One Year Later and Something Has to Give

This Mother’s Day weekend held important anniversaries.  Saturday, May 7, was one year since we moved Mom in to our home so that I could be her 24x7 caregiver.  Sunday, May 8, it was exactly 23 years since we walked into our home for the first time as homeowners.  It was also Mother’s Day that day 23 years ago.

This home has seen a lot over those 23 years.  We raised four children and sent them off into the world.  We are so proud of all of them and feel that the years they spent with us and together made them who they are today.

This past year brought an entirely new experience to our home.  It has had its ups and downs as we have watched Mom slip and slide between the later stages of Alzheimer’s.  The physical health that she possesses that amazes her doctors and all who meet her is in sharp contrast to the state of her mind.

As you may have read in earlier posts, I greatly enjoyed spending time with Mom last summer as we would take walks or swing in the sun and she would marvel at the beautiful sky.  The loss of her mind has at times been a great source of humorous stories – stories that I know she would not mind us laughing about much as we laughed at the various stories about Daddy all those years ago.

You may have also noticed that as the winter dragged on and the gray days and the rain just didn’t seem to want to leave us, I was struggling more and more with the continual, although slow, decline in Mom’s mental state.  The decision to stop taking her places and the continual decline has effectively made me a prisoner in my own home.

In addition, Mom’s sleeping habits continue to evolve and it is not unusual for her to get up as early as 4 am and get dressed for the day.  At times she has pounded on our door and yelled, or she just keeps pacing between her room and the bathroom making so much noise that we can’t sleep.  We’ve tried talking to her about it but the understanding isn’t there.  We’ve kept her awake all day and still there is no consistency to her waking.  She is not agitated when she gets up, just noisy, so for those of you that might say medication, again we say no.  As the doctor says, we don’t know what side effects we might face that could potentially be far more troubling than her waking early.

The stress on us caused by this new behavior came to a head on Saturday.  It happened to be the one year anniversary of moving her in but the issue at hand was my health and that of my husband.  I am sick and without sleep, I’m struggling to fight something that in the past would not have taken me down.  Lying in bed as she walked around early Saturday morning, I finally looked at my husband and said, “I’m done.”