I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible. I’m a totally lone parent to two children, one of whom has a physical disability and significant emotional issues. In the last nine months I’ve become the default carer to my elderly parents, both of whom are physically frail with severely restricted mobility, and with the added complication that my mum is in very obvious cognitive decline (appointment with a Memory Clinic doctor in a fortnight to determine more).
Anyway, like many of you here, I’m run ragged trying to maintain two homes, keep two households going, doing all the transporting to the multitude of doctor and hospital appointments, and I’m starting to feel resentful.
I have a sibling who lives solo 200 miles away (who is in denial about mum’s cognitive decline) and maintains the prodigal child status by phoning my parents twice a day. But that’s pretty much it. I’ve been asking (well, in several heated discussions that have turned the air blue) for said sibling to organise a supermarket delivery service for my parents. Weeks later, and I’m still doing the shopping. My parents are old school and have never had a new-fangled shopping delivery; they prefer me to pick up the orange-stickered reduced items they’ve been used to buying all their adult lives.
They are effectively living in one bedsit-style room with a kettle, toaster and microwave. My suggestion of installing a stair lift to enable them to access their downstairs kitchen and maintain some semblance of independence was met with ridicule, like I’d suggested blowing all their savings on a trip to Vegas.
It will probably not surprise anyone here to learn that between my sibling and I, only one of us has a vagina!
I’m so stretched, my children are fed up because all of our weekends are consumed by helping their grandparents. I’d like to know how other people in a similar situation have managed to draw effective lines in the sand in terms of what they are prepared to do and not do?
For example, my sibling doesn’t have a car (no need in Zone 1 London) so is visiting my parents by train next week; my request that taxis are booked to transport my mum and dad to their various hospital appointments has been met with radio silence. And every discussion I try to start about new ways of doing things ie shopping home delivery is shut down with the implication that I’m being deliberately awkward.