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.
But I can understand the need for the time change, otherwise the elementary school kids who catch the bus at 7:15 a.m. would be standing in the dark waiting for the bus. I couldn't imagine trying to get a grade schooler all dress and fed, and out the front door while it still looked like midnight.
Saddly it sounds like your Mom needs another layer of care... time to hire someone to be with her full time. Maybe your hubby is been seeing a pattern here and he's trying tough love to make you see the situation for what it is.
Yep, when it get's dark, my body thinks like yours. Hunker down time!! Gonna try and do something about that this winter... load up on vitamin D and force myself to keep moving.... least until 8:00 p.m.!!
The garage door opening is always in the other vehicle, along with the umbrella!!
I agree with FF time to make other arrangements for Mom and start talking to your hubby it's not his fault you feel like sh*t. Why not take a sick day tomorrow and get better.
sundowners starts earlier and lasts an hour longer... lovely poor mom knows what's she's doing isn't quite right, but says she simply can't help it.
I had a conversation with the daughter of a mom with very rapidly advancing dementia, with a sudden onset brought on (I think) by a recent surgery, which threw her whole system out of whack. It was a knee replacement, but sometimes, with elders who are not quite into their dementia yet, all it takes is a traumatic event like surgery to tip the balance - which seems to be the case here. Daughter is one of those whiny, nagging types who wants everything to be about HER, and when we had breakfast with them this morning at a restaurant, she sat there and talked about her Mom in derogatory terms like she wasn't there. Her mom just sat there and looked at her. I pulled her aside privately later and explained that her mom can't help what's happening to her, but I think it fell on deaf ears. All she did was continue to complain about her mom forgetting how to turn the TV on and something about a window being opened and closed - I have to admit, I kind of tuned her out after a while, because she just doesn't "get it". Her mom is entering a facility soon, and I think the sooner the better, because this daughter is her caregiver until she does - and I don't think the level of care is at all what her mom needs right now. Breakfast with them was a real eye-opener and reminder to treat my own mom with kid gloves, so to speak. I'd hate to be in her mom's position, having my daughter sit there and talk about me in a mean fashion, like I'm not even there.
I bet your mom's glad to have you there instead of someone like that....
My sister would call it laziness, too. I'd call it indifference. I don't understand how people can be so utterly indifferent to their surroundings, but I'm pretty sure they are. And I'm absolutely sure they ain't going to change!
Men get to retire from their full-time work, and go onto enjoying things. A woman still cooks, clean, laundry day after day.... hey, when will we retire???
That could be the reason why some elder women don't bother with cleaning like they use to.... it's like enough already... I want to see a TV show all the way through, not in bits and pieces while I am ironing or preparing dinner !!
While all this was going on I was on tenterhooks because we'd already had so many tears before bedtime about clutter, but in the event she actually didn't deign to notice what I was doing. I don't know what had made the difference, why she couldn't be bothered to put up a fight. What do you suppose would happen if things just made their way magically, bit by bit, or rather box by box, out of your mother's house? - how would she react?
The bed is really difficult, too - we all like our beds how we like them, it's very hard to justify changing it willy-nilly, and very expensive I expect to buy properly fitting equivalents. How old is her bed? I'm just wondering if you'd get anywhere with that back-protecting theory about how it's absolutely crucial to change your mattress every seven years or whatever it is.
I think you're okay if you enjoy it, or at the other extreme if, like my late aunt with cookery, you loathe it and unapologetically refuse to get involved. As with many things, it's us in the middle who feel we "ought" to do things we don't enjoy who are in trouble!
Mom's bed is new. That's another tale of woe. She didn't like her old bed and wanted a new big bed. Then she wanted to return it and didn't like the headboard and wanted to keep the mattress pad off of her smaller bed. All that and she sleeps on the sofa most of the night. She has a nighttime ritual where she'll make up the sofa like a bed, then go to her bedroom and sit on the side of her real bed for about an hour. Then she'll get in bed to sleep an hour or two. Finally she'll get up and go to the sofa for the rest of the night. It's just a habit she has. And of course, she leaves both "beds" for me to either deal with or ignore. Double the work or double the ignoring.
This woman was constantly on the go, always volunteering for something, doing presentations at our schools about rocks, nutrition, etc when we were in grade school, volunteering at the hospital gift shop, distributing local tourism magazines to various retailers...the list goes on. She was never one to sit still. Through it all, she maintained a clean house, taught us kids how to take care of a house (so we helped a lot), and always found time to spend with her grandkids. Now that she is older, she sits in her chair and watches tv for an hour or two, then goes straight to bed. Sometimes she sleeps for an hour or two, sometimes she's up/down every 10 minutes (which drives me nuts). She resists showering, changing her incontinence pad, and some weeks, she's not even interested in going out to eat for our Sunday breakfast.
When I first moved in and got really frustrated with her not showering, I asked her why she wouldn't just get up and shower, because she was never like this before - her response was, "Because I'm LAZY, ok?!?"
Not much I could say to that.
It's so hard to watch her go downhill like this, but nothing I'm doing is working to change it. I've tried keeping her active, taking her for rides, giving her things to do that she can do while sitting, etc - and she perks up for a day or so, but then goes right back to where she was before, not wanting to do anything and sleeping all the time. I've asked her doctor about it, and he feels that while she may have many years left to live, the concept of having many "good" years is a thing of the past - that she is simply tired and her weight and age have simply caught up with her and are starting overwhelm her system. I suspect she is headed for a nursing home in the next 5 years or so, possibly sooner. It all depends on which part of her body decides to give up first. That sounds horrible when I read it back to myself - it seems so crude and crass - but I have to be realistic about the fact that she will not live forever, and her body is going to give out sooner rather than later.
After we kids left home, she stopped cleaning altogether except doing superficial things in the main rooms. Instead of throwing things out or donating, she would stick them in the empty bedrooms. Soon the house was stacked with useless stuff. It is why I mention that one thing that causes hoarding is laziness. It is easier to set something somewhere than it is to discard or donate it.
My mother could still have many good years left, but she is lazying herself out of existence. I encourage her to do things, and tell her to use it or lose it, but my words fall on deaf ears.
If Mom would have stayed active instead of settling into this rut of not doing anything at all unless she absolutely has to, she would be in far better shape now - but now it's too late to change much. I am working with her on eating somewhat healthier, and she has started to lose some weight, but I have to be realistic about the fact that no matter how much weight she loses, the damage is already done. The "use it or lose it" rationale doesn't work on her, either.