Up Against It
The thing I have been dreading my whole life has been the decline of my mother.
Luckily, she is somehow holding herself together. What isn’t so lucky is that I married a woman who is now dealing with the decline of her own mother, who has Alzheimer’s.
Today was one of the worst days. I woke up early, 4AM, to do work for my job, which requires me to patch and update systems when nobody is using them. So: middle of the night. I finish at 7, get back into bed to sleep a couple of hours literally as my wife is getting up to go to work.
I wake up at 9:30 to frantic texts from her. She went to check on the parents before work and her mom was wearing an old dress and no underwear, thinking she’s going to a party. She’d peed the dress.
Wonderful. My wife is getting traumatized by this. This isn’t my mom she says. I have to agree. This is nobody’s mom. Dementia turns regular people into nobody’s people.
And yet, we have to figure out what to do about it. She is taking yet another day off of work to care for her mother. Her brother, who is a doctor and loaded, tries as hard as he can to ignore what’s happening. He recommended “puzzles and tea” to calm Jennie’s mother down.
Puzzles and Tea, for fucks fucking sake. What he needs to do is call one of the caretaking businesses around here and shell out 7K a month for either round the clock home care or have her committed somewhere. He pretends like this is a lot of money for him: It is not. He makes 500K a year. It is a lot of money for me and Jennie, who make 120 or so between the two of us in a super high cost of living area, around the suburbs of Boston. Jennie is going to lose her job if she has to function in this role and I can’t have her function in this role — it is bad for her mental health, death for romance, bad for sanity, plus, if we manage to have a kid via IVF (results are pending right now) there is zero way we can juggle care for the walking zombie and a little one.
Bad, bad bad.
In the meantime I have to log into work meetings and pretend I care so I can keep my job, I have to do physical therapy so I don’t fall apart, my stupid father is emailing me for “updates” on the health of Jennie’s parents (the updates are not good and no matter what I type, he can’t help, he lives in another state, so really he is just being nosy because he is bored and retired), I have to call someone to look at a siding problem with the house because recent wind gusts blew a piece off, and I woke up from my second round of sleep noticing that the tiny cyst in my left eyelid isn’t so tiny anymore, in fact, it’s crusty and I probably now have to get that looked at, a quick internet search told me that it might be infected, and it’s possible for infections in eyelid cysts to spread to the eye and it can actually affect your vision so
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
That’s enough of OD for today, time to grind this POS day out.