Sometimes God uses events to shape and change us. I won't blame God for this, but I am profoundly changed by what occurred this morning. Our next door neighbor's Adult Foster Care Facility was completely devastated by fire this morning. Thank God all 8 people + 2 dogs got out alive. Thank God no one was seriously hurt. A firefighter's shoulder was hurt when a ceiling collapsed on him. The challenged elderly residents had been practicing fire drills recently, and each were brought out safely. Thank God.
I complain about my circumstances, at times, as you all know. But today, I think I will not complain at all. I thank God no one was hurt and lives were spared. I thank God my home and husband and son did not perish. I thank God I did not move my Mom into that situation. I think I'll think about this every time I look out my windows, walk or drive by. And when I want to complain about something, I think I'll just count my blessings, instead. I pray you'll count your blessings, today, as well. And while you're at it, please pray for those in need, including your own, thanking God for all the good he gives you each day.
Thanks Austin, glad you got all that stuff out of the way there is only so much even you can do He sounds like he and my mother would get along really really good they could start a new soap opera as the stomach turns or who can pass out the fastest win XXX $ good game show or a reality tv show who will survive? I am being sarcastic and sick but hey that's who I am.
Don't you realize hon you are worth more than wherever you can get it? You don't deserve to be treated as you have. Start choosing now to make changes. Let me give you some pro-active options to help yourself start a bit. They don't go without struggles, but it will help you gain some freedom emotionally as well.
You can be who you are!!! You can! Others will NOT like it because they have been used to you one way for so long. That's okay!! Take baby steps. Your children learned to crawl before they could walk and they learned to walk before they can run.
Taking care of yourself emotionally and physically is no different. Find one thing in your day that you are tired of. Make a determination of what you will or will not do. Then consciously say it out loud of what you won't do. Make that your one goal for the week (if its reoccurring). Watch what happens.
We don't have to go before God cowering and feeling unworthy. There is no way. Do you like it when your children come before you cowering or feeling unworthy? You love them regardless. It's no different for any of us here as caregivers.
Neon, its not about pride, its not about guilt, its not about being ashamed to take care of yourself. It's that we've believed a lie for so long we do not know any other reality. I know for my own life for the first time I can honestly say my life to this point has been a blessing. If not for all the verbal abuse, narcissistic behavior from mom, and everything else, I never would have realized what was lost. I wouldn't be where I am now. Now it is a time for healing. Now it is a time for restoring, and enjoying my life. The same can be said for you hon..... (((((Neon)))))
Navajo and other traditional cultures understand that there's nothing more soulful than supporting people at the margins of life, those who can't walk fast or talk sense or remember how to use a toilet. They also know that this takes a village.
It really does.
Most eldercare providers in our village-less society end up jury-rigging systems of helpers. The common refrain I heard from people in the trenches? Take notes. Write down every bit of advice you get, from every person who interacts with your family member: doctors, pharmacists, neighbors, hairstylists. Write down these people's contact information. For good or evil, they're your village. Oprah: Do you have a hard time asking for help?
Jennifer has 45 people on her call list should her elderly parents encounter a crisis. Polly rallied support from her parents' church congregation. Not everyone in the village will help care for an elderly person, but a long list gives you multiple possibilities for support.
"No one can tell you what to expect," Anne said to me. "You have to live like a firefighter, ready to call other firefighters to solve whatever problem arises."
Psychological coping strategies
Once you've adopted this firefighting mentality about your parent's needs, you'll need a whole new set of strategies like the ones below to deal with the emotional wreckage that piles up along the way.
Surrender to the emotional grinder.
"The thing that galls me most about caring for my mother," one woman told me, "is that she's the only one who gets a morphine drip."
The emotional pain suffered by caregivers is intense -- and unlike the elderly, caregivers are expected to live through it. With every new issue your elderly relative develops, you'll head into the emotional grinder called the grief process: bargaining, anger, sadness, acceptance, repeat.
Grieving, like physical caretaking, differs from case to case. If you had a troubled relationship with an aging parent, expect to spend lots of time in the anger stage. Use this time to clean your emotional closet. Explore the anger with a therapist. Journal it. Process it with friends. Clean the wounds. Oprah: 4 healthy ways to grieve
On the other hand, if your declining parent was your main source of emotional support, you'll find yourself spending lots of time in sadness. You'll feel as though it's killing you. It won't.
As Naomi Shihab Nye wrote, "Before you know kindness / as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow / as the other deepest thing.... / Then it is only kindness / that makes sense anymore...."
As the grieving process scrapes along, you'll learn to offer kindness to everyone: your aging relative, the people of your village, yourself. When you snap under stress and begin to rail at Nana, God, yourself, and the cat, you'll learn to be kind to yourself anyway. At that point, you'll find relief and an unexpected gift: laughter.
Nourish a sick sense of humor.
A morbid sense of humor isn't listed in any official guides to eldercare, but to the caregivers I interviewed, it is like oxygen.
Take, for example, Meg Federico's memoir "Welcome to the Departure Lounge." Federico's wry portrayal of her mother's senescence is both sad and hilarious. Without belittling her mother or her stepfather, Walter, both of whom suffered dementia, Federico recounts conversations like this one:
"I can't seem to find my keys," Walter told Mom. "Say, do you have them?"
"Oh, don't worry about keys, dearest. We don't need them. We can jump out the window and fly home."
"What?" said Walter. "You can fly? I never knew."
"So can you, but you have to take your shoes off."
To Walter's credit, he was not convinced.
Just acknowledging that this is funny makes it tolerable. Cracking up can keep caregivers from, well, cracking up.
"Bill and I are training his dad to 'go toward the light,'" said my friend Anne, whose father-in-law no longer recognizes his family. "Any light we see -- lamps, flashlights, the TV -- we steer him over there. We figure he can use the practice."
Of course, Anne isn't serious. Not being serious is how she and Bill are surviving. If you can't train your elder to go toward the light, you can make light of the situation. And sometimes, that light becomes splendiferous.
Ponder the nature of existence.
There's nothing like caring for the elderly to help you face your own mortality. Many caregivers told me that their experience was dissolving, through simple drudgery, their fear of death.
Pulitzer Prize--winning psychologist Ernest Becker wrote that the denial of death underlies all evils, and that we must drop this denial to live fully. The caregivers I interviewed would agree.
"Fear of death was my biggest obstacle in life," said Polly. "To help my dad, I have to get past it. He's showing me how to die, which is really helping me live."
Other caregivers went further. They said that as they watched the door close on their loved one's physical identity, a door to the metaphysical slowly opened.
"I don't believe in an afterlife, but as my mother died, I truly understood that being dead is no more frightening than being asleep, which I love."
"As my husband's body was failing, he became almost translucent. I went right through my own pain and felt the most intense peace. I can still find that."
"Just before my grandmother died in surgery, I heard her voice saying, 'I'm leaving now, but you'll be fine.' I've been less anxious about everything ever since."
This is why traditional cultures value even the most fragile, disoriented elder, why the Navajo carry "Grandmother's bones" with such reverent attention. Even as you grapple with the logistical and psychological stress of eldercare, there will be moments when you find yourself on the "blessing path."
Rather than a long day's journey into night, you'll feel yourself making a long night's journey into day: through fear and confusion to courage and wisdom. Receive this gift, the final one your parents can offer before they take off their shoes, jump out the window, and fly home
Some days I feel just like Job more days than not. Not that I am as righteous as Job but I sure can identify with him.
Again thank all of you for your love and well wishes, you really don't know what it means to me I hope for all of you things take a turn for the best so that you can be who you are, thats the hardest thing not being able to be who I am and who God wants me to be, the evil one is lurking ready to devour me like a lion and I refuse to allow that. I need to find myself and I know God can help me as well as all of you.
I have no children so I cannot relate in that loss, but let me tell you briefly about me and I know in the depths of my being, as long as we keep pursuing and seeking, He will restore double for our trouble. Question is the hanging on part.
I was adopted (basic feelings of rejection my whole life). I was adopted by a narcissistic woman who led me to feel I couldn't be myself. I married a man completely opposite my faith. I married a verbal abuser (oh the stories we could share), I met my birth mother and learned some hard lessons there. I went into severe debt because of my unhappiness. I gained over 100 lbs due to being so unhappy. I had a nervous breakdown 10 years ago. That is when God started teaching me boundaries. Years ago I tried or catered the thoughts of suicide. I ran away from home (while married) into another bad scenario.
Since my dad's stroke 5 years ago, I compound the problem with instantly becoming a caregiver, provider, legal counsel, financial wiz (remember used to be in debt). In the last two months I lost my aunt and my MIL (both I was close too). I am dealing now with stepping up the boundaries a bit for my own sanity. Finally went to a counselor (yes, Christian counselor) to find my inner peace at any cost.
I am emotionally spent. Like you I am tired. When I look back at each of the instances I told you about, I can see God's hand in everything. I don't know how I survived without Him. Emotionally.... there are things even now that are challenging. Teaching my husband boundaries for one. God has equipped me with a great counselor that gives me the tools to be Godly about it while maintaining my own sanity.
I try to grieve the loss of my MIL and my aunt and I have nowhere to even cry. My husband can't stand seeing me upset and that starts a whole other issue. My schedule is packed to the guild because of just life. My time with God is becoming extremely challenging, but the determination to NEVER GIVE UP.... that's the thing mom taught me best.... stubbornness.
I have a job where people are probably the most miserable I have ever seen (I have an employment record two miles long). I don't talk to a soul because every word I speak is used against me.
Do NOT be afraid to take care of you. People are going to get pissy about your decision to take care of you, but so what!! They've had their way. You have a chance to allow God to give you double for your trouble, but you also have to do your part to take care of you. God does not want to see His children suffer. But when we allow people to walk all over us, He cannot shine.
Being a Godly-gal isn't for wimps, and you have sure proven you are not one. Neon... we all just love you to the hilt!! Love and care comes in the strangest of places. Take it from one who has lost a lot.
Hubby was supposed to spend the day with me saturday we planned it for a week he spent zilch time with me sat. no excuses just sat in front of tv all day, I am thankful I did not blow up the TV and wring his neck.
We have been in a drought for the last three we have had rain for days and days and days it is great for my gardens and everyones wells, the only conversation I can have with my mother is (Miss doom and gloom) "Oh this rain if it don't stop it is so depressing) well you never leave the house anyway its not like your going to sit in the sunshine!! I am thankful I didn't strangle her. There have to be some changes because I am thankful for the teenie tiny bit of sanity I have left. sooooooo when all else fails turn to humor.
REPLACEMENT WINDOWS
Last year I replaced all the windows in my house
with that expensive double-pane energy
efficient kind, and
today, I got a call from the contractor
who installed
them.
He was complaining that the
work had been completed a whole year ago
and I still hadn't
paid for them.
Hellloooo,...........just because I'm
blonde doesn't mean that
I am automatically stupid.
So, I told
him just what his fast talking sales guy
had told me last
year, that in ONE YEAR these windows
would pay for
themselves!
Helllooooo? It's been a
year! I told him.
There was only
silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung
up.
He never called back. I bet he
felt like an idiot.
I just want to say I am thankful for my adversity, for it helps me put in perspective
how good my good times really are. Does that help? Jerome.