How to get Mom to focus on eating her own meal?
Mom is obsessed with making sure everyone else eats. She often refuses to eat unless someone else is sitting at the table eating with her.This isn't a problem when there are people around to eat with her, although mom can drive people nuts by obsessing over what or how much or how little they are eating. Not a big deal. The first thing mom will ask someone is whether they've eaten, and often will repeat the question dozens of times. But when no one is around, it's a real problem for her caregivers. The caregivers don't always want to eat at the same time with mom, and when it's near the end of their time with mom, they want to go home and eat with their own families, so eating twice isn't an option. Mom gets angry, refuses to eat her meal, sulks, often goes to her room without eating and her mood goes straight to crap. She gets argumentative and angry when people don't stop what they are doing and eat. Sometimes she will still refuse to eat her own food, keeping watch on everyone else to make sure they eat. Some background: Mom is 88 and has dementia. She still recognizes some people, but suffers from typical confusion, short term memory loss, etc. She is living in her own home and has 24/7 caregivers attending to her needs. Mom has always served others and has trouble being served and she is rarely gracious about it. For as long as I can remember, she spent most family meals hovering over the dinner table and rarely took a seat and ate with us. Her job was to make sure everyone ate, and ate well. She worked as a hospital cafeteria manager for over 30 years, so the "making sure people eat thing" is engrained into both her "home" and "work" personas. She is a Nazi concentration camp survivor and knew starvation all too well -- before, during and after the war. She cannot stand to see these other women cooking in "her" kitchen, but she does realize they are helping her out. She often makes rude remarks to the caregivers, who don't always cook in ways that she likes, and that compounds the situation. I know these situations are rarely unique and someone out there must have encountered this or a similar behavior. I am running out of ways to get her to eat alone, and both caregivers find this the most challenging aspect of caring for mom. Any suggestions or ideas about what we can do, if anything to solve this, and short of a solution. Are we just stuck having to pay for a hired meal companion? At this point, since it's disrupting every single day, that doesn't sound like an unreasonable solution to me. Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas will be greatly appreciated.
I wonder if it would work if the caregiver joined her and ate a small appetizer and talked in detail about what she was going to eat with her own family. Mom wants to know that no one is starving and maybe that would be reassuring. Maybe they could talk recipes. "I'm making macaroni and cheese for my family tonight. When you made that, did you put a bread crumb topping on it? What vegetable do you think is best with mac and cheese?" Etc. If she is conversational, perhaps they could get her to talk about her cooking history. Outside of the hospital, what is the most people she ever cooked for? What did she make? What were usual breakfasts for her family? Just anything at all to get her talking about her past and her obsession.
While they are cooking for her, is it possible they could take some of her advice? Probably not all of it, but if they could honor one thing and then thank her and point out how well that turned out and tell her they are glad to have learned something new from her. I think I would be pretty irritated if someone with dementia was criticizing my cooking skills, but they are getting paid to do this and if they could treat her as a "teacher" with many years of experience, that might lessen the rude remarks.
I haven't dealt with this kind of obsession, so I'm just grasping at straws. If you do come up with things that help, please share. We learn from each other.
I know that there are a great many caregivers from the Phillipines currently in Israel careing to the elderly. I'm wondering if there is any information on line from Israeli websites that address the different cooking styles (grasping at straws here--something like "Easter European Cookery for Caregivers from Manila"). Is there a particular herb or spice that you remember from your childhood that "says" this is mom's cooking to you? I'd get a big supply and ask the caregiver/cooks to sprinkle some into every dish they cook.