Captivating Freedom Part 8

My mum had lived with us since my son was born.   She had her own apartment upstairs and in the early years it was really quite easy to live under the same roof.   She was completely involved in our lives.   As a family we did everything together.    My children loved having their grandmother around 24/7.   We were living our best life.

Mum and I rarely argued.    However, I really felt like I was never enough as a mum and as a wife and as a homemaker.    This used to make me upset and increased my already convinced mind that I was no good at anything.    Words echoed to me by my stepfather every day of my young life all those years ago.

The truth is, it wasn’t that I didn’t do everything right, I just didn’t do it mum’s way.   We had a very different way of raising our children and I found it difficult.    I never stood my ground and explained to her that we wanted to do things differently.   It was easier to just let her have her way – I thought.  I stood back and allowed myself to be controlled by my mum for many years.   

Now, mum was aging and she had a couple of long stints in hospital following major surgeries.    After these surgeries mum was no longer able to manage the stairs.   We were now faced with the difficult decision of what to do.   My mum had made me promise I would never put her in a Nursing Home and when she asked me, there was no thought of that being an option and so we had to make some changes around the home.   Do we put in a lift, do we put in a stair chair?   We decided the best thing to do was go about converting the upstairs self-contained apartment into a couple of bedrooms and move mum downstairs.

My mum went to stay with my sister for a couple of months while the renovation was happening.

With the renovation complete mum came back home.   I would love to say that it was easier, but now she was in our lives even more.   We had the use of two of our bedrooms downstairs, one as her bedroom and the other was set up as a sitting room for her where she could watch her own TV etc.   However, she very rarely used it.   She spent all of her time out with us.  

This was all fine except we began to discover that we didn’t have any time when mum wasn’t there.   Where once we could debrief at the end of the day with each other, now mum was present and it was impossible to do.   Our anxiety levels were beginning to rise.

Mum had also begun to do all kinds of things that were dangerous, like putting a fork in the toaster to get the toast out – while the toaster was still plugged in.     Put metal containers in the microwave – all manner of dangerous things.   I also noticed that she was having more and more bruises on her arms.  

One day, I was at work and received a phone call from VitalCall to say that mum had had a fall but was refusing an ambulance.   They told me she had assured them that she was fine.    When I got home from work some 4 hours later, there she was, still on the floor where she had fallen earlier in the day.

I was really angry with her.    However, I was not able to express this, I just bottled it up inside.

I tell you all of this to simply paint a picture of the stresses I was feeling.   I love my mum, so much.   There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.   She is an incredibly strong and independent woman and what I didn’t stop to think about in all the time I was stressing, was that she was finding it extremely difficult to cope with losing her independence and her ability to be her own person.