Betty is REALLY MAD

I turned 55 in May, and had one of those moments of clarity that make you a little dizzy. It occurred to me that I don't want to spend the second half of my 5th decade taking care of my mother-in-law. She's crabby, ungrateful, and annoying. So am I, but on me, it's charming.

She and Mikey had also been fighting like twelve year olds. He actually IS twelve, but she's 87. Plus he knows more swear words than she does, so he's been winning. Still, it's unpleasant, and it occurred to me that my primary duty was to him, not to her. So I started looking at assisted living centers, found two, realized one had a huge waiting list because it's cheap, and found out that the other one could take Betty in 5 days but it was barely affordable.

You don't have to ask which one I chose, right?

Betty vacillates between liking the place and hating all of us for sending her there, but me and the kids are over the moon with happiness.  Here's the short list of why:

1. We don't have to hide the honey and sugar.

2. We don't have to hide the snacks.

3. We don't have to maintain separate jars of peanut butter and pray that she only sticks her fingers in the
    one marked "Betty."

4. We don't come downstairs in the morning and find bowls of margarine, plates covered with cornmeal
    (she thought it was sugar and spread it on bread), empty cans of cake frosting, etc.

5. We don't grit our teeth and wonder if she washed her hands before she got into the bread, ice, fruit,
     ice cream, and other foods we all have to share. (She didn't)

6. We don't have to listen to her clicking dentures, watch as she yanks them out of her mouth while we're
    eating, find them when she accidentally throws them in the trash, or see them in the bathroom floating
    in their plastic container.

I could go on and on, but I'm saving it for an essay I'm going to write, or possibly a novel. Suffice it to say that every day is peaceful now. I don't have to badger Betty to eat three times a day and take her pills, I don't have to hide food she shouldn't eat, and I don't dread the sight of her coming out of her room toward the kitchen to complain about something, ask for something, or tell me about her most recent "dissociative state."  (That's a nightmare to you and me.)  My mother is still with us, but she is generally in a pleasant, agreeable fog.

Betty has been at Riverwalk Commons for just under 2 weeks, and yesterday when David went to hook up her phone, she yelled at him, threatened to report him to the VA for abandoning her, etc. Apparently she had some choice names for me, too, for kicking her out of "her home." He said he's not going back to see her. So tomorrow, Betty and I are going to have a chat about how she treats my husband, whose home she was living in, and whose idea it was to move her out. I can't say I'm looking forward to it.