Cucumber Water

Finding a place to keep living in the middle of taking care of my Dad has been hard. Now don’t misunderstand. I am not taking care of him by myself and he does not have to be sat with 24/7. We are not at that stage yet. I mean just continuing to the every day things that need to get done instead of putting my life and everyone else in it on hold so I can just concentrate on him and what he needs and be there for he and my Mom.

I don’t know about you but when something so big comes up in my life I have a knee jerk reaction to look at everything else around me and everyone else around me and say “You all are just going to have to exist on your own because as of this moment I am no longer available.” Granted the way things run will have to change but I just can’t wak out of my life. I still have a husband, a son living at home who just recently got his tonsils removed and needed to be taken care of for two weeks, a house to keep semi straight, animals that aren’t going to feed themselves and a garden that would probably keep Kroger’s produce section stocked for the rest of the summer. I still have to keep living. I’m a fixer. If there’s something wrong well you just sit down make a list plan out how you are going to take care of that and you get it fixed. Follow the list, A B C D or 1 2 3 4. My Mom and my sister are the same way. Fixers. None of us can fix this. You just have to live in this. I’m also a perfectionist. If you don’t understand completely what that means it doesn’t mean that everything I have is perfect all the time. It means that if I can’t do it completely and accomplish it all the way through exactly as I need to I can’t do it. So, the kitchen needs cleaned but I only have time right now to sweep the floor. That’s not going to work because the whole kitchen needs to be cleaned. What good is it going to do to just sweep the floor. It’s bill paying day but I also have to balance my checkbook on the same day. If I can’t do both I will have to do that tomorrow because you can’t do one without the other. Yes I know, that is sounding a little OCD. So I will just leave things undone until I can accomplish the whole task at one time. You see where that would get me. With a big pile of chaos and my anxiety level is just off the charts.

I need to find a place to just live in this. I need to understand I CAN’T FIX THIS!! Ya know it’s still hard to deal with my brain and all the thoughts that go through it. It has almost been 2 years but sometimes it can feel like it’s only been 2 days. The thought goes through my head that I could deal with everything much better if I could just sit down at the end of the night and have a vodka tonic. Then I could just relax. Really, is that how that would go. No, it would start there but quickly and I mean very quickly that would be 5 or 6 VK’s light on the tonic at the end of the night.

A couple things happened yesterday that made me happy to be in the moment. My Mom and I were wrestling this wheelchair out of the back of my car and getting my Dad in it so she could wheel him into the house through the back. Well I was trying to make it easier on her and get him in the chair and wheel him through the grass to the walkway so she wouldn’t have to push him through the grass. It’s kind of hard to do that if you never have. Well I ran over her foot and she laughed and I laughed and it was just kind of comical. I ran and parked the car and came through the front door out the back and she was having a hard time pushing him off the walkway through the grass to the patio. So then we both pushed him and Dad was using his cane like an oar as if he was helping us get through the grass. Uh, if you didn’t know already that was of no help and I let him know that but it was all just funny. The other thing that happened was JT came home last night and I was still up and we just sat and talked a bit. Not about anything in particular but just about stuff. Just talking, he and I on the couch talking and laughing. I love those moments.

I tell you those two things to say I know if I were drinking I would have been moody and irritable with my Mom and my Dad to get them where they needed to be so I could get home and have a drink. I would miss the funny laughs that you have to have through this to keep your sanity. My Dad needs to laugh, we all need to laugh. If we can’t do that this road is going to be longer and harder than we think it is. I would have already been drunk by the time JT got home and would have had little to no interest in talking to him and felt that he was interuppting my me time. What a missed moment. Those are the kind of moments your kids remember when they get older. Not what they got for Christmas when they were 12 or what they got on their 16th birthday but those moments when you laugh and talk heart to heart and you are just loving on eachother.

So reading through all this rambling I’ve done today I come to this conclusion. Find a way to live in this. I’m not going to fix it. Making a list is fine for certain things but it’s going to be ok if you have to move those things from day to day. Doing a little bit at a time is fine, if you don’t do any of it it’s never getting done. Stick with cucumber water it doesn’t make you nearly as moody, irritable or give you the same hangover that vodka tonic’s do.