Dysfunctional parents

[camshaft]

im almost forty, and my parents are almost 60. There’s been quite a lot of issues in our family over the past 20 years which my mum hasn’t coped well with. Both parents have slipped into bad habits- they work full time, get home, have tea then drink. It’s got progressively worse over recent years- my mum gets aggressive with my dad and lashes out at him. He smokes weed with lager so is a mellow drunk and doesn’t really cause any dramas. My mum on the other hand drinks, picks up the phone and rings family / friends and embarrasses herself, having no recollection of it the day after. They both need help but I’d argue my mum even more so because she’s in denial over how much she drinks and plays it down.
We've had bad news earlier this year - dad has cancer and is on chemo, with poor prognosis. He’s still drinking and smoking - nothing will change him and I am not going to start arguments now over it, what’s the point. He’ll probably be dead within a year. Anyway, things escalated massively last night. My mum turned up at my sisters claiming my dad had punched her unprovoked. She had blood from her nose. I drove straight up, completely shocked and confused. My dad isn’t a violent man. She’d had a drink (obviously) and her story kept changing. My sister went round to my dad who was fast asleep and had no idea she’d left the house. He thought she’d gone to bed in another room, which is quite standard behaviour for them. He denied it all and was confused what was going on as he’d just woken up.

On reflection, I believe that she has fabricated what happened. That she likely kicked off with him as she was drunk and that he put his hand up to stop the attack and she fell. Her injury is not consistent with a punch to the face. She’s then made up her own version of events and I’ve spent the whole day feeling miserable and at a loss. Either my dad is lying and he did hit her; or she’s lying and making my dad out to be violent. What on Earth do I do here? Reading this back is making me cry. I have no idea how it ended up this bad. They both need help but are both in total denial. My mum even acted shocked when I said they were dysfunctional!!!!

aibu?
YABU - stay out of it; not your business
YANBU - get involved and get them to seek help

any advice would be appreciated. Thanks for reading.

Bump

i wouldn’t take sides unless you know for sure what’s happened. Does your mum want to leave your dad? Do they need carers?
How involved you get is upto you

@firstofallimadelightI messaged them both this morning to ask for the single version of events and whilst my mum acknowledged the message and said they’d be talking it through, I heard anything back from my dad. He’ll be ashamed that me and my sister became involved but we didn’t have much choice seeing as my mum turned up on my sisters doorstep!

Op places like Age Uk often have schemes that help people with alcohol issues. Would she consider anything like that ? She needs to acknowledge she has a problem and be willing to seek help.

I am so sorry Op. They both sound like they struggle with coping but this behaviour is alarming. You can't fix this. They are both adults and need to take responsibility here. You could suggest they seek help for their drinking. But its unlikely to go well.

I’m really sorry about all this. Incredibly upsetting when he’s close to end of his life, not the sort of memories you want.

My mum is an alcoholic (now in recovery after a particularly awful incident where I finally snapped and said I was cutting her off, I really meant it) and this was pretty standard behaviour for her. She didn’t actually drink every day but when she did she was completely out of control and behaviour like this was pretty standard. I remember when she was doing the AA steps and she had to apologise to people, she apologised to me and it was hard to hear because I wanted to say what’s the point, you don’t remember what you’re saying sorry about. She was always very defensive the day after any dreadful thing she’d done if we told her - not even telling her off, just stating the facts - and would find a way to make it anyone else’s fault but her own, probably because she didn’t really remember. I’d lost count of the weddings and funerals she’d made huge scenes at, violent or verbal. Then just the regular Tuesdays where she’d drink for no reason and just be mayhem. She was the personification of chaos.

But I am proud of her that she’s quit. As a side note she had undiagnosed ADHD which think made the alcoholism ten times worse.

what I would say from experience is that any kind of pressure they are under, the behaviour really ramps up. The shock and upset at your dad’s diagnosis could be driving this extra bad behaviour. I know full well if this had been my mum, 5 years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to think along the lines of staying sober to be supportive, to make the next 12 months really count, to not cause extra stress to her family while they’re going through it. The only thing she’d have been able to do is focus on her own grief and get steaming drunk and create more problems. She was not a person who could cope with any stress. For your mum she’s facing the loss of her life partner, it’s a lot to come to terms with and she possibly doesn’t have the skills to get through this without being drunk.

i wouldn’t suggest AA because she has to come to that point on her own, but would she be open to having some type of grief counselling to try to come to terms with what’s ahead?

@Quamarinathank you for sharing. Happy to hear your mum has come out the other end. I really hope that my mum can find the strength to do that at some point. I think the reality is that nothing is going to change any time soon. You are totally right that she is so focused on her own grief and her solution is selfishly to get drunk and take it out on him. I can’t say this is new behaviour though, before the diagnosis she was aggressive towards him when drunk and would find another reason. I have already asked her to ring the Macmillan support line to talk things through with them and offload. She doesn’t have a social network really so doesn’t have many friends to offload to. I feel so sad and deflated, and I can’t talk to my own friends in real life because it’s so embarrassing. The only person I can talk to is my partner who is being there for me but also finds it all so difficult and awkward. I hate it.

@Pickledonion1999@Isitevensummeri doubt that they will accept they need help. I’ve tried to suggest it before and I got scoffed at by my mum with ‘you like a drink too’. (I have a drink on the weekend as a social activity, not the same)

Wouldn't they be too young is younger than 60?

@camshaft i completely understand how isolating it is and hard to talk to people who have ‘normal’ parents. Luckily (?!) too many of my friends had seen her in action to even try to pretend she was okay. She’s the sort of person that even sober MUST be heard and come hell or high water she will get that attention.

If I could give you any advice, it’s going to be very hard to take, but that would be distance. You need to put yourself first. I appreciate that with your dad so poorly it isn’t practical to have physical distance but emotional distance. When she starts with the drama, engage as little as possible. I got drawn into so much, I used to feel almost constant fight or flight with the drunk calls about arguments with other family members / me calling the family members to try to sort it out / worrying she’d leave the house and have an accident or worse, but then one evening I was unpacking the first night of moving house and she called shouting that she was going to kill herself, which I’d normally have dropped everything and gone round so she could vent about her childhood / my dad / her ex boyfriend, but this time I calmly said, ‘no you won’t mother. Go to bed. I will call you in the morning’. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t a miracle cure but I couldn’t keep indulging the madness and running around after her shenanigans. Putting that boundary in place 3 or 4 times did mean the frequency decreased a lot for the next few years. There were still the big blow ups at events but daily life was a lot more peaceful.