The word "wrong" may not be a good choice for my subject. But I just had a very frustrating interaction with my mother and I'm just wondering (not for the first time) if she has some actual issue beyond an extremely difficult personality.

So...my father is currently in the hospital. My mother is alone at home. I offered to travel home to be with her for a few days, but she said no. A day after my father was hospitalized, she started coughing. I actually didn't entirely believe she was sick at the beginning...but OK, she definitely caught something.

Lots of annoying things have happened as a result of her being home alone for the first time in so long. But I want to talk about what happened just now--her taking a COVID test.

She took one a few days ago with my father's help over zoom and it was negative. But she kept on obsessing about how she may have put 3 drops instead of 4 on the cassette.

So when I heard she was told she'd have to take antivirals immediately if she was positive, I was like, "OK, let's do another test right away, so you can start taking them if you're positive." And I kind of expected a positive result because she was really coughing... This is where the nightmare started. She resisted this suggestion for several hours, wanting the test to be supervised by my father, but he's been busy so she finally asked me to help her. Why she can't just follow the instructions is already weird to me. So I sent her a zoom link to do it and called her to help her join the zoom. She was like "I don't know, maybe I should wait for your father." And I'm like "I just stopped everything I was doing and created the link and am sitting here just waiting for you to join--if you didn't want me to help you do it, why are you wasting my and your time??" And she was like, "Yes, ok, let's do it..."

Like I said, she aleady did a COVID test 2 days ago with my father's supervision. Nevertheless, she couldn't figure out how to open the floflex box. I was taken aback; I've taken several of these tests before and I didn't even remember opening the box. It was like five minutes of her hysterically struggling with the box... I looked up online videos--they don't even cover opening the box, that's how easy it's supposed to be. I'm like, "mom, remove the tape and it should just open...ok is there an opening on the side...etc." Finally she got it...somehow...and I was like "gosh what is going on here..."

Every step from there was me trying to tell her to do something and her contradicting me or asking me repeatedly was I timing it, had I started timing it, or not understanding what I was saying. At one point, I'm like "mom it just needs to be wet with your mucus, you don't have to fixate so much on the 15 seconds per nostril" and she almost started crying that those numbers are very important to her and I can't tell her to do it wrong. I actually couldn't convince her to swab her nose, but my father joined the zoom around then. His trick was actually counting for her out loud: "one, two, three" so that she would know how many seconds had gone by and her circles were like timed to his counts.

Then we're like, "OK, put the tip in the tube" and she's like "put it in the tube? are you sure?" and we're like "put it in the tube" and she's like "but for how long? are you timing it?" and it just went back and forth until he and I were really yelling at her "PUT IT IN THE TUBE!" Same for getting her to remove it from the tube...

Finally she loaded the cassette with her four drops and I set the timer for 15 minutes and my father and I started chatting, except that every 30 seconds she was interrupting to ask how much time was left... Finally I was like "OK, the timer I set has an alarm, but I see we can't talk while it goes, so I'll just stare at it counting down silently and tell you." This sort of appeased her...

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Maybe this is just what extreme anxiety looks like, but a friend who overheard the conversation was asking me if my mom might have dementia... She's always been like this though (not so extreme maybe), so I don't think it's dementia...

In general--I'm really surprised by how helpless my mother is when my father is absent. Also, she's really not able or willing to do things independently, but she doesn't listen to anyone around her either. It's weird. She doesn't drive on highways and has been begging various people to help her with things. But when I suggest anything, she's derisive and sarcastic about my solutions, to the point that I've finally started responding to her complaints with, "You figure it out."

Is anyone familiar with this type?