I may lose my boyfriend so he can care full time for his Mum, what can I do?

I’m so sorry that both of you are going through this. You want to be with him. He feels caught in the middle of you and his mother. I am sure losing his dad is magnifying the situation.

Your instincts may be telling you that you aren’t satisfied with how things are. Listen to your gut feelings. I think it’s natural to want to be his number one priority.

It’s complicated, especially since you own property together. It seems like his mind is made up. I suppose you could sell the house and move on with your life.

Why are you living so far apart?

Stick around and others will have some ideas.

You are right. You aren't even married yet and already competing with his mother for attention. Not a good sign. Ultimatum time. Either he stays and builds life with you or he goes to care for sick mom and sells your house so you can move on with your life.

You should be his top priority.

It sounds as though he is emotionally enmeshed with his mother. How does he know she will deteriorate in care? Many of us discovered that our parents THRIVED in facilities with good ful-time care.

How can he know he he hasn't tried it.?

If he won't consider even temporary placement, you can see where this is going. Sell the property and move on.

You aren’t exactly speaking to me, since we are all relatively anonymous and this is an accessible forum, but as to agreement or disagreement, you need to be aware of the fact that in caring for a Loved One with dementia, there may well be NO good decisions available.

Being “madly in love”, and based solely on those feelings, buying property (usually a MAJOR investment) TOGETHER, is typically a significant mistake, and often also results in long term serious legal difficulties. “been together” has no legal meaning. I’m SURE you knew that when you committed to purchasing property, and I’m sure you know that now.

Your “partner”’s “plan” is, as YOU realize, already based on decisions he thinks he is making for other people. The obvious fallacy there is that people CHANGE THEIR MINDS. HE has changed his mind already, possibly having actually determined that round the clock full time care is VERY EXPENSIVE, often unreliable, and also often inaccessible.

When ADULTS are fully, truly prepared to make long term decisions for themselves and then for others, they arm themselves as completely as possible with all the information available in advance of making promises.

Both you and your “partner” seem to have brought many expectations to at least two or more situations, including the physical care of a dependent adult, an expensive mutual purchase, strong feelings for each other, a long distance relationship, the legal obligations of care and mutual property ownership......without fully examining the realities of what confronts you as you move forward.

Are you both able to address the uncomfortable truths about what your resources are, what your individual and mutual obligations are, to yourselves as individuals, a vulnerable adult relative, and each other, and how, or IF, you can move forward?

Also, are you both clear about your legal responsibilities and rights in all of the parts of your life that intersect?

Emotional decisions can make wonderful movie plots, but reality can be SO different. Hope you both are willing to do the very hard work of figuring this complicated situation out, and find out how to keep your lives moving forward in the best way for each of you.

You and your partner are not on the same page.  Some people do choose to care for a parent.  I think if I put my mom in a nursing home she would deteriorate.  It may be that your relationship is not meant to be.

"... my partner has now decided he’d rather care for her himself, and split the duties with his siblings and her grandchildren."

That's a dream world. How can he tell his sibs and nieces and nephews what to do? As you say, he could quite easily become the fulltime caregiver.

Barb's answer: "If he won't consider even temporary placement, you can see where this is going. Sell the property and move on."

Barb is 100% correct. Sell the house you've bought and move on. You will always be second fiddle to his mother, and that's not the way a healthy marriage should be. You are more in love with him than he is with you, apparently.

I think there is some confusion. We aren’t living apart, our home is 200 miles away from where his Mum lives.
We have been apart for a few weeks purely because his Dad deteriorated fast and died this week. He was by his bedside when he died, we both were.
This wasn’t an issue when we bought the house or we wouldn’t have done it. We have legalities in place over ownership of the house as we aren’t married. We didn’t go in to this lightly.

I appreciate all responses. Thanks.

Kitkat, if the loss of his dad is very recent, he may be reacting unrealistically to his mom's needs out of grief. He will soon see that whatever plans he makes, he can only control his own actions, not those of his siblings and nieces/nephews.

If you both had a solid plan in place before dad's death, perhaps you need to give him some time to process his grief and realize what the best thing to do is.

I'm going to disagree with many other posters. You should _not_ be your partner's top priority. You are _not_ married so you are the "friend with benefits" and a financial partner and his parents are _family_. Family comes _first_. When you are actually married then you are also family and should become _a_ top priority. Successful families do not operate on a strict hierarchy; rather they use a loose hierarchy based as much on needs as position. You have acknowledged this baseline in your statements supporting your partner's _short_ term prioritization of his dying father's needs and/or making mother a priority would be reasonable if she was also dying. So even as a spouse, while your needs should always be considered as a major factor in decision making, your needs may be considered less urgent than other family members. If you have problems relating this to in-laws, perhaps you can understand it better relating to children. Consider a child having a serious illness, consuming the time and total attention of at least one parent while other children are taken care by extended family and couple time is an afterthought. Although children are our dependents while parents and siblings are usually not, the emotions involved are very similar. When a parent becomes mentally incapacitated, many of us feel they are dependents too. Prioritizing the needs of a dependent family member over a fully capable partner is often not a statement about how valued the partner relationship is as much as it is about how capable the partner is viewed.

Many grief counselors encourage not making any major changes for at least one year following a death. In a sense, your partner is maintaining the status quo while he deals with his grief from both his father's death and his mother's disease. It's emotionally difficult to acknowledge dementia impacts and place a LO in the early or mid stages in LTC, particularly if other family members are also against placement. Many attempt to support our LOs in their home or even move them into our home until the required level of care absolutely _requires_ LTC.

If you value your partnership enough to want to weather this difficult time and all the others that will come with a long term relationship, then I recommend you focus on becoming as supportive as possible while working out the practical problems. First, you need to address the financial issues of your shared home. Can expenses be reduced? Could you rent the house for enough to pay the expenses then maybe rent an apartment a little closer to the travel direction to his parents? Sell it and recover your investment? Second, educate yourself and your partner as much as possible on the dementia journey, which is one of constant decline. Work on gaining an acceptance his mother will need placement at some point, then defining what that point should be. Research facilities, their costs and amenities. Perhaps contact the Area Agency on Aging for a needs assessment and their help locating facilities. As your partner comes to emotionally accept his mother will need placement, he can logically move on to the next step of planning placement.

If you need your partner to always put you and your needs first, then this is probably a good time to walk away from this relationship. Your partner has demonstrated he considers the needs of others along with your needs and he will not be changing. If you need to be first, then this isn't the right partner for you.

The only wrong decision you could make is not being honest with yourself about your own needs and your ability to cope with a situation where you will need to be supportive of a partner in emotional turmoil. Value yourself and place a time limit on seeing improvement. If your partner has not made some transition toward accepting his mother will need placement in 6 months or so, then it's probably time to re-evaluate your relationship's long term potential.

KitKat, in the words of Douglas Adams "Don't Panic."

Your partner has *just* lost his father. This is not the moment when he's going to be amenable to putting his mother into care. When did the father die, exactly?

Also: whereabouts are you and MIL, roughly; and how many responsible adults are included in the care plan (all siblings + offspring added up)?

What is it with everyone all of a sudden that they think the future has to be "decided" in one summit meeting? Plans develop. Feelings alter. Answers emerge. You do not have to force your partner to any final decision at this point, so seriously don't.

You are right to be worried. Your partner is thinking about being gone from your home 3 days a week in order to maintain his mother's status quo. For how long is that sustainable?

"But my partner has now decided he’d rather care for her himself, and split the duties with his siblings and her grandchildren." That may work for a short amount of time to help "grannie" in the immediate month or two after the death of her husband but that does not a long term plan make, because most family members will want to go back to their own lives i.e. get back to normal.

You live 200 miles away. Driving back and forth each week is hard enough without having hands-on caregiving awaiting at the destination. Your partner drives 200 miles and arrives at his mother's house. What's waiting for him? Laundry? Grocery shopping? Meal preparation? Mowing the lawn? What exactly is he going to do? And for how long is he willing to do it?

And what happens when his unreliable brother doesn't show up? Is your boyfriend's employer going to understand when he doesn't show up for work? Remember that he's paid to do a job and plenty of people can probably replace him. And then what? He's unemployed? Where's the gas money to drive 200 miles going to come from? How's he going to pay for your house? Can you afford your house by yourself if worse came to worse?

Kitkat, what I would do is try this situation for a couple of months and see what happens. Your boy-friend may have a wake-up call that this is more work then he ever imagined caring for his Mom, especially if his siblings and the grandchildren decide it is time to put Mom/Grandmother into a care home.

All this may work out in time.

Kitkat, I agree with the others who say it is just too soon to make any permanent decisions since his dad just recently passed. Give him and his family time to grieve, to spend time loving on his mom as she grieves and adjusts, especially since you say his dad passed in an unexpectedly quick timeframe. Their grief may take several weeks or months -- there's no correct answer to how long -- so you will just need to be supportive and sensitive to where he is at with his new normal. Don't panic or assume anything yet. It's just too soon for him and his family. Blessings to you and may you receive peace in your heart as this unfolds.

OK. Immediate thoughts are he doesn’t want to sell house for care because he wants the money when his mother passes. Secondly are you both madly in love or is it you. It seems to me that he has put you second. You can’t do this in a serious relationship. Your partner comes before everyone else. It seems it is going to come down to making him choose
HOWEVER. this could all be grief and a growing feeling of taking charge and “fixing” the problem. You. Stop panicking. Gently remind him that you Both have another life His plan is not sustainable without the full support of others which will not happen. Go home even if it is without him to begin with. I think he will see sense in the original plan

Give it some time. He is grieving the loss of his father. Don’t get married. If your boyfriend doesn’t come around in time, sell the house and move on. Don’t marry him until he puts you first.

I will tell you one thing; my mother will be 93 years old tomorrow. Had she NOT been in Assisted Living the past 6 years, she would have died about 10x already. The care she's gotten by the staff and the nurses at Assisted Living is precisely what's kept her ALIVE this long, of that I am 100% certain. They've caught pneumonia twice, immediately, before it became life-threatening, and a whole bunch of other illnesses and situations (high blood pressure, AFIB, UTI infections, etc) that probably would have taken me a long time to figure out, especially since I'd be working and not at home for 10 hrs a day to be paying close attention to everything.

Tell your b/f to keep that in mind when making decisions on behalf of his mother. Oh, and also that he is placing unreasonable expectations on family members, especially grandchildren, who have extremely busy lives and not much extra time to devote to caring for their grandmother. Plus, he is giving up the probability of a full life with you for this idea he has.

If he insists on moving forward with his idea, it may be time to move on yourself. Only you can make that decision.

Best of luck!