Am I a Slow Learner?

My mother is turning 91 today, and is now living with us. I Facebooked this (is that a verb?) and got an astonishing number of comments, ranging from ARE YOU NUTS? to I'LL PRAY FOR YOU! Kidding aside, it is so wonderful to be connected to old and new friends and to know they care. But I thought I'd use this venue to explain why we moved Mom back in here, and why I think it's going to be okay. It's too complex for FB posts.

To begin, we bought this house four years ago because we thought it would be a good idea to move my mom in with us. She wasn't paying her bills, her driving was scaring people, and she seemed to be lonely and depressed. IT WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA. She tried to run my household, picked on Mikey (then 7), fawned over Sami (then 11), and irritated David by refusing to contribute to home improvements. She refused to see that she was benefiting financially--I found a renter for her house to more than cover the mortgage, and hounded him every month for the rent, she wasn't paying for lawn mowing, shoveling, etc.. Her bank account rose every month, while ours shrank.

Anyway, after 12 hideous months, I threw out her renter, and moved her and her (I'm not kidding) hundreds of boxes of stuff back to her house, and found her a companionm, Kathy, to come in the afternoons and keep her life organized.

We moved MIL Betty in to help pay the mortgage because the housing crisis was in full swing, and we knew we'd never sell this place fast enough to stay out of bankruptcy. We also took in a Korean high school student, for a monthly fee, who turned out to be clinically depressed and possibly suicidal. Lots of material for future novels, yes, but no fun to live with.

FAST FORWARD.

We move my mom into a very fancy Assisted Living Center two years ago, which seemed like the best solution for her diminishing life skills. It was 10 minutes away, so I could keep an eye on things, but when my mother started falling frequently, and I asked to install an internet camera so I could monitor her from my home, I ran into a BRICK CORPORATE WALL. Then the place was sold, and the new owners made lots of stupid changes to increase profits. Most of the best nurses and caregivers left, and the ones who remained were told not to communicate directly with families, but to run information through a chain of command. So if I called and asked, "How's the new medicine working?" or "Is she eating better?" it might take 48 hours to get a now outdated answer, IF they called back at all.

And then my mother started refusing to get out of bed. Sleeping pills to cure her chronic insomnia were implicated in her falling, and strategies we came up with to monitor her sleeping at night were ignored by the overnight staff. I was supposed to be called if she slept through two meals in a day, but this rarely happened. I'd get a call from Kathy at 4pm, telling me that my mom was still sound asleep in bed, having missed breakfast and lunch. No matter how much hell I raised about this--and I think I'm pretty good at this--nothing changed.

So I've moved her back in with us three days ago. Stupid, maybe, but she has lost much of her "edge" in the last few years. So far she's not bothered by how Mikey chews his food, where he drops his socks, or any of the other things that she felt compelled to bring to my attention last time. She and Betty enjoy each other's company, and my mother's cat, Benny, 15, is integrating into our feline community.

It's nearly impossible to get my mother out of bed before noon, but her doctor says it's not that important, as long as she doesn't completely switch day/night cycles. So I have lots of private time in the morning for writing, shopping, etc., and when my mother does get up, she's staying awake all day. We talk, she reads, she helps set the table, fill the dishwasher, etc. I can give her simple food prep tasks, which she enjoys, and she's not sitting alone in her $4,000/month room at the Assisted Living center, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. They had lots of activities, but she refused to participate in most of them, and I now see that the whole concept of Assisted Living, where she had no responsibilities for doing anything for herself contributed toher decline. Kathy still comes in the afternoons and takes her shopping, walking, etc., so I'm not constantly "on duty."

Best of all, I'm not feeling guilty that I dumped her in a fancy institution. I'm back to feeling like A GOOD DAUGHTER, which makes up for a lot.

And if it turns to crap again, there's always antidepressants, right?

Volume + Vexation = Retention

Betty is currently obsessed with finding the rest of her John Sanford novels in the basement. We still have several dozen boxes of her books down there, but we're finishing the basement, so they have to stay in boxes for the moment. For the 10th time in a few days, she told me she was going to go down there to look for them, and for the 10th time, I explained why she absolutely couldn't. The steps are sleep, uncarpeted, and I have a recurring vision of finding her at the bottom of the steps, bleeding...

So once again, I found myself raising my voice a notch or two and telling her that if I ever found her on those steps, I'd put a lock on every door in the house. She said, "I'll just crawl down, I won't walk." So up another notch I went...

As I may have mentioned in a previous blog entry, her neuropsychologist told me that the only way to make a memory is sometimes to get angry, so I did. It wasn't difficult. The hard part is not yelling ALL THE TIME!

It's All About Attitude... and Having Smart Friends

I found a solution to two issues that have been bugging me. It's not a perfect solution, but it's good enough. First, my kids, 10 and 15, should be getting some kind of allowance, so they can learn to handle money and not bother me for their every whim. Sami, 15, is an obsessive saver, and Mikey, 10, is an obsessive spender, so both need to work on their money skills.

The other problem is that I didn't teach them to help out around here when they were younger, and while both do things for me when I ask/demand/threaten them with death, there's always the sighing, eye-rolling, and complaining to deal with.

In comes my new friend, Jen, host mother to one of my Korea tutoring students. She shows me the chart and system she developed for her two teen daughters. There's a list of chores and a dollar amount for each, depending on the complexity of the chore. There's also a weekly chart on which each girl marks the day and number of the chore she performed. During the school year, each girl is expected to do three chores per week, by bedtime on Sunday. Mom pays accordingly, by bedtime on Sunday. So the kids can earn more by doing more and harder chores, but if they don't do the minimum, they have to double up the following week for no payment at all. On the flip side, if Mom doesn't pay on time, she must pay double.

I adapted this to the chores I need to have done, lowered the fee for most chores (yes, I'm cheap) and raised the number of chores to 4 per week. It's working! I pay Sami an average of $7 per week for the chores she selects, and Mikey more like $5, but they're doing chores and lightening my load!

But here's where MY attitude comes in. Both kids have a habit of putting off their chores until the weekend, so I find myself announcing, "There's a dishwasher to unload!" or "The garbage can is full!" and often... nothing happens. I have to work on not getting angry, as they have a right to choose their chores and days to perform them. So far, we've come close to the "double chores for no money" deal, but at the last minute, they've found things to do on Sunday evenings for me. That's fair, and I'm working on not doing so much nagging and reminding about this.

Ok, So I'm Not Sherlock Holmes

I came home the other day and noticed that the back door, which leads to our deck, was practically pulled off the hinges and wouldn't close properly. If my daughter and her buddy hadn't been sitting in the living room, calmly blowing up Nazis on the Playstation 3, I would have suspected burglars. I found a screwdriver, fixed the door, patted myself on the back for handling this without requiring my husband's assistance, and went to the kitchen to get more coffee.
There I discovered a cabinet door also pulled off its hinges. Ok, it was getting a little weird now.
Hours passed, there was laundry to do and dinner to cook, and I stopped thinking about it.
In the middle of the meal, Betty looked up, stared at the back door for a long moment, and said, "I fell today!" Turns out, she was trying to let one of cats in or out (which I've asked her not to do about a million times), started to topple over, and grabbed the door knob to try to stay on her feet. It didn't work.
I asked, "Did you also fall in the kitchen?"
"Yes, I fell twice today. I forgot!" she said. She was excited to remember the falls because she was quite sore and couldn't remember why.
Fortunately, she wasn't badly hurt, and the doors were easily fixed.

Summer is Nearly Here

My kids are in their last week of school, Ra Youn goes home in two weeks, and we leave for the Grand Canyon about four days after that. I'm looking forward to giving up the school routine for a couple of months, but aside from that, I find myself in a crappy mood. DH ruined my weekend and I'm still boiling over with anger. I need to have it out with him, but I'm too angry to trust my mouth.

I miss my old neighborhood and my old friends, I can't seem to write, I'm endlessly crabby with MIL, and everybody around me disappoints me. It's my problem, not theirs, I know, so I have to work on myself.

At least I'm exercising. I'd like to make a giant bowl of popcorn and watch all the O'Reilly Factors on my DVR. I just may do that, as soon as Kim takes Betty out of here. Kim is my favorite person in the world at the moment.

Caring for the Caregiver

Me, that is. I'm 52, and people I know are starting to die. Okay, not many, but enough that I decided to put on my Big Girl Pants and start doing all those nasty tests that women over 50 are supposed to get: mammogram, bone density scan, colonoscopy, pap test, dermatology exam of a dark spot on my shoulder.

So I got a bad report on my pap test, did some nasty follow up tests, and it turned out I don't have cancer. That felt great!

The dermatologist was pretty sure I had a basal cell cancer, but the test came back negative. Also great!

I got a clear mammogram, although I don't get overly excited about these, as my mother found lumps in her breasts very soon after clear mammograms... twice.

My colon is a thing of beauty. (the test is no big deal, but drinking the stuff the night before was quite unpleasant. I drank less than half what you're supposed to, and it turned out not to matter.

Bone density came back normal.

So I'm pretty sure I'm destined to be hit by a bus.

I Need a Vacation to Relax from Getting Ready for my Vacation

We're going to the lovely Wisconsin Dells next week for Spring Break, mostly because it's within driving distance and we had timeshare points that were going to expire. The biggest headache is WHAT TO DO WITH BETTY? The Assisted Living center we usually use fired Joyce and Lillian, who were really good with Betty. I was just bitchy enough to call, pretend I didn't know this, but let them know that I couldn't possibly let Betty stay there if Joyce and Lillian weren't working there anymore. So Joyce will come here and stay with Betty, and the lovely Kim will drive her to the senior center as usual. I'm happy to pay Joyce directly--she's still looking for a new job.

All I have to do now is stock the house with the Veggie Straws that Betty lives on, and clean my bedroom, so Joyce doesn't find out what a crappy housekeeper I am.