Your mother asks when your father is picking her up. You tell her. Four minutes later, she asks again. You tell her again, a little more clipped this time. By the tenth time, you're not really answering anymore, you're managing your own frustration. It's one of the most common things caregivers describe, and one of the most exhausting, not because the question is hard, but because it never stops.
What's actually happening
The question itself isn't the point. Short-term memory can no longer hold onto your answer long enough for it to matter, so the fact resets every few minutes. But the feeling driving the question, worry, boredom, a need for reassurance, doesn't reset with it. She isn't failing to listen to you. She's asking, over and over, from a place of real unease that a correct answer can't actually settle, because the answer was never really what she needed.
The alternative: answer the feeling, not just the fact
Repeating the same factual answer treats this as a memory problem to be solved with better information. It isn't. Try responding to what's underneath the question instead: "You seem like you're waiting for someone, want to sit with me until he gets here?" You're not required to keep restating a fact that won't stick. You're allowed to address the worry directly.
A few things that help
Answer the feeling once, then redirect. Give the reassurance, then shift her attention to something in the room, an activity, a snack, a walk, rather than re-litigating the fact each time it resurfaces.
Write it down where she can see it. A simple note ("Dad is at work, home at 6") on the table or fridge gives her somewhere to look that doesn't require asking you, and doesn't cost you anything the fifth time she checks it.
Let go of needing this to stick. This isn't a conversation you're going to win by explaining it more clearly. The goal isn't a fact that holds, it's a moment that feels calmer than the last one.
Expect it again in ten minutes. That's the disease repeating, not her being difficult, and not you failing to explain it well enough.
This is the whole idea behind Read, the second of the four skills in the Steadier Ground Method: treating behavior, including a question asked for the fortieth time, as something to interpret, not something to correct.
When they ask the same question again
Read more on interpreting behavior and easing repeated questions in the free guide, including how dementia changes memory and what tends to catch families off guard.
This is one piece of the full guide, "Diagnosed With Dementia: Now What?" Section 3 covers it in full.