Over the last two years, I have seen my mother's personality change to the point where she is very sharp now. I am thirty eight, so she's in her seventies. Every time I do something she doesn't agree with, she says so bluntly or tells me I make bad decisions and it puts a lot of stress on her and my dad. The last round of this, I tried standing up for myself, and said "all I hear is what I do wrong" and she promptly turned that back on me, "well, you yell too" (I wasn't at the time). To some extent I can see her point, but this hurts, I feel like I am losing control of my life.

How would you acknowledge that you understand what she's trying to say, without letting it be used to lead you by the nose?

Is her health OK? Sometimes the inevitable physical and mental losses of age bring on personality changes too, depression and/or slowing down can really sour an elder's outlook on everything. You can't do much about that except to urge Dad to get her to a checkup if she hasn't done that lately. But you do have to protect yourself from her negative attitude. Try to tune her comments out, understand that she isn't her old self and the things she says have more to do with how she feels about herself, not you.

I have been experiencing similar things with my own mother, Keaghry. She finds it difficult to restrain herself from saying what is on her mind and it often comes out in a harsh fashion.

Then recently I read that as a person ages, there is a change in the brain that makes it more difficult to withhold thoughts. Eureka! I realized that maybe this is happening with my mother.

I hope your mother's behavior won't continue to make you feel like you're losing control of your life. She can't steal your power to make your own decisions. I think it's important to listen to her complaint (just in case she has a good point), evaluate it and if you feel you are still making the right decision, stand up for yourself as you have done. I also encourage you to insist that she use some tact, perhaps giving her an example of how you'd like to receive comments about your decisions. And of course, realize that it may be harder for her to temper her comments as she grows older.

Her health is all right, but she does have some issues, my dad has had some bad health issues recently, in the sense of scary and painful, making him cranky, which he then takes out on her. So telling him to take her to the doctor when he's never worried about her a day in his life, wouldn't work, it would have to be me or my sisters who do it. She's lost a niece, a sister and two brother in laws in four years, and that has hit hard, I know.

Thank you for the suggestions : )

Hi Diana,

To an extent, there is some validity in what she says, but it doesn't mean all my decisions are bad ones. I'm not as adult as I'd like to be, but am working on that. I'm also scared because I kind of have someone I'm close to, but he had something happen in the past year that unintentionally hurt me, I think he was trying to protect me because the possibility of separation was very real.

That didn't happen, at least not in the way he was thinking it would, and he's still around, but I'm a little shy of him now, not enough to stop the friendship, but there's still things to work out, and I wonder what he sees in me. I haven't seen him in
six months, but why is too complicated to explain.

What a lovely "mud pie" life is : p Still good, however.

I had wondered if something like that happened with the brain as we age, interesting to know that it does. Thank you for the encouragement, and likewise back : )

Wanted to add, not equal to this growing up thing, not anywhere close, but am trying : /