It’s the start of July and I’m here with another update on how things are going with mom. Since I have very little in the way of outlets to express my wide variety of emotions, I’m choosing to do it here. Be prepared. There’s a lot of raw angst about to flow through my keyboard.
Mom is now moving towards the eight month mark of being in the hospital. Since my last post in April, a lot has happened and I am doing anything and everything I can to cope with it.
Let’s start with the good news. On the list of people to be admitted into Gordon Hall here in Moncton, mom is somewhere in the top five. I received a call from them to come in and sign a plethora of paperwork since she was now fourth on the list. That was several weeks ago. I can only hope that it is now only a matter of weeks before she leaves the hospital and moves into her final care facility.
That right now is about the only piece of good news I have. The rest has all been an ongoing set of frustrations that I have not been dealing with very well.
Let’s start with mom herself.
Visiting her has become increasingly difficult. Due to her memory loss and brain damage, what she remembers or understands is hit and miss. I’m asked every time I see her why she hasn’t seen a doctor the entire time she’s been in the hospital. This of course isn’t true, and I have to explain to her every time about how doctors have seen her, and that since she’s now medically discharged, it’s more like she’s renting a room until we can move her.
No, I’m not ignorant to the fact that this is a side effect of her mental condition. That doesn’t make it any less draining to have to repeat the same thing during every visit.
Then there are the constant requests for money and purse. And again, despite telling her every time that the nurses have said to keep valuables away from the rooms due to theft, it doesn’t stick. I tell her every time I am there that if she has those kinds of things in her room, they’ll end up in the wandering hands of other confused patients. Early on, she too was very confused and took things from other people thinking they belonged to her. Plus she has no need for any of those things while she is at the hospital.
During a recent visit, this came up again and mom started getting mad and regardless of what we tried to tell her, she was insisting we do as she asked, and to not inform the nurses of what we are up to. When trying to explain to her that we can’t go against the doctor or nurses recommendations, she got angrier. This led to me walking out of the common area and leaving the hospital all together.
I’d had enough.
Again, I know she’s confused, and I know there’s a specific medical condition that is causing her to behave this way. But in the moment it is incredibly difficult to not get upset in trying to explain to her what’s going on. Especially since you know the moment you leave, she’ll forget all of it anyway.
This all came after several weeks of having to deal with her house.
Knowing she can’t live there any more meant that someone, mainly me and my resources, would have to sift through her stuff to try and figure out what she can bring with her to the new place, and what has to go. This illuminated a side of my mother I had no idea existed.
Going through the basement, it was container after container of things that were decades old. Not just years old, decades. I found papers from the 1980s still in boxes downstairs. I found containers filled with countless boxes of unused greeting cards, music lessons, art classes, accounting stuff, and yarn.
The yarn. Every time I turned around, there was more yarn. I cannot communicate to you how much yarn we found in her home. Crochet and knitting kits and half-made projects filled box after box.
After finally getting through much of what was down there, I came to realize that mom had been spending an exorbitant amount of money on stuff she never used. This theme continued as we started digging through the kitchen and the bedrooms. More yarn and more “stuff” filled every nook and cranny in that home. A constant barrage of more stuff that was purchased, and quietly stuffed into a closet, never to be seen again.
It made me angry.
Who was this woman who had been living here all this time? This wasn’t the mom I remembered when I lived there.
It was another one of those “your parents are people too” moments. We spend a lot of time in our lives thinking of our parents as nothing more than mom or dad. The reality is they are just as flawed and messed up as the rest of us but as children, we can often see them through rose colored glasses.
I was mad that I had no idea what had been happening with her all this time. It made me wonder if there was anything else I didn’t know about who she was.
Combine this with the fact that it’s also incredibly hard to try and figure out what to keep and what to chuck when the person who owns all of this stuff is still alive. Since she can’t come to the house to help sort, the task falls on me and Tamara. When you’re surrounded in a house filled with so much “junk”, my initial reaction is to just chuck it all.
So it’s made me more angry. I’m angry that mom got this sick. I’m angry that she wasted so much money on things she’d never use. I’m angry that I’m the one who has to deal with the aftermath of her poor choices.
But most of all, I’m angry at myself because somehow it feels like I’m not supposed to be angry with her because of her condition. Her diagnosis means she can’t physically remember or understand things the way she used to. So what kind of person does it make me if I am getting angry at her over things she can’t control?
When you combine all of this frustration together, it’s overwhelmingly difficult to not let it seep out during a conversation with her. I think that’s what happened this past weekend.
From her inability to remember anything, to having to deal with the mess of her home, and being the only real person who can do anything for her or help her, it’s far more anxiety and stress inducing than anything I’ve dealt with before.
Perhaps one other upside right now is we’re about to hopefully sell off much of what is in the house.
I’ve organized an estate sale for this weekend (and next weekend) to unload much of the extra stuff. I’m hoping once the house is a bit more cleared out, it will be one less thing on my mind, making it easier to deal with her current mental state.
Until then, I’ll just keep doing as I have been and hoping for the best.
