Just a little background before I start posting on this blog...since I didn't think about journaling my new life until today.
Up until 2011, my relationship with my mom was tenuous at best. She has a lot of issues--medical, emotional, social, and psychological--that make it difficult, to put it mildly, to live with her. I am not sure what is wrong with her, but in a society that wants to label every single disorder, she is antisocial, a sociopath, and has borderline personality disorder (check it out online....). To put it bluntly, she is not a nice person, at all. She is verbally abusive and always has been, She gets surgeries to garner attention, and she lives in an alternate reality. Despite all this, I have spent the majority of my life trying to gain her approval, to make her love me, to get her to be nice to me. It works for a while, but then, BAM! it is gone, and we are back to me being stupid, bossy, bratty, etc.
She and my dad had an explosive marriage, albeit one which produced five children. After 15 years of hell, though, they divorced (and they both still harbor ill feelings, no, hatred for each other, even after over half a century). Mom remarried three more times, divorcing the next two and then outliving the last one. While married to her last husband, I tried to be the "good daughter" and help her by having her move to an independent living facility about 10 miles from us in Florida. After two years, we were back to square one and one of my sisters decided to move Mom and her husband up to Nashville with her. Well, not with her, but in an apartment near her.
Fast forward three years, Mom's husband died (probably got nagged to death), and with him went 80% of her income. She couldn't afford to stay where she was anymore, because her income was at the poverty level. My two sisters who lived less than 20 minutes away from her couldn't be there for her--not in the way it was needed. Mom was a medical mess, having had at least a dozen major surgeries, had limited mobility, and, to make it worse, a permanent ileostomy (part of her intestine is outside her body and she poops into a bag). All of these factors made it imperative for her to move--the three options were (1) an affordable assisted living facility with 24/7 nursing care, (2) a low-cost of living HUD subsidized apartment with home health care contracted through Medicare, and (3) living with one of her daughters. Assisted living facilities with nursing care cost at least $4500 a month more than her total monthly income. And, although we found her an affordable apartment, my sisters convinced Mom she was incapable of living on her own. Enter option #3--and guess who was the only one willing to do that? Yep....yours truly.
So, in October 2015, after at least five separate trips to Nashville to work things out, get her stuff from storage, move it again, and then bring her things here, we drove out there one last time and moved Mom in with us. In fact, she asked to move in with us. We set up her room, installed a stairlift and handicap railings, put our furniture in storage in another room, and rearranged our home and our lives. As can be expected whenever an elderly parent moves in with an adult child, there have been a lot of adjustments. Food choices, bedtimes, schedules, making the house accessible for a walker, and communication. As Mom is practically deaf, that last one is challenging--we have to be facing her and practically hollering at her for her to hear us, and even then she misses probably 40% of what we tell her. Her medical issues are even more challenging, and since she scheduled her life around doctor appointments before, I made sure to set up a new primary care doctor here in Brevard, and get her authorized for home health care, at least until she could get settled into her new routine. Most importantly, we had to ensure we had someone coming in to take care of her hygiene and her ostomy care, as that was something I am not going to tackle. At least not yet.
Then there are the dogs...we have three dogs, dogs we have had since puppyhood, and they have an established pack and routine. Enter Mom with her walker and her dog--an irritating, untrained, pampered toy poodle named Benji. First order of business was to adamantly enforce the "no microwaving of wet dog food" rule...the smell is akin to a dead carcass. Once we got over that hurdle (not after some conflict and more than a little resistance on Mom's part), the next hurdle was to get all four dogs on the same feeding and bathroom schedule. There have been a few accidents, and some growling, but so far the worst part about Benji is his barking...he barks at air. But that we can handle...we just turn up the music.
So, all in all, the first month went fairly smoothly. There were some kinks, and some confrontations, but I was pleasantly surprised with how we were all adapting. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. However, medically she was having some issues with a hernia (from her ostomy surgery), and this caused a lot of pain and unpleasant leakage and ostomy accidents, so she elected to have hernia repair in mid-November. That event deserves its own post....
End of Phase I--the Move In Phase
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