My mother is a widow. Ideally I should be helping support her, since she has been unemployed for years, and only receives social security and some regular handouts from family and friends.
Here is the problem. She has chained herself to 2 of my siblings, determined to support them like children forever. They are in their 30s. One of them (brother) works a low end job, and the other (sister) hasn't worked for 15 years. She doesn't have any disabilities, at least nothing official. She doesn't get SSI which is Social Security for the disabled. They haven't even signed up for free healthcare in their very liberal state which hands out Medicaid like candy. So how do you support your mother, when she tries to force you to be party to harming your siblings by coddling them forever? My mother is not going to live forever. When she passes on, what is going to become of these 2 freeloading siblings? They will end up literally homeless on the street. They don't live in a good area either. These siblings have been coddled and protected from the world and from being adults for many years now. They are not just unemployed or underemployed. They also have no street smarts whatsoever. My brother has a job, but he was homeschooled and spends all day gaming on the computer. Neither of them can drive, and neither has a license much less a car. They live in an area where you need a car, too. It is a mid-sized sprawled out city, not one of those big cities with a subway or where you can get by on foot. My mother has refused to nudge them out of the nest, and she won't even downsize her 1300 sq foot home, probably because she's still running a household of 3. Naturally, the house is falling apart without a man and/or funding to do maintenance. Yes, I said without a man. My brother only excels in the online gaming world. Once he leaves the keyboard, he's almost useless. Her house isn't paid off either. She lives in an area that lost a lot of value in the past 15 years. Even though she paid around $80K for the house in the 90's, she's still underwater on her mortgage. In fact, most family and friends have moved out of state at this point. So there aren't many left who can help out financially, much less take in people if a real crisis happened.
So how do you help out Mom while refusing to give support to freeloading siblings? Does a mother forfeit her natural law right to support when she handcuffs herself to a couple of freeloaders and says, "You either support all of us, or none of us!" I'm so tempted to choose "none of us". It's not just about being unfair or unpleasant financially. It's positively harmful to continue to coddle these siblings in this way. In fact, if I hated their living guts I couldn't hurt them any more than by keeping them asleep, sending hundreds of dollars a month so they don't change anything. My sweet revenge of hate would bear fruit as soon as my mom passed away and they found themselves totally screwed. But I don't hate them, and don't want to see them in that position. So what do I do? I talk to my Mom and sister on occasion, but lately we only talk about the weather and superficial stuff, since I stopped trying to get them to change a long time ago. It wasn't worth the aggravation. My family can be very stubborn.