regret – Shrinking Horizons

Back on track again…….

Well hopefully I’m back on track with the dieting. It certainly feels like an uphill struggle at the moment but I am sure that is all down to my attitude and weaknesses when it comes to food and drink. I am not overly fond of sweet potatoes for instance unless they are fried which is a bit of a drawback and so many recipes include these rather tasteless vegetables. I can of course leave them out or substitute something else but I often look at a recipe, see them in it and move on and end up doing something utterly unsuitable because I am cooking for three very different tastes.

But I am not giving up and am back to the swimming and hope to manage to fit in walking the dogs with the LSO at least once in the day this weekend.

The AP is keeping a low profile at the moment which is good in one way but rather worrying because from past performances we know she cannot sustain a pleasant exterior for too long. Her short term memory continues to fade but not where money is concerned which is quite amusing, she is obviously hanging onto that faculty as long as possible but everything else is out of the window and we are definitely living in echo valley. She continues though to irritate me with her assumptions that when something needs replacing in her rented property it cannot be the fact that the item in question is just old and worn out but it is always that the tenant has damaged it in some way. We have also witnessed the return of the ‘I know’ attitude but we are just ignoring that at the moment.

As I have said before, it is just a matter of time before the vinegary spleen rises up and we will be forced to say something. She continues to try to bully and dominate us every now and then but we cannot allow that to happen again. I am hugely weary of the whole situation but also have to accept that we can only do what we are doing and try to keep everything on an even keel. It is now over four years since we made the fateful decision to have the AP living with us, it is a decision we both regret. I try to not be bitter or dwell on the lost years but the LSO finds it much harder to deal with it all. Friends do find it difficult to understand but in most cases they lost their parents when they were much younger and before their mothers or fathers changed and change they do. There seems to be some kind of watershed that takes place after about 94 years. I do not recognise the person my mother is now; all refinements have been stripped away as she has aged and the brain begins to die leaving behind the more unpleasant sides to her personality.

All very sad.

Me

A single word that is alien to me. Since my diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes I have been reading as much as I can about the disease and how to cope with it.

As a working mother all my life with two children and a husband with a demanding job I never really had time for ‘me’. I retired eleven years ago and found it an exhilarating experience. My husband retired a year after me and we never looked back, we made the most of the early years. Seven years ago we moved away from the South East of England to a much better life in Norfolk but because we left our family behind we upsized rather than downsized. If we had stayed in the South East my mother would not be living with us because that house would have been too small for us all to live together.

Do I regret the move? No not really although I would have preferred to see more of my children and grandchildren but on the other hand I count myself lucky that until seven years ago I had a great deal of contact with them. The truth is children have their own lives to lead just as we led ours and we do have contact constantly through technology. I sometimes regret the decision to bring my 99 year old mother to live with us but whilst she is pleasant, as she is at the moment I can face the days without too much trauma.

But back to the reason for the title of this blog. The word that comes over all the time when I am reading about Diabetes is ‘overwhelming’ and in a way I agree with that because there is so much to think about but what really is overwhelming is the need to suddenly put ‘me’ first. How do I do that when I have never thought about myself since being a teenager and on top of that, along with the ‘long suffering one’, we have to look after a 99 year old who cannot be told the problem?

Small steps first I think is the answer.

Respite and regret.

Respite – meaning among many other things, pause, break, relief, intermission, relaxation, halt, reprieve, breather, let-up. This is something we get little of for 10 months plus of the year. I did think that having AP’s old colleague here would give us one or some of the above but this is not the case.

Decided yesterday to run them in to main city near us to visit the cathedral and have a lunch there. It seemed a good plan to give them time together and also to be doing something other than occupying the living room all day, that is except when being served the requisite three meals a day. It worked for them but it meant I had to drive for 2 hours in total to have 3 hours to clear a multitude of jobs before collecting them again. Was any thanks forthcoming from AP – no, only the comment that I had arrived back spot on time to pick them up. So not only am I chief cook as husband is chief clearer and bottle washer I am now a chauffeur, all unpaid of course.

Regret – meaning among many things, be sorry, to wish you had not done, distressed, rue, bemoan, bemoan, weep. The latter is seldom far away.

Must don my cap and apron and serve lunch.