What to do with Dad

Hi lflook - welcome to 'here' but sorry for the reason.

I'd have to agree with Qbc - It might be best if he doesn't visit for a week or so. It doesn't sound like your dad 'gets it' and would not be open to treating mom any different than what he is doing. Perhaps he isn't able to see he is doing this?

@lflook Hi and welcome. I am sorry for your reason to be here but pleased you found your way to the site.

This is very sad and probably not “fixable” in any real sense. If impatience, lack of empathy and understanding were always features of dad’s personality, you’re unlikely to succeed in making headway around improving his behavior. If you factor in a cognitive shift of his own, those traits will likely become more obvious and entrenched as his social filter erodes.

IMO, staff calling on dad to settle mom is unprofessional and a little lazy. And maybe a little mean if they know he resents it and is unkind as a result. What do they do when other residents are upset? If he opted to place her, it may be because he expects them to handle this for him. PWD can be exhausting to caregivers and maybe dad has no more to give at this point. I have an extended family member who elected to move out to a different AL because she specifically didn’t want to care for her husband or spend hours a day with him. This upset her children greatly, but mom felt her time was limited and she didn’t want to spend it as a caregiver.

TBH, were she in MC and he was still living at home, he might visit her for an hour or so every couple of days. If you read the spousal board, there are many caregiver spouses who only visit their LO in MC once or twice a week. My own mom went about 3 times a week for maybe an hour. Half an hour daily plus being on-call to deal with mom when she’s upset is not an insignificant amount of time.

HB

I think we thought you wanted to change him because of this question you put in your original post:

“ My long winded question (sorry) is…. How do we help Dad understand that this is a disease and she is not doing any of this on purpose. He needs to be calm and gentler with her. Watching Mom go through this horrid disease is so tough…but we think Dad is making it worse :(. How do we help him when all of our attempts to help have failed????”

We all totally agree that your Dad is not being helpful. We just think that his being helpful isn’t possible at his age, temperament and his own health issues. That’s why our suggestions are to minimize their contact I also agree with HB that if he wasn’t in the same building, he wouldn’t be visiting her any more than he currently is. There are some people here who visit their spouse daily, but most are going twice a week or less because that’s all they can handle for various reasons. Especially if they are in their 80s.

Hard to think you may need to separate them, but I think that is the right advice. The staff can easily fall into a pattern of involving your father when they shouldn't. This happens with behaviorally difficult residents: it's happened to us, in that my partner is so uncooperative with staff that they look to me to do a lot of what should really be their job. I do so, many times, to avoid arguments and neglect that would be to her detriment. But once the pattern is established it's very hard to break. Like today: I can't be there to feed her lunch because someone is coming to the farm to repair a phone line. So she probably won't get fed. I'll let them know, but it won't accomplish much.

I would leave specific instructions to not have your dad visit at all for a week or so and see how she does, how they both do. then perhaps the only times for him to visit her should be when you are also present. He may be a trigger for her to resume elopement behavior.