Thanks for reading. Please bear with me...I'll try and be as brief as I can!
Basically a year and a half ago, I started volunteering at a local group. I'm on benefit and also look after my disabled partner and dog.
There I met the club organiser and shortly after I met her dog.
Next her husband who'd been very ill for a long while died. They hadn't been happily married but she was very upset for a long while.
Since the dog had lost her main carer/companion and to help out this lady i started taking her dog out for her a couple/few times a week when I walked mine. She lives a few roads away so by car it is a short journey. She asked if I wanted paying but i said no just give me petrol money.
I also offered to look after /walk her on weekends as she works long hours and also often goes out in the evening. She doesn't seem to like being indoors.
So my friend/this lady was giving me some money for looking after her dog ranging from five pound upwards each week. I think she might have given me fifteen/twenty quid some weeks when I had her most days for a total of probably about ten hours with me picking her up and collecting her.
So then she was going on a family holiday and asked me if I'd have her dog. I didn't reply want to but she paid me a tenner a night to have her. It was a lot since I'm in a flat but it was ok. I have had her a few more times since for which she usually pays the above rate.
Next she was saying her and her terminally ill mum were not getting on and that as an only child she has to do everything for her mum and didn't get a break. I had said I'd looked for cleaning work previously and she asked if I wanted to clean for her mum for an hour a week for £15 (higher end of a cleaners rate) to give her a break.
This sounded good but in reality, her mum is a bit fanatical/has very high standards and I go over time every week by about twenty mins trying to get everything done so really it's more like £10 or £12 ph. I've also felt misunderstood and patronised sometimes about why I do things a certain way when I have good reason! Sometimes I feel that no matter how much I do she will find something I haven't done and pick up on it. I even had to bring my friends hoover over last time because hers picks up NOTHING so I end up sweeping all her carpets.
Anyway since starting the cleaning i have noticed that my friend barely gives me any money for having her dog now and sometimes actually nothing.
It's basically come to a head in the last couple of weeks when my friends mum wanted me to thoroughly clean her conservatory which involved getting rid of thick spider webs on the ceiling and walls, baby spider eggs all over the windows and bleaching the floor. She gave me extra money in form of a fiver for this! Whatever. Shes old and at least it was something. But then last week my 'friend' gave me zero petrol money for having the dog (she pays the cleaning money) so she effectively took it back!!!
So I am being treated badly I think.
We've also fallen out because last week her dog ate my dogs food left over from the night before. (My dog didn't want it). I only noticed when she'd nearly eaten it, so when I returned her it was dinner time and it was to an empty house as usual. The dog was staring at me intently laying next to her food bowl so I gave her just some kibble and salmon oil and told her 'mum', my 'friend ' the situation.
I got a voicemail moaning that she now had two bags of biscuits opened (!) and her speaking like id inconvenienced her badly to which I said I couldn't see another bag and apologised and explained. The next day i sent her a text asking if she'd decided what she was doing yet re going to her caravan as I wanted to know what I was doing regarding her dog and we'd been discussing it earlier in the week as well.
She completely ignored it even though I could see she read it. I deleted the message in the end and didn't bother going up for the dog the next day.
I should add that she very rarely takes the dog out so probably she was in, bored, by herself all day as is her life it seems now that her dad is gone and their adult children don't live there anymore.
On Easter sat i got a very long, hard to understand message about cleaning and her going back again to my having fed the dog when she was staring at me at dinner time. I barely replied. So then I got pictures of all her Easter flowers so I just said Happy Easter, that's it, no kisses or nothing.
That's basically where I'm at. I feel like telling her to stick the lot of my commitments with her but I am worried about her dog and wonder if I would be cutting my nose off to spite my face so to speak. I don't like her having so much power over me . She tends to be passive aggressive and I can't really be bothered with that. The regular £15 a week from cleaning is nice but I could live without it. I would feel bad telling her mum I don't want to do it but they could find someone else or my 'friend' could go back to it. Regarding the club, I could either cancel my commitments or see it out until the end of the year at which point i'll have done it once a week for a whole year.
What are your thoughts please? Thank you.