If she were retirement age it would be something different. If I were middle-aged and well-established in life with a house and a wife and kids of my own, and my aging parents needed some help getting by, that's not ridiculous to ask for. Parents care for kids when they're young, kids care for parents when they're old.
But no, she's at least a decade from retirement age. I'm barely over thirty, and have just barely secured a course in life that might have me, in a decade or two, to the kind of place in life she and dad were (before they threw it all away) when they were almost a decade younger than me, with a house and marriage and all that. (We don't want kids, but I'd want the house and marriage before the kids even if we did, for the kids' sake as much as my own).
And she has the gall to tell me that kids taking care of their parents is the normal course of things, despite how terribly off-schedule we are even given that. And when I say that, she says I should count my blessings to be doing as well as I can to live on my own, as many of my generation are still living with their parents in their 30s. And I tell her that that's not a blessing, I mean I am statistically doing better than my peers but I wasn't happy to move out on my own when I did, and I really couldn't afford it back then (I'm paying the same now making 3-4X as much as then and now I can reasonable afford it). I just didn't have parents I could live with. Staying with mom would mean sharing a bed with mom, and staying with dad meant living in a tool shed next to his trailer, and then he dared to start charging rent for that, at which point if I'm paying rent I'm going to get a real fucking room for it, and moved out.
What I wanted back before everything went to shit, when I thought I had a loving supportive middle-class family (somehow they put up that illusion, no doubt by living beyond their means), was to live at home through college (we're within commuting distance of my university) plus a little bit longer, just enough to save for a down payment on a house and then start buying my own. Instead, having to rent and work my way through school, I was three years late graduating, couldn't afford to take any risks in my career living check-to-check afterward, and am tens of thousands of dollars behind schedule on saving to start buying a house. I'd love to have had the option those 30-somethings living for free with their middle-class parents are taking advantage of. When it came time that I briefly couldn't make it on my own, I didn't have that option to fall back on. That's why I fight so goddamn hard to make it on my own. Because if I fail, nobody else is going to save me. I'm sure mom would if she could, but she can't even fucking save herself, and dad's the same way.
And yeah, "ridiculous times" indeed, that so many of my generation have to fall back on that option. I gripe constantly about the impossible uphill battle to secure a place in life I have ahead of me, but then I look at the statistics about how well I'm actually doing compared to other people and it's just like... jesus. We're fucked. We are all fucked. The whole goddamn world is doomed, if I'm a statistical paragon of success.