2011 ...
by bear
As the new year approaches and we are yet again without flying cars or holidays on the moon (heck, I would love even a monolith sighting!) everyone around me is expounding on their past year and what things they are looking forward to.
Me, I am just glad I got thru 2010 with some semblance of sanity.
This fall marks the first fall that I wasn’t caring for my father-in-law, and by proxy my wife. The one thing I can say is that taking care of a senior with dementia and failing health is that it does keep you busy, but wow, is it tough on a person physically and mentally. The last year has me experiencing for the first time full on depression and anxiety as suddenly I have nothing to do.
Of course, I don’t literally have nothing to do, but when your schedule had been dictated for the last 15 years by someone-else’s mental and physical state or by a very busy job - the sudden realization that you can now stay up all night and play a game or you can actually drive someplace for more than an hour or hell, even that you can now go to a movie and watch it without the phone buzzing because of some emergency, is a sudden change to the way I was living and being. The human brain gets really used to status-quo, so any shift away from that is met with anxiety and resistance.
I am not posting about this to start a pity-party or gather up other kinds of comments, I am posting this as a letter to myself so that I can acknowledge what has, and is now, happening in my life and with the help of friends and work-friends move on past this last period of “OMG WHAT DO I DO” and actually clear my head and be able to focus on something, anything, other than the fact that I can’t focus on something for days at a time.
So yea, re-reading the above, I realize that it will not make any sense to the vast majority of my imagined reader base - but it does to me. And if anyone else is finding themselves in a spot where they are having to become a care-giver for someone, please do contact me. Maybe the potholes and landmines that I hit during the last 2 decades I can help you avoid. Heck, even the realization that it could easily become two decades of time and care is something I wish someone had been able to warn me about.
Here is to 2011 being just another year - for me that will be exciting enough :) and then I can relearn what a vacation is and how to enjoy one.