You should just take care of those bills.

After chatting myself up while driving to my parents, I arrive and there are piles of mail all over my parents’ living room.  My goal today is to:

1. Let my mom drive this conversation
2. Ignore any inaccurate statements

We chat for a bit and I wait until she brings up the bills. She has a pile at her feet and we go through donation requests for various charities. We easily navigate through the pile. I let my mom look up previous payments in her checkbook. It’s the place she goes whenever she gets confused. We found out from her testing that one strength is the visual side to her memory, so seeing the checkbook helps her make sense of the bills.

At one point, she wants to go get her old check register and she goes upstairs and comes back down with notecards. We didn’t need the checkbook and I don’t point out that she didn’t return with what she left to get (major victory for Kay). We just start picking piles and sorting. This takes a lot of time to do.

It would be so much easier to grab the piles, quickly sort through them and be done in about 10 minutes. However, I need to let her drive this process, so we wander through the piles.

When we finally get to the bills, I ask if I can set up auto-payments so they don’t need to worry about the bills. My dad is there and says, “Yes, you should just take care of those bills.” My mom doesn’t disagree and I quickly pick them up and just put them in my binder.

Out of sight, out of mind. Relieved.