I didn’t really know how to title this post as I decided to write out some truthful and painful thoughts today. I started this blog, back in January 2017, as a way of getting myself back into writing again and, since then, I have written about quite a wide variety subjects. Some posts have been fairly frivolous: about fashion, my daily outfits and my love of scarves etc. Others have been much more serious: about my health issues, hospital visits and difficult family circumstances. Today’s post will be about the latter and I urge those of you who prefer to read about scarves to skim over this and return later in the week!

Cracking under Stress by Bernard Goldbach on Flickr

To be honest, I’m using today’s post as a way of getting my feelings out and recording them for myself. My memory is still so poor that I struggle to remember things from an hour ago, never mind a day or a week. Events from decades past are, in contrast, very clear! Also, I apologise if this post is muddled and confusing – my thoughts are too.

Life in this household is becoming increasingly difficult:

• Lovely Husband is disabled with severe back problems that he has had for almost 30 years, diabetes, depression and other serious issues. He can still drive and go out shopping and he cooks, cleans as well as he can, and organises everything for us all. However, he is beginning to slow down and is under a huge amount of stress.
• I am so ill now, both mentally and physically, with a pile of meds which I have to take daily. I can only get up and go downstairs for a couple of hours before I have to return to bed. As I said above, my memory is poor, I cannot do housework or cook because of my chronic cough and dizziness, but I do help with some of the household organisation (via my iPad) and can put a load of washing on. I am afraid to leave the house except in a dire emergency or a medical appointment. I am terrified of having another, even worse, stroke.
• Elder Son is becoming more difficult to cope with as we get older. His autism means that his moods are very changeable. One minute he is cheerful, helpful and lovely to be with; the next he is angry, violent and unreasonable. LH and I are now struggling to manage the fallout from his condition and an event (which I cannot write about in detail) happened yesterday that sent him over the edge and us to the brink too. We now have to wait for a resolution to the event in order to move forward. In the meantime, we also have to manage ES’s reaction to it all as he always turns his worries against us, as his parents!
• Younger Son now lives and works away from home. We try to support him from afar when he needs us (and he does his best to offer support for us), and he does not add any stress on a daily basis. Of course, as his parents, we worry about him, but that is only normal, I think!
• All of LH’s and my parents, and their generation of relatives, have now passed on and we have very little support from wider family. In addition, we have no close friends locally. Of course we really appreciate the online support from friends who live further away.
• Our house is causing us a lot of stress too. It is basically sound, but we have been so overwhelmed with other issues that we have allowed regular maintenance to slide for a quite a few years. We don’t have money worries, thank goodness, but we cannot find the headspace to sort everything out: windows need replacing, the loft cleaning out and boarding, carpets cleaning or replacing, the rendering removing, many rooms decorating, loads of basic maintenance jobs doing, masses of general clutter removing… We feel helpless in the face of mess and just “stuff”. LH has suggested that I move out to a hotel whilst he sorts it all out, but I am struggling with the idea of leaving my safe space.
• The future frightens us all. We really need to move to a house with a downstairs bedroom and bathroom for me and LH to stave off having to use residential care. ES worries about how he will manage without us. We worry about how long we can cope with him at home, but would it be even worse if he didn’t live with us? I suppose that this is the major cause of stress for us – what will the future bring?

So, now that I have got all of that off my chest, I will try to be more cheerful and hope that ES’s issue is sorted out favourably as quickly as possible. I have an appointment with my Consultant tomorrow, so will probably write about that later in the week.

Love and best wishes,

Anne

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Image credits

Cracking under stress by Bernard Goldbach on Twitter