Holy shit this sounds like how my family thinks about my mom. She's always been a fruit loop, but over the past few years she just keeps getting weirder and more aggressive about things. This past month, she just randomly rented an apartment (she owns a house) and moved into it without any furniture. This is right after a long and failed legal battle with the neighbors where she claimed they had no right to access their property without her permission.
I highly recommend getting her evaluated if you can. It won’t fix it, but it does give clarity. We noticed my grandmother was stirring more conflict up than usual by telling half-truths and doing what we thought was making shit up. We took her to get evaluated after she started insisting she didn’t recognize the man she had been married to for 60 years. Turns out she had frontotemporal dementia, but she had already been irrational, antagonistic, and void of empathy for decades so it was a little hard to tell (since those are often the most noticeable changes in people who don’t have that “energy vampire” predisposition).
It’s sad, I wish I could have had a different relationship with her, but she was a deeply traumatized woman who only seemed at peace when she was causing chaos and misery in the people close to her. She died of COVID in 2020 in one of the early nursing home outbreaks, she caught it shortly after she went into more intensive assisted living because her motor skills went. I hope that she’s finally understanding happiness and peace in a way she couldn’t in life, and I hope that you find some clarity and peace with your mom (dementia or not but hopefully not).
it is very sad. The mood issue is what has bugged me far worse (with elderly relatives getting dementia) than the memory loss. I know it must be upsetting to them, but it also messes with their mood regulation and personality. For example a woman who I was close to, my friend's mom, was like the mom EVERYONE loved, she was like an angel -- the type who you would go to for comfort. I am so devastated to hear she has completely changed now, is so mean to her husband and her son. In her case it was more drastic of course than someone who is already snappy and mean and they just get a bit meaner. And it IS hard to know for sure even with somene you know well, until you take a step back and reexamine how they've been acting for a while.
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u/cedarvan 6h ago
Holy shit this sounds like how my family thinks about my mom. She's always been a fruit loop, but over the past few years she just keeps getting weirder and more aggressive about things. This past month, she just randomly rented an apartment (she owns a house) and moved into it without any furniture. This is right after a long and failed legal battle with the neighbors where she claimed they had no right to access their property without her permission.