I'd listen twice, then say she's already told you....if she doesn't have memory problems and she tells you a story more than once and you act interested she may know very well she told you before, and she'll think you're not listening!!..so if you make her aware she told you already she'll feel that you are indeed listening to her! Cherish her Beth, you're very lucky to still have your mum!
I just had to repeat that. Bess lucky, lucky you. May you have your mom for many more years. PS--My mom repeated her stories even when she was young! Even my son knows them by heart! I found it wasn't worth mentioning because she would repeat them no matter what I said. So, I learned to just listen as I was bound to hear them anyway!
We took care of my MIL until she died. Full blown alzheimers was something else to deal with. Cold sheets she thought the bed was wet, bought an electric blanket to heat the bed but had to remove it just before she was going to sleep for the night. One time she saw the on light there was a fear of fire. Before going to work in the morning I'd make her toast & coffee her favorite breakfast. Later when my wife got up she complained that no one gave her anything to eat. Like others when she was fairly lucid she would tell stories from the times she remembered. Probably the funniest was when she would see herself in the mirror and ask who it was in the picture. Our home was bilevel, when our kids were downstairs listening to the TV she would ask if we knew the other people that lived where she heard the voices from the TV. Lots of great memories even though caring for her was not easy.
I so totally agree with this, and wish that my mom could still be around, but she did live into her 80’s, so I had her and listened to her stories for many years. My mom also told the same stories over and over, but I guess that i just always enjoyed hearing them. She used to tell me about when she was little and living on the Indian Reservation in Arizona, where my grandfather was the Indian Agent, and her best friend was a young Indian girl that she went to school with. They got there in a buckboard, and she said that the wild longhorns would chase the buckboard to attack it, and the driver would have to fight them off with his bullwhip to prevent them from turning the wagon over and killing everyone. I listened to that story as a little girl, vividly imagining the scene in my mind, and grew up terrified of cows.....any cow. When my kids were little and we visited my mom and dad, she used to tell the same “bedtime story” to my daughter, Robin, so she also grew up terrified of cows.
Oakland Technical High School in Oakland,California graduated quite a number of well known atheletes, entertainers,actors & musicians. Clint Eastwood, John Brodie, Rod McKuen. I did not know Clint but I did know Brodie & McKuen. The school had a great mix of races. Many Japanese students back from the interment camps of WW2. Chinese students due to a large number of Chinese families living & working in Oakland and the same with Black students. It was a great high school experience owing in large part to it's curriculum and racial diversity. Many of my classmates & I went to the same Jr. High School together 1947/48