I'm tired of cooking/preparing 3 meals a day. It's just the two of us but boy oh boy can that woman eat!! She stays slimish, I get fattish. It's bad enough I do everything here much less start making her one thing and me the other. At times I feel guilty when I buy her fast food cuz of the nutritional value....not to mention I eat it too.
One thing that I notice about the dementia/alzheimer's sufferer is their perception of things. There brain is very disorganized. For example...I go OUT OF MY WAY to make mom's environment comfy and orderly and pleasant. Yesterday after cleaning the deck off and making her a lovely seating space that she can look out from, she says to me, "It's kind of messy out here isn't it"? Are you kidding me???? This is a lady who cannot fold clothes--she wads and rolls them up. She cannot hang things straight on a hanger. She cannot put her clothes on right side up or frontwards. And she calls the environment that I have just spent a great deal of my morning arranging for her---'messy'. Heck, why do I try sometimes?
Always problems to some degree or another. Isn't there some law of physics that states that "for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction" ??? If that is the case, then for all the bad things we are going through somewhere somehow there should be a time where there is more good than bad for all of us!.....right now it seems that there is too much "ying" and not enough "yang".....that the state of things is always below the median line if we were to graph out how things are going....things are balanced towards the bad and difficult. Will there be a flood of good and wonderful things for us in result of going through all this now?....Maybe I am thinking too much!
Hope, YAY!... glad your mama is feeling better!! So is mine. Finally. She's been so lucid and talkative today... and it's so pretty outside, she want's to go for a walk :) she can no longer walk though so... gonna try and improvise a makeshift ramp so we can go for a sunny day stroll. Yeah, it's almost 65 out and gorgeous. Hey, she's even eating more. She wants to get up and help me do stuff around the house, bless her heart. Apparently she has more energy than I do !!! This Wednesday I am for sure going to take my 5 days of respite.
Katie, I swear I hope there is a flood of good and wonderful coming our way. My yang has yinged and I always think too much and lately it's leaning towards the negative vs the positive and I truly hate that!!!
So now that I'm thinking.... I might try and take all of us for a walk. I can leash the 2 dogs to mom's wheelchair (they dropped it off today) and push her while the dogs help me by pulling :) Yeegads I've lost my mind. haha
Went for a fun drive through the countryside with the music cranked up and enjoying a soda...wow I forgot how good that feels...before I came home I went by and got my flowering bulbs and also some pretty iris...going to start jazzing up the yards now. I felt alive today...
Even fixed me some peas and cornbread and am about to enjoly along with the new episode of one of my favorites...The Walking Dead.....
Thank you all for your encouragement...what a difference a day makes.. :)
my mom done something similar with nearly 800 . 00 cash that she was trying to stash . after losing it and accusing me of stealing it she came into my room and gave it to me for safekeeping . its sad and sweet at the same time . the two women , both with late dementia , came to the realization that they have no choice but to put their trust in someone else as their own judgement simply gave out on them .
i guess theres a lesson for everyone here . at a point the earthly possessions are reduced to a bushel basket full of trinkets and clothes and eventually money means nothing .
someone with the guts enough to take the last walk with you is the real treasure .
Anyway, the watch maker said he was hesitant to open up the watch because it looked like someone who wasn't a jeweler had pried opened the back cover because of all the scratch marks on the back of the watch and the cover was placed back incorrectly. He was afraid if he tried to force open the cover it would break the stem. Since it wasn't my watch I decided not to take the risk.
Ah ha, I bet Dad [93] got out his tool box and was trying to open the watch himself... he's always been Mr. Fix-It and used to do excellent work but now he has trouble seeing and he's not too steady. Once again he was messing with something and damaged it. Couple weeks ago it was Mom's hearing aid where it looks like someone broke off a piece of the hearing aid, and I know it wasn't Mom doing it..... [sigh]
Now, I could have put it down, but the subject was resurrected this morning on AC. Something I'm really starting to have trouble with when it comes to preaching is the legalistic, condemning nature of fundamentalists. I am so hard on myself already that I don't need a fire-breathing person condemning me further. If I could no longer take care of my mother, would I be damned to all eternity or have to do daily penitence for forgiveness?
I grow weary of the condemning nature of many of the religions. I am tired of condemning myself based on what someone else thinks I ought to be doing. Some people use the Bible to beat people over the head with it.
I do think it is wonderful if we are able to take care of our parents. Graham had gone on to say that we should still obey them. I wonder if we get an exception if they have lost their ability to reason. There was so much Jack Graham was saying that all I could do is shake my head and figure he had never been a 24/7 caregiver for a person with dementia or other serious disability. He spoke from the Bible, but without any understanding.
My brother is pretty notorious for "fixing" things....some things turn out ok, but to be honest, I have gotten to where I have to crack up seeing some of the catastrophes he creates...always ends up costing me twice what it would have cost in the first place to have jut hired it done...or better yet, just done it myself.
Been a busy weekend, and it's kind of fallen over into this week, but I'll get it all done. Lots of house projects going on.
IOW, I doubt he has any serious hands-on experience with changing an elder's poopy diapers or listening to someone ask him the same question several times. He is too busy for that. This is not criticizing him for being busy, but it is saying not to be critical of others who are also busy. It is easy to tell other people how you think they should live, without taking it to heart for ourselves.
I understand his thinking that we should take care of our parents, but sometimes we can't do it. I do not like at all what he said about still having to obey the elders we care for. It shows lack of understanding of the reversal of roles that caregivers face. I don't think he really had any idea what he was saying, to tell the truth. He probably meant to honor and respect, but he came across as very convicting. I hoped that my mother would quickly forget some of the things he said, since it would be used to strip any power of adulthood from me.
That preacher is the very reason I created a thread on how people misuse the Bible when it comes to caregiving. I should have included preachers in the title!
https://www.agingcare.com/questions/parents-manipulate-you-as-a-caregiver-176024.htm
He either does not know his NT Greek very well or was never taught it for the verse about obeying your parents specifically used a word for children that means young children. BTW, that verse is followed by a verse telling parents not to provoke their children to anger. How many of our parents have provoked us to anger before we even became an adult?
We are not little children anymore and don't have to obey our elderly parent like we are still their little child!
I would not listen to any TV or Radio program that had him on. He's out of touch with both the Bible and real life in that particular area. I'd hate to hear him preach on mental illness. I guess he would think it is either all in their heads or means a person lacks enough faith or has some hidden sin they need to confess.
I hope your mother did forget some of the damaging things he said. We don't need that kind of preaching or the begging for money kind of preaching on TV, but that is almost all that is out there.
Talking of the Bible, I think it cannot even begin to enlighten us to the ways of God. Considering that he knows everything -- all the chemistry and physics, etc, that makes the entire universe works -- how could a little book really show much? God is totally awesome and gave a bit of the spirit to all the things living (and maybe unliving). I learn more about God watching the birds and squirrels than I do listening to a preacher talk the Bible, since the animals have not had their knowledge adulterated by cultural expectations.