When the parent is still difficult

I was sitting in Mum's lounge room on a Saturday at 11:30 in the morning, ten minutes into a visit, and she had already told me three things. That I'd put on weight. That my brother was the favourite (he wasn't, although she said it both ways depending on who was in the room). That the cleaner she pays for through the Home Care Package is stealing from her, again, the third one this year, and would I please ring the agency and complain. My jaw had gone tight at the temple, which is what it does. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. I drank my tea and thought, with great clarity, the thing I have thought a thousand times: she is not going to soften.

There is a fantasy, and it is a powerful one, that the parent who was difficult your whole life will eventually, under the pressure of age or illness or proximity to death, become someone else. Wisdom will descend. The sharp edges will round. The old wounds will be acknowledged. The conversation you needed to have at fifteen, at twenty-five, at forty, will finally happen at the kitchen table with both of you teary and forgiving.

It almost never happens. I'd rather you knew that now than figure it out at sixty-three.

The shape of the difficult parent

There is no single profile, but there is a family resemblance. The parent who criticises and has criticised every choice you've made since you were old enough to make choices. The parent who plays the children against each other, sometimes deliberately, sometimes from a kind of unconscious habit. The parent who needs to be the centre of every visit, every story, every illness in the family. The parent whose love came with conditions you never quite understood and could never quite meet. The parent who was, when you were a child, sometimes warm and sometimes cold in patterns you could not predict, and who is now, at eighty-one, still sometimes warm and sometimes cold in the same patterns.

The literature has names for some of these patterns (narcissistic, borderline, dependent) and the names are sometimes useful and sometimes a distraction. What matters more, practically, is the shape: the relationship has been hard, it is still hard, and you are now the adult son of a parent in their late seventies or eighties who is your responsibility in some way, and the hardness has not lifted.

The grief is anticipatory, and the anticipation has been going on for decades.

Why age usually doesn't soften them

The hopeful theory is that frailty creates humility. That the parent who treated you with contempt at thirty-five will, at eighty, look at their own mortality and reach for you with a softer hand. The evidence (clinical, anecdotal, my own and that of the men I have spoken to about this) is that the opposite happens at least as often as the hopeful version.

Two things tend to happen as a difficult parent ages. First, the personality structure that was difficult tends to become more rigid, not less. The defences that worked at fifty (the criticism, the manipulation, the playing of favourites) work less well at eighty because the world has shrunk and the audience has thinned, and so the parent applies the same defences harder, more often, with less filter. Second, the cognitive decline that accompanies normal ageing strips away whatever social inhibitions had been keeping the worst of it in check. The thoughts that used to be private become public. The cruelty that was implied becomes explicit.

This is not always the case. Some parents do soften. Some marriages of fifty years do produce, at the end, a version of the person you'd hoped for. But it's rare enough that you should not plan for it, and you should not feel you have failed if it doesn't happen to you.

The alternative reading (the one the literature on personality and ageing supports) is that the parent at eighty is, in essence, the same person they were at forty, only more so, and you are dealing with a concentrated version of what was always there.

The temptation to keep waiting

The trap is this. You keep waiting. You go for the visit. You let the comment land. You let the manipulation play out. You drive home angry, then guilty about the anger, then back to angry, and you tell yourself, over the years, that the next visit might be the one where it changes.

The waiting is not benign. The waiting is itself the cost. It is the slow leak in the relationship between you and your wife, who has watched you come back from these visits for fifteen years now and is tired of it. It is the thing that wakes you at 3am the night before a visit. It is the reason you are now the kind of man who, at fifty, still cannot quite shake the small voice that says you are not enough.

The first move in being a good son to a difficult parent is to stop waiting for them to change. They probably won't. The second move follows from the first.

The boundaries that protect both of you

This is where the language of "boundaries" gets misused, because boundaries with a difficult parent are not the same as cutting them off, and they are not the same as confronting them with everything you have ever felt. With a difficult parent, especially an ageing one, the boundary is structural. It is a set of small, repeated, unannounced choices about how you engage, that you do not discuss with the parent and that you do not justify.

The structural boundaries that I have seen work, and that I now use with my own difficult mother:

• A standing visit length (90 minutes for me, 2 hours if there's a meal involved) that I do not extend even when she asks; the visit ends when I said it would, with no apology
• A rule that I do not respond to comments about my weight, my marriage, my work, or my parenting; I change the subject mid-sentence, calmly, without commentary
• A rule that I do not discuss my brother with her or her with my brother, no matter how skilfully she fishes; the triangulation only works if I let it
• A separate phone for "Mum calls" with sound on, that I check on a schedule, so the constant ringing does not drive my actual life
• A standing weekly call at a time I choose, so she has the contact she wants and I have the protection of a known boundary
• A rule that I will help with practical things (a doctor's appointment, a leaking tap) and I will not adjudicate emotional things, because adjudicating only ever makes it worse

None of these are announced. None of them are framed to her as boundaries. They are just things I do, and I do them because they let me show up at all.

How to be a good son without losing yourself

There is a question underneath all of this. Can you be a good son to a difficult mother? The answer, I think, is yes, but only if you redefine "good son" away from the version your mother is selling.

The version your mother is selling is the version where you call more, visit more, listen more, agree more, let the criticisms land, take the side she asks you to take in family disputes, attend every event, drive every errand, become more available as she becomes less reasonable. This version is unsustainable, and its endpoint is your own collapse.

The version that actually works is quieter. You are present, predictably, within limits you set. You handle the practical things that need handling. You do not engage in the emotional manipulations. You speak to her with civility and without warmth-on-demand. You go home and live your own life. You do not abandon her. You do not absorb her.

This is, in the language of this site, a SETTLED stance, and it took me a decade to find it. The earlier years were oscillation: closer, further, closer, further, with each swing more exhausting than the last. The settled stance is steadier and, paradoxically, kinder to both of us. She gets a son who shows up reliably. I get to remain a person.

The body metaphor

Living with a difficult ageing parent is a bit like living next to a small earthquake fault. The fault is always there. It moves in patterns you cannot predict but can, with attention, learn to read. You don't pretend the fault isn't there. You don't try to fix the fault, because the fault is not yours to fix. You build your house with reinforcement. You bolt the bookshelves to the walls. You keep the breakable things low. You go on with your life knowing that there will be tremors, and the tremors are not personal even when they feel personal, and the house holds because you built it to hold.

The grief that includes relief

When the difficult parent dies, the grief is real, and the grief is also complicated. There is mourning for the parent you had. There is mourning for the parent you didn't have, the kinder version that flickered occasionally through the harder years. There is also, often, relief. Relief that the constant low-grade vigilance of the relationship is over. Relief that the phone won't ring with a fresh complaint. Relief that you do not have to schedule another visit you have been dreading.

The relief is not a moral failure. It is a normal human response to the end of a difficult relationship, and the people who feel it most strongly are not the bad sons but the ones who were most attentive, most present, most caught.

If you are in this phase of life now, with a parent who was difficult and is still difficult and probably will be until the end, the kindness I can offer is this. It is not your job to make her happy. It was never your job to make her happy. Your job is to behave with quiet decency, set the boundaries that let you keep showing up, and not abandon the ground you have built between you and your own life.

The fault line stays. The house holds. That is enough.