RouletteWeekend

Here’s one for the geriatric psychology majors.

Since we’ve been back in Knoxville and since I’ve been the all day every day caregiver for Will’s mom, something fascinating has happened. Not just one thing. I’m finding this whole dementia journey fascinating in general. From reading books about the causes and the “cures” to watching the behavior unravel in real time right in front of me. I’m perpetually amazed at the psychology (and psychosis) of it.

Most recently, I’ve worn myself too thin. I haven’t been taking care of myself the way I want to. I haven’t taken any time to do any of the things I want to do for me. Yes, I’ve gone to get a massage. Yes, I’ve gone downtown to walk around, but it seems the only peace I get is when I leave the house and leaving the house usually means doing it alone because we just don’t feel comfortable leaving Will’s mom alone for too long. An hour is fine, but she gets restless when left alone and her mind starts mulling over worst case scenarios, but the crazy part about it is that it seems worse when I’m IN the house and I leave her alone.

Her and Will both agree that “Angie needs time for herself.” But this strange thing happens when I actually take time to myself. And it’s not some groundbreaking thing I do. When I’m home and I need to get away from it all, but I’m too tired to actually leave to get away from it all, I usually just go upstairs and lay in bed. Sometimes I scroll on my phone. Sometimes I watch TV. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I listen to an audiobook, but if I wanted to do any of those things downstairs, I can’t unwind and do it. I have to give the Mother in law all of my attention. If we aren’t watching a show she wants to watch, she gets up and goes into the bedroom and gets angry. If we are watching a show she wants to watch and I pick up my phone to scroll or play a game while listening to the news, she gets pissy because I’m not talking to her. And when I go upstairs to unwind and do any of those things, she gets mad and starts stomping around telling Will how I hate her and she might as well go into a nursing home so she doesn’t have to walk on eggshells in her own house.

It is maniacally fascinating.

Originally when this started happening, Will would come upstairs and ask me if I would come down and talk to his mom about it. We tried to reason with her. We tried to be logical. We are learning that maybe those things do not exist with dementia. Some days she’s logical, but most days, she’s selfish. If she’s not getting her way or if things aren’t going her way, she’s mad. Big mad.

The last two times it happened (one being just ten minutes ago), I decided that I couldn’t keep wrecking my peace to go downstairs to have a pointless conversation because she wasn’t going to remember it anyway and tomorrow when I’m “clocked back in” for the day, she will be “so grateful that I can never repay you for all you have done for me.”

I swear, if there was no diagnosis, I would be convinced I was being emotionally abused on a daily basis. But we do have a diagnosis and since I have my wits about me (for now), I mad a decision that I would not be dragged into her crazy. When we don’t have a full day of “doing,” and Will can take the time to check in on her throughout the day, I am going to take full advantage of staying upstairs for now.

Don’t get me wrong, the kitchen and the front porch are my two favorite places in this house, but I can’t just sit in those two places all day. The living room, where she wants to spend all of her time when she’s not in bed, is, in my opinion, the most uncomfortable room in the house. The furniture is not comfortable. It’s old. It feels dirty. When we got here she refused to let us get rid of anything downstairs except for the couch her son basically killed himself on. That one, we got rid of without permission. We tried to make it feel better with fun new rugs and rearranging the furniture, but it’s just not comfortable. There’s nowhere to lay comfortably. The chairs are not comfortable. It basically is the worst room in the house if we were giving out awards. So going upstairs to the one space that is curated with my things, my color palette, my dogs, my smells is the place I typically retreat to. It’s a tiny piece of me in this house full of ghosts.

And every time I come up here for any extended period of time, she goes off the rails downstairs, but she only does it when Will is home. He just left to take care of some work things and she said all of that before he was leaving about me hating her. When she is alone downstairs she cannot fathom why I am resting, but that could have something to do with the fact that, in her head, I do nothing all day.

The other day she asked Will why we didn’t have the $20k to fix all the things that were wrong in the house so we could sell it easier. Her follow up question was, “Why doesn’t Angie have a job? What does she do all day?”

She didn’t want to hear about my list of daily chores which starts with going downstairs and mopping up dog piss every morning because now that the rugs are packed away they just piss straight on the floor because that’s what they learned to do over the last 3 years while the dog door stayed closed and the blinds stayed down because she was ashamed of the inglorious mess that existed in her once beautiful home.

Every task Will ticked off the list, she insisted that she does that, not me. Getting her medicine organized? She does it. Running the dishwasher every night before bed and unloading every morning before breakfast? She does it. Making breakfast? She does it. Doing the laundry and making sure her clothes are hung in her closet versus rolled into a ball and shoved on a closet shelf? She does that.

And really, I’m OK with that delusion. If that’s what she needs to believe to make herself feel like she’s not losing her mind, so be it. I’m not here to prove I’m right. But moreover, I’m not here to argue with an insane person which is exactly what dementia is. Some days you are something like yourself and other days you are so far gone and outlandish it’s laughable. The scary part about it, though, is that nobody can tell the difference between those two people unless they know the diagnosis or spend more than 10 minutes with her. But in 10 minute snippets she could easily convince someone that she does everything and I am just her son’s freeloading wife. Like I said…fascinating.

So now I feel like it’s this juggling act between her mental health, my mental health, and mine and Will’s relationship. All these balls up in the air having to be tended to separately because tending to them all at the same time is impossible. And I never learned how to juggle.

So I’m doing the only thing I know how to do. Learn.

I did it when my kids were born. I read all the books about single parenting, parenting in general, how to love your kids and not lose yourself, etc.

Now I’m reading things like The Alzheimer’s Solution and the 36 Hour day and signing up for classes called the Savvy Caregiver and trying to learn how to manage a household, a marriage, and a mother in law without absolutely losing my shit and calling her out on hers.

I also never learned how to walk a tightrope, but some days I think I’d rather fall 600 feet than walk down those 15 steps to reality.