The title is self-explanatory, but I’ll give some more details. I [23F] have been making invoices for my mother [53F] for a couple of years now. She has a business that she sometimes needs to send her customers invoices for, and usually she will text me or come to me in my room (we live in the same house still) and tell me she wants an invoice sent to a company or person. She gives me all the details, and I’ll send it off, because I also have access to her email to do so. I had, and still don’t have, any particular issue with doing this really. I know some of the older folks aren’t as efficient with technology, and she didn’t have a computer of her own at the time – whereas I did, so I figured I’d do it for her. I even made a little template document with her business logo on it so I wouldn’t always have to do it from scratch. However, about a year or so ago, she came into possession of a second-hand laptop, which was good because she had always been putting off buying one when she needed one. She asked me to set it up for her, which I did, and I sent all of her work documents I had to the new computer, so she could access them whenever she needed.
Here’s my issue: since getting this laptop, she’s rarely used it and I’m still doing her invoices. She repeatedly said that she’d find some time to learn to do all that stuff or go to tech classes to learn properly – which she doesn’t need to since I can literally teach her myself without her spending useless money. None of that has happened. Instead, she comes to me every single time to have me do the invoices. Every couple of times I do it, I make it a point to remind her that she needs to learn to do it on her own. Not because I can’t and don’t have the time, but if she’s going to be running a business, that is a fundamental thing she needs to learn. I also iterated this point because, well, it’s not like I’ll always be around and available for her to come ask me to do it. I got a new job sometime in October of last year and I’ve been moving up pretty quickly and got about two raises, and it’s really been making me think about the future and where I’m headed. I have a lot of things I want to do, and I’m not always gonna be here for her to conveniently have me do all those things for her. But whenever I bring it up, she brushes it off and repeats that she’ll get around to it.
The most recent time it happened, which is why I’m making this post in the first place, is because she got annoyed with me last time I brought it up, she said “she can’t understand” and that I’m always doing things for other people (I’m not) and that I make life so hard (I don’t) and “what’s a little something that I can’t do” and it quite frankly has me annoyed. I replied and told her that first of all, she’s projecting about my sister [28F], who is the one of us two that actually bends over backwards to do things for her friends, but would turn around and make fusses about helping our mother with simple things, so do not lump me with her. And secondly, that I’m not complaining, because yes, it is simple – but that I’m repeating these things for HER own good and not mine. The day I’m gone and she has no idea what to do will be her own undoing because she decided to wait till I disappeared to get her act together. Furthermore, if she can tell me that it’s something so small and so little, then there’s absolutely no reason she shouldn’t be able to take care of something so “simple”, right? She is making no effort to help herself, and that’s what is really ticking me off here.
She then said something the next day, after asking again for the invoice to be made, more desperately, and mentioned something about adding a fee to the invoice to cover me “processing” it, which felt really weird of her to bring up, cuz it sounds like she thinks I was complaining about free labour or something, so she’s gonna add a fee for me to get money out of it and just suck it up. I ended up making the invoice anyway because she really had no time to do it after I argued and the day went by, but this particular instance makes me not want to do it ever again or just give constant excuses as to why I can’t, just so she’s forced to figure it out. Is this a reasonable course of action for me to take? I feel like if I refuse to do it, then it’ll get done somehow, but I also feel as though it will create a weird animosity too.
TL;DR I’ve been making invoices for my mother for a couple years and I want her to learn to do it herself for when I’m no longer around, but she got annoyed and complained as though my issue is the work itself and not the fact that she isn’t making an effort to learn to do them herself, so now I don’t wanna make them at all.