Response to comment

Thank you for the kind thoughts, and I'm sorry you both had to go through it.

She did it again all through dinner and afterward. I found myself not minding the repeated stories so much unless/until the negativity and judgment came in: I (almost) didn't mind hearing for the gazillionth time about her business trip to Vladivostock however many decades ago, but I bristled whenever it came time to declare someone a complete incompetent, even if it were true. I hope that I don't remember, fifty years from now, who was being incompetent at work now. This is actually a good reminder for me not to dwell on such things, lest I continue to dwell on them out of habit once they're even more irrelevant.

But repetition did play a part in my frustration--not repetition of the whole story, again, but repetition within the story. She told me about the incompetent manager at least six times, consecutively. I guess that's Alzheimer's, but it's not that different from how she was beforehand. Maybe, ten years ago, she would have mentioned the incompetent manager two or three times.

Mom has always had a frustrating storytelling style. That's petty, perhaps, but it adds to the current frustration and to my struggle with being patient because now it's driven by her illness. I feel like if she'd never done it before, it would be easier to ascribe entirely to the illness and to be that much more patient. I know it shouldn't matter: this is the way she is now and the only way to be with her is patient. But it comes down to my having spent the last fifteen years of my life essentially putting down boundaries and reducing her influence over me, so it's that much more of an adjustment--a paradigm shift--to let it go and let her be her because is the right thing to do, under changed circumstances.