I know this whole story and cast of characters sound crazy, but I have kind of a crazy family. I’m pretty put together with two Ivy League degrees and a good job (I’m paying two mortgages and it’s not causing any hardship), which is part of why I feel like I would have a lot of shame if I were to just ignore my mom and refuse to help when the day comes. But truly, I don’t think she deserves my help, and my sister sure as hell won’t lift a finger or spend a dime when the day comes. Please help.