My [25F] mother [60sF] does all the work for family [60sM] [19F] [22F], it's way too much for her, how can I encourage others to pull their weight?

My mother recently retired from her job (she worked mostly from home) and yet she still has a full time job cleaning the house, cooking every meal, doing the entire mental load (I highly doubt anyone but her has organised anything to do with Xmas etc etc.). She's basically depressed bc of this and probably has been for years, and everyone else in the house relies on her as basically a servant. It's like classic mum stuff (find my X, make me a snack, deal with everyone's emotions) turned up to 11, she has no time for herself. The house is also full of stuff and no-one is willing to go through their own stuff and mum refuses to throw things away if she hasn't spoken to the person about it. So everyone gets anxiety from being in the house bc its low key hoarders paradise.

The 3 of us kids all live away from home, coming home often enough, but every time I come home I spend basically all day helping her with household chores she doesn't want to do or organising things to make it easier for her (without being directed, just because the house is a mess and she clearly can't cope). When the other 2 come home though, they go back to being children, they come home to be taken care of. One sister to be fair did recently do some clearing but that was bc she was having a party so it advantaged her. She didn't do the clean up afterwards.

Dad works away from home half the week, so you can definitely see he has reasons to justify not pulling his weight (he's only there for half the week, only makes half the mess (not true), mum "doesn't have a job".) He has a very specific interaction whenever I make a general request for help which I don't know how to respond to, he names one (1) thing that he *has* done, as if that justifies not doing 99% of things. E.g., I suggested last week that bc mum did all the cooking, someone other than her should clear the plates. Sister 22F wasn't home, but sister 19F did not respond at all, dad said "but I did [thing FOR HIS JOB] today and no-one helped me!". I cleared the plates. Today there was a specific mess in the bathroom that could only have been sister 19F or dad (specific type of hair all over the shower walls), and I messaged the family group chat asking people to take care of their messes bc we shouldn't rely only on mum. Dad messaged back saying it was probably him but he "regularly cleans the toilet bowl", as if that means he should be excused for anything else or praised for doing a simple task. I have no idea how to respond to this kind of reply in a way that won't provoke a big argument.

I have tried the advice from Mari Kondo wrt families, which is "organise your own space and people will start to follow". So far I have thrown away/donated probably 30 bags of my own stuff and nothing. Mum told me she gave up clearing her own stuff because every time she made a space, someone else would expand their stuff into it, and she felt she was becoming smaller and smaller, which is very fair. She actually has very little, other than books.

I'm often viscerally upset, both that mum cannot enjoy her retirement and also that her job is completely thankless, something I found out over the last 3-4 years (?) as I started to help her. I could clean an entire room for hours and the only person who notices is mum (who often cries with relief, breaking my heart). Even if I do it while other people are in the room. They just filter out things being done for them. The living room was unusable until 2 weeks ago when I and mum sorted it and all that happened was that family members migrated into the newly usable space without acknowledging how it got that way. A similar thing happened with a bathroom recently (the one now covered in hair).

TL;DR - my dad and siblings do nothing to help around the house and it's going to send mum to an early grave, or at least waste her whole life, I don't know how to help.

Submitted December 23, 2019 at 01:10PM by notaskin4afriend https://ift.tt/35SeUiG