I could cry
It’s time for my annual bout of bronchitis. It hit yesterday, so I have about two weeks of this to get through. I’m either so drugged up on cough medications that make me extremely drowsy and often knock me out, or I’m coughing so much that I’m gonna start straining muscles. That means that keeping up with stuff around the house has gotten much more difficult. It didn’t used to matter as much. If I was knocked out most of the time from cough medications or hacking up a lung, my mom could always take care of what I couldn’t get to. But not this time.
She has hit a plateau in recovering from the stroke, able to get around the house but not able to get out and do errands. She can walk around a bit, but standing in one place is difficult and often painful for her, so no taking over the cooking. I managed to talk one of the guys who lives here into doing the grocery shopping today and cooking dinner tonight and the next couple.
Mom doesn’t do any exercises to strengthen the muscles that were weakened by the stroke, so it’s unlikely she will improve further. She is also back to the amount she was drinking before the stroke. She doesn’t seem to realize how much it affects her and how much of the balance and muscle control she’d regained she loses from the drinking. I can watch her becoming more and more wobbly and less and less capable as the day goes on. She has fallen a few times recently, and I’m sure it’s because she’s back to the heavy drinking. Her skin has gotten thin with age, and she’s on blood thinner medication, so she gets these gashes on her arms and legs that bleed profusely and it’s difficult to get the bleeding to stop. But saying something to her about it won’t make a difference. It hasn’t before, it’s not going to now. She fell again tonight, about 3 hours ago, and last I checked on her, her left arm had still not entirely stopped bleeding. She’s starting to look like I’ve been beating her with all of this. Every time I saw her so drunk she could barely walk before the stroke, it made me cry myself to sleep that night. It’s a thousand times worse now with the stroke. And I feel like a fucking weak coward, because if I was really doing what I should, I’d refuse to buy her the booze. I’m the one who has to do all the grocery shopping, after all. But with everything else, all the other stresses, I just can’t face the day after day of fighting over it if I refuse. I should be stronger than this, but I just can’t fucking get myself to do it.
Meanwhile, my grandmother’s mind is slipping further. She can’t hear nearly anything unless I’m yelling it, and then she gets pissed off at me for yelling. She’s pissed off at me because I have refused to throw out my artwork, which is apparently useless and taking up space (and it’s not like it’s space she needs, or even would use if it was empty.) She’s recently been making it pretty clear that even though I live here, I should do my damndest to make sure that I leave no sign anywhere that I do. The fact that I live out of a box and a suitcase is an issue, even though they’re out of the way, because they’re visible signs that I live here. Never mind that the reason I have to live out of a box and a suitcase again is because two months after I had my own room once more, she and my mother informed me I had to give it up so someone else could have it.
My grandmother has also decided that for some unknown reason, I have completely rewired the dryer so it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t turn on the way she’s convinced she’s always turned it on. The thing has always had a start button in order to get it running, but she’s sure that the way she used to turn it on until recently was by turning the timing dial to the time she wanted and then pulling it out. That’s how the washer has always worked, not the dryer. But every time she does laundry, she comes to get me to show her how to turn on the dryer, and then yells and screams at me for a while about changing how it works on her just to drive her crazy. She also is convinced that I’m “doing something” to the TV to make it hard for her to watch it. Never mind the fact that I only watch one hour of TV per week. Every time she can’t get the TV working because she poked the wrong button when she turned it off the night before, it’s my fault and I get yelled at for it while I’m fixing it for her.
She’s pissed off at me because I “choose” not to sleep at night. She’s pissed off because I “sleep all the time.” If I don’t get any sleep or get very little (as usually happens) then she tells me that I should be perfectly fine because all I ever do is sleep. She won’t eat anything but sweets all day – heavily sugared cereal, cookies, and ice cream – and then tries to refuse to eat dinner because she’s “too fat” (her clothing is extremely baggy and hangs off of her) and so that’s a fight every single night to get her to eat anything healthy at all.
She’s losing control of bodily functions. There’s a stain on the chair she always sits in, and it’s obviously a urine stain. But she claims that it’s the cats making the chair filthy, and knocks them off the chair if they ever dare to get in it. The day before yesterday, a new wrinkle in this is that she shit herself rather explosively in the morning, after she’d been up some hours, just before she was going to take her shower. She’s currently still able to clean herself up after something like that, but who knows for how much longer with the way things are going. And one of my own issues is that I can’t deal with fecal matter without heaving up everything in my stomach. This is the case even if I can’t smell it. Just seeing it will cause me to start gagging.
And with the cats, she frets if they’re are out at night, but even if we tell her that all of them are in, she goes and stands there at night holding the door open in case any cats want in – letting all the cats out in the process. So I wind up spending hours trying to wrangle the cats and get them into the house for the night, after already having gone through it once to get them in.
She doesn’t care that having my psychotic cousin over here drives my mom’s blood pressure up and puts her in danger of another stroke. Nor does my grandmother care that when he’s here, I can’t sleep (sometimes for days on end if he’s here for multiple days in a row) because I have to be on guard so he won’t attack her or my mother. She tries to force us to let him stay here on the couch anyway.
Anything… and I do mean anything… that she doesn’t like at the moment is pretty much automatically my fault. I am so sick of getting yelled at, insulted, and threatened for things that I didn’t even do. And if I say I didn’t do them, she gets even more pissed off at me for lying to her. Even the cats messing up the chair thing isn’t always the cats. Sometimes she accuses me of peeing on her chair.
I have nowhere to work on artwork except at the dining room table since I had to give up my room. And if I’m there, she likes to wait until I’m concentrating and then come up behind me and stab me in the back with her fingernails. She thinks it’s hilarious to make me wreck some piece I spent days, weeks, and one case months on. Then she gets pissed off at me when I’m not amused by her little “joke” and starts screaming at *me* to leave *her* alone. I’ve managed to hide the destruction in a couple pieces, but often the piece will be ruined beyond my ability to fix.
I am low man on the totem, and even though my mom makes a point periodically of telling me she appreciates all I do, everything else is not making me feel much appreciated. I feel trapped. I feel like I’m drowning. I spend a large portion of the day refusing to let myself cry because I want to desperately but I just don’t have time for the tears. I’m going through a lot of self-pity right now, though I don’t let it prevent me from doing what needs to get done. The one thing I have to look forward to every day, the one good thing in my life right now, is the three or four hours I spend talking with Yar online, and the trip out to see him in July, hopefully. I’m skipping BayCon this year, because of the expenses of the trip in January when Yar came out to California for a few days, and the projected expenses of the trip in July. There are a lot of people I will miss seeing, because BayCon is the only time I get to see most of my friends.
I can’t even go hang out with a friend down here just to get away for an hour or two. Because I have no friends down here. Nearly six years I’ve lived here, and there have been people I’ve gotten on well enough with at the college. I’ve suggested we hang out, and they take my number, don’t give me theirs, and I never hear from them again. Since I had to drop out of college when my mom had her stroke last August, and discovered it was too soon when I tried to go back this semester, I haven’t even had that hour or three a couple times a week to get away from all this.
This is not how I pictured my late thirties and early forties. I sometimes find myself resenting being in this position, and hating myself for that. I know I have some advantages living here, like not paying rent or having to worry about bills. That was an acceptable trade-off when I was helping to take care of my grandmother and was also getting some money toward college so that when I get out of here, I can maybe manage to have something resembling a life. But since I had to drop out of college, my workload has more than doubled for less “pay”. I know that this isn’t how either of them pictured their lives at the ages they are now either. I know it’s not easy on them either, and that what they’re going through is worse than what I’m dealing with in so very many ways. My mom hates her helplessness and wants to get her independence back, I know that too. But since she wouldn’t do any of the physical therapy exercises to continue her improvement after the sessions ended, doesn’t do any other exercises to improve things either, and drinks the way she does, it’s unlikely she will and she will need me to be with her for the rest of her life. And all I want is to get my degree, get the job I’ve been wanting with it, and build a life with Yar. It’s looking like, at best, that will be eventually get my degree and the job that I want, and live a life with both Yar and my mom, if Yar is willing to have her as a rather permanent attachment.
I really don’t even want to think about what it’d be like if he doesn’t want to deal with having to live with someone else’s alcoholic invalid of a mother. Yar’s the best thing in my life, the best thing ever in my life. But with that comes the fear of losing him. And all of this is so much to ask him or anyone to accept.
I know that some of this is also that when I get really sick, I get gloomy and things look bigger and harder than they are. But even without the gloominess from being sick, it’s a fucking huge and heavy load.
