This is kind of long, there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.
I (19M) am currently staying in a house with me, My mother, her husband (my stepfather) and her husbands mother (my Step-grandmother, who we’ll call L). L is 86 and is definitely feeling her age, she is fairly immobile and uses 2 walking sticks to get around places. She goes out a fair bit to do standard hobbies that old people do (bingo, gardening that kind of thing) but most of her time during the day consists of her watching TV and moving over to the kitchen to make food. This is where it gets kind of tricky.
L is in the kitchen ALL the time, and by all the time I mean she is ALWAYS there making food or a cup of tea or something. This makes it incredibly hard to do your own thing in the kitchen because, as previously mentioned, L is quite immobile and so it takes forever for her to finish what she’s doing. Both me and my Mother get pretty frustrated at this.
My Mother works 12 hour shifts throughout the week and so when she comes home and sees that L is making food or a cup of tea and that she won’t be able to do anything in the kitchen until she’s done she gets very frustrated.
She also gets frustrated because L also kind of assumes that my Mother is going to go shopping for her or take her to her Doctor appointments on her days off. Like she’ll just be like “I’ve wrote a shopping list for you” or “My appointment is at x time” and because my Mother is such a kind soul she won’t refuse but instead just do it without question and get frustrated about it.
What’s also frustrating is that L won’t wait for people to be done before she comes into the kitchen, she has a VERY specific schedule for what time she eats and so if someone is in there at that time she will come in and start doing her thing and quite frankly just get in the way of what you’re trying to do. It’s frustrating to the point where I’ll just straight up leave the kitchen until she’s done before I continue.
It’s worth mentioning that L is a very nice lady but that there’s just some I guess ‘unspoken conflict’ between who is in what space at what time. So my question to you Reddit is: WIBTA if I were to talk about this with L to try and make things a little less frustrating for my Mother and I? I’ve spoke to some friends about this and they’ve said that I would be an asshole for bringing it up and that I should just put up with it because she’s old and slow so I’m not sure if I should or not. What is the Internet’s opinion?
TL;DR – Me and my Mother are frustrated because my Step-Grandmother is in the kitchen all the time and takes forever. WIBTA for telling her to politely fuck off until people are finished doing their own thing?