Am I Being Patient Enough?
By admin on Nov 11, 2008 in Care
Caring for the elderly requires lots of patience.
That’s very excruciatingly hard for some of us, especially me. I’m not a patient person by nature, but I’m trying. It’s just that I fail so often.
Nothing is more difficult for me than to be ready to go somewhere and having to wait an extra 30 minutes while my Mom finishes getting ready. Then there’s the ritual of checking everything in the house such as the stove and iron to make sure nothing is still on. She always fears the house will burn down before we can get back. I don’t know why. It’s never happened.
But I was talking to a close friend of mine who has two parents in an assisted living facility. He had taken his one day off, a Saturday, to do errands with them. (Actually it is much easier to do errands without them, but as we know, they want to get out and go.)
He said after four hours of such tasks as taking them to the grocery store, they were finally arriving back at the facility where the front entrance was being painted with sand mixed with the paint. That was because the area was slippery and dangerous for the elderly to walk over, and they were trying to fix that as quickly as possible.
My friend saw the “wet paint” signs and warned his father who got out of the car first, not to walk through the wet paint on the sidewalk.
“My dad went right straight through the paint on his walker trailing the paint as he shuffled inside,” my friend said.
“Then the next thing I noticed before I could stop her, my mom was on her walker doing the very same thing. They both got wet paint smeared all over the place. My nerves were already shot from the trip to the grocery store. All I could do was throw up my hands.”
How many of us have felt the same way?
As we talked another friend pointed out that there simply isn’t enough help out there for those of us caring for our aging parents. We need more advice. We need help.
That’s the main reason for this site.
I think we’re here to help each other. Please write in and share your stories and your frustrations. If we’re all going to be honest with ourselves there are moments of total desperation, but thankfully those moments never last long.
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Tags: Care
3 Comment(s)
By Rob McInnes on Nov 12, 2008 | Reply
My mother and my in-laws are in their 80′s and live 300 – 1500 miles away. My mother-in-law is in a nursing home, but the other 2 are still independent. I don’t have the daily work of caring for them like many seniors do. But I worry and try to make things easier for them at a distance. I phone my mother every 4-5 days or so to check in. She gives me the update about her doctors’ appointments and her friends and her days’ events. I find it difficult even to find the time sometimes to call her. I wish it was easier- easier to be more involved and easier to be more comfortable with the phone calls.
By Nancy Jones on Jan 29, 2009 | Reply
I just finished a fourteen year vigil with my mother. Told at 79 that she would not last 6 weeks, she just passed away at the age of 93. The one thing you have to remember is that you will not get a “do-over” on this task. No matter how, in the day to day grind, you may become frustrated, discouraged, DO NOT HAVE TIME!!! and are not treated well by misbehaving parents who have actually become the children you have to discipline with “time outs” and such. I have seen many adult children check out, say, “My parent and I did not have a good relationship, so I don’t care what happens to her now.” This will not wash in a psychological future self evaluation. You know you have a responsibility to be the best child you can be, as they had a responsibility to be a good parent, whether they were or not.
It’s now rather odd that I don’t have the daily phone call to make. I sometimes found it helpful to be in heavy traffic, so when the topic got frustrating, or the complaints about the staff stealing her things got to be too much, I could always plead traffic and have to go. But I certainly do not regret those daily phone calls. My husband lost his dad last year, for a long time, he had called to talk every night, a true patience tester, because his dad was very hard of hearing. Now, he is very glad he took that extra and frustrating bit of time to communicate with someone who was passing through another time of life. I hope we have accumulated good karma and that someone else will be as patient and involved with us as we were with our parents. If nothing else, we set our children a good example of what we consider a requirement of life, to honor our parents.
By admin on Jan 30, 2009 | Reply
Nancy,
Thank you for making these excellent points.
You have certainly summed up caregiving.
It is hard, it can sometimes be painful, but it’s what we’re called to do.
I liked your comments so much, I wanted to share them with our Aging Parents Community. I wrote about these hot button caregiving issues in this morning’s blog post, Am I a Good Caregiver <