I’m 29, living in my own place, and still have a good relationship with my parents. Except for when my mom decides to come over to my house.
There’s often a building tension between us when she comes over. My mom, for instance, will immediately start doing chores as soon as she comes through the door to my place.
Now its not that I have a problem with her doing chores. Help around the house isn’t something that I hate having. However, I can be particular about how my house is organized. I like things to be located in places where I can naturally find them at.
This keeps leading to a fight where I have to beg her not to put things away that she thinks are out and unorganized. God-forbid I have laundry in the drier as well, because if she sees that then she puts it upon herself to start folding up my clothes and putting them up in places that are different than where I would like them to be. So whenever I need a shirt for work or a kind of pants to go out in. I can never find them. And I have to spend 10 minutes digging around my closet to find the things I need.
When I try to talk to her about this problem of her doing my chores for me, it always ends up in her getting really defensive about it. She doesn’t see how her helping me is a hindrance on the way I like to organize things. She always likes to organize things in the way that she sees fit, not in any way that’s agreeable to me. And she’s very insistent on things being done the way she sees fit too.
This either leads me to being very angry with her when she’s over. Or it leads to me swallowing my pride and walking into another room while she decides what’s best for my living arrangement. And she’s *always* looking to help me out in this kind of way. I can’t get her to just sit down and talk with me while she’s in my house. If she sees a problem, she *has* to fix it.
So this outcome just tends to leave me in feeling two different kinds of ways. Either I feel like shit because I’m being angry with my mother for trying to help me with my house chores, which feels terrible. *Or* I feel like I just end up sulking in my room like a teenager, and I just end up accepting “mother knows best” on the various items around my house. So either way I end up feeling like shit, but lately I’ve just been taking the sulking in a different room route because I know if I bring it up in any way that she’ll just start getting super defensive about it immediately. Usually, when she starts deciding that she needs to do chores around my house I just walk outside and wait for her to be done. Let it be me the one who suffers I guess.
It makes me feel inadequate in one sense. I’m a fully grown man with a job whose mom does house chores for me. I don’t want it to keep happening, but as I’ve said a few times now: if I bring it up to her it upsets her.
So what should I do? How should I broach the subject? I would prefer her to just not do my house chores, period. Let me do them myself. But when I try to say anything, she ends up throwing up her walls and doing them all anyways. And I end up feeling like an asshole. So I just end up leaving my own house and let her take over when she’s here. It makes me feel like shit that I can’t find the things she keeps putting away, but at least this way I don’t end up being an asshole to my own mother.
What should I do though? How do I solve this?