🪳 Cockroach Café Spring 2024 🪳 🪳

[MereDintofPandiculation]

I’ve had a good clean of the place, replenished supplies, and brought in pots of snowdrops and daffodils to remind us Spring is just around the corner.

Come in when you want to share good news, or to rant, or just to hang out with others who understand what you're going through. The way MN works, hopefully this thread won’t appear in any featured lists, and the only people wandering in will be those who understand what it’s all about.

If you have a BIG question, it might be worth giving it its own thread, so as not to swamp this one.

For newbies: why cockroach? Previous long term resident of "Elderly Parents" Yolo's DM attended a 'small animal event' in a nursing home, and was presented with a "small animal with a hard back" the name of which species she couldn't remember. Her ever helpful DB suggested cockroach, and it has become a toast on here. My recent enquiries suggested more people wanted to keep the well known name than wanted to change it to something mor savoury, so for the moment it stays.

The other week I cleaned out Dad’s tea/ coffee/ cake cupboard - omg I threw out two cardboard boxes of out of date biscuits, snacks and cakes. He just overbuys, stuffs it in the cupboard and it stays there for months.

Yes, many, many packets of food out of date in cupboards. The freezer was solid ice and full of ancient mystery.

I found some jars of spices that were nearly old enough to be priced in £sd. Older than my brother anyway.

@funnelfan I want to say ‘you win’ but I still have a lot of house to sort out and I can’t get to all of it yet.

Ah, spices aren’t really food though are they? I suspect there are some ancient tins lurking at the back of the corner cupboard which I may investigate one day if my back lets me do the contortions necessary to reach. But on reflection for mum, loss of stock control in the kitchen was in hindsight one of the first obvious signs of her cognitive decline. When I first opened her cupboards and realised there were dozens of tins of the same thing it was clear she wasn’t managing.

a friend of mine found that her grandmother hoarded rolls of aluminium foil, possibly going back in her memory to a habit picked up during the war. Stashed them all over the kitchen.

My mother seemed to be intent on buying cashew nuts in her last months. I wish I could wind back time and ask her if it was a mistake or whether there was a Mary Berry recipe she was favouriting. Sadly someone took the large MB recipe book collection to a charity shop by accident before I could look. Including one my husband had queued up for ages to have signed for her one Christmas. Just an innocent mistake but i was surprisingly upset when I found out. Strange what triggers us.

Can I sidle in for a moment, please? I’ve posted before under different names but I suppose I’m an imposter now because I'm several years down the road from losing my DM. But something just happened and I feel I have to unburden as I’m so upset.

DH and I were out having coffee and next to us was a man and his very elderly grandmother (I think). They'd been chatting happily together and to other people about cultural stuff, music, etc etc…then at some point I realised she was saying' I know it’s awful to say it but I don’t want to go back to my own home' and 'nobody comes to see me', 'I don’t want to be there', and suchlike, and he was placating/reasoning with her in a way that sounded as though it had happened many times before - 'now, you know X will come, and Y will pop over' etc etc…but she sounded so distressed and bleak about it. When they go up to go she was moving very badly on two sticks. Probably late 80s/90-ish.

It just brought all my guilt over my beloved DM flooding back - she lived alone and, while she never complained, I know I should have found a way to try and address that - I visited her regularly (as in, every couple of weeks or so) and stayed for days at a time but I lived 200 miles away and had a job so everything was just so much to juggle. I did that for over a decade (gladly, though) so it swallowed up a big chunk of my life.

But since she died I'm so full of guilt for not doing more. And I just couldn’t bear the thought of this woman this morning being so unhappy and lonely. I’m afraid as soon as they left I was in tears. DH is quite unemotional by nature and never knows what to say to me so there was just awkward silence from him and I feel yet again I’m coping with this by myself. You wouldn’t think it’s been 4 years, would you? But here I still am…😢
Sorry if this is all a bit random but I couldn’t think where it was best to vent. I needed to, though.

@Obelism welcome to this brilliant place to vent or just air your worries. You sound lovely and I’m sorry to hear about your DM. I cannot offer you much but I think there is real guilt and false guilt. We all experience the emotion of guilt but it does not mean we are actually guilty. You are probably looking back and thinking things could have been different IF you had done more. The likelihood is they wouldn’t have been. Also, and this may sound harsh, we are not responsible for other people’s happiness. My own mother will tell me she ‘hasn’t seen anyone ALL WEEK’. This is usually on a Wednesday when I will have been on the Tuesday and my siblings over the weekend. She will also tell me she ‘hasn’t been out since you last came’….literally 24 hours then…this is often a lie. It is guilt tripping but we are not guilty. You sound great perhaps try and find out if there are any online resources to help you deal with the emotion.A wise person once told me to replace guilt with self compassion focussing on reflecting on what you did do not what you didn’t.

Thanks @BlueLegume - here come the tears again 🫣 I know, I don’t know anything about the woman this morning and it’s entirely possible that she’s got a large and loving family doing an enormous amount for her - I just don’t know. I suppose it just struck to the heart to hear her saying so bleakly that she didn’t want to go home. I could imagine that what she was really saying was that she didn’t want to be old, infirm, left alone after maybe her husband had died and she was nearing the end of her life.

Nobody wants that, do they? We all want to be having an energetic, interesting, useful life with plenty of friends and things to do. But that is the hard reality for many of us. I know even DM, who was 97 and amazingly young in her mental outlook, confessed to feeling depressed in her last year or so. She wouldn’t tell me why or what she was depressed about but my guess was all those things I’ve mentioned. And the awful thing for the rest of us is that we really can’t do much to help them.

I did have counselling for a year or so after DM died and it helped - her final few weeks were quite traumatic. I’m a lot better now but things like today just catch me. Thanks for your kind words.

@Obelism what do you think you should have done? Do you think you should have moved closer to your mum? How would that have impacted your DH and DC? Or do you think you should have moved your mum nearer to you? Would she have wanted to leave her familiar home and social network? The chances are you didn't do these things because they weren't right for the people affected.

There's no perfect answer. Someone on this thread gave some great advice previously - if you're faced with a choice of resentment or guilt, choose guilt. I'm finding that even the guilt lessens when I know that I made a conscious decision not to overburden myself.

So Dad is now not expected to last more than a few days.
Everything escalated really quickly last week and I am now working out when I can get there to say goodbye.
Devastated.

@ofcourseyes thinking of you.

Sending a quiet handhold @ofcourseyes

@BestIsWest @Obelism thank you xx

@ofcourseyes also holding your hand here. It must be a shock for you. I hope you can get there to be with him xx

@ofcourseyes Such a hard time for you. We're all here if you need that hand hold.

@ofcourseyes as others have said thinking about you and please come back if you need to.

So sorry @ofcourseyes...hope you make it to see him.

@obelism I understand...what @bluelegume said is true...im sure you did enough at the time that felt right for you and your DM. I am in this dilemma now. I'm trying to hang on to some kind of normality for my own mental wellbeing whilst sorting stuff for my elderly parents so I have to say No sometimes and have reduced visits as a consequence. I know, when the time comes and they die, I'll say that I didn't do enough but right now, it feels I do too much as my mental health is starting to suffer. Its so hard. Sending you a hug 🫂

Thank you everyone. I'm out of the UK at the moment but think I can get a flight sorted.
We had the siblings talk yesterday, this is it etc, feeling OK this morning.

Need a little moan. Currently helping a family member recover from surgery. This currently involves all personal care, meals, changing the commode, general household jobs and everything else in between! I am sharing parts of it with another family member.
I’ve asked for 2 morning a week off from the 6am get up (another family member will do these 2 mornings). This has not been well received and I’ve been informed that if I went to bed earlier then I would be able to manage the 6am get ups no problem. It’s an emotional break as much as physical one. I have tried to explain it’s not about what time I go to bed, it’s that I want to lay in till 7/8am once in a while which I don’t think is unreasonable but maybe it is. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Of course it's not unreasonable, @Strikingthebalance .Is this likely to go on for long? You seem to be talking pretty extensive care, really.

Striking, I said on your other thread, what you are doing is too much and not sustainable. You are providing everything your family member wants. Provide only what they need. Did you pursue any of the suggested avenues for support?

Just back from a visit to my more annoying relative and feeling riled. I was hoping it would be some
breathing space for a while!

Yet more manipulation, more guilt tripping. Goldenballs sibling still shining brightly and still useless.