Again, a long lapse in posting. Emotionally I'm a roller coaster tonight.
Mom and I went on vacation to a lakeside resort that we have gone to since I was a teenager. This year, we went as guests of the owners. The owners had actually come to Dad's funeral. It was an amazing trip in good and bad ways.
Dad and I had always fished together in the evenings. We'd get our gear, float it on an innertube and head out to the sandbar to fish for white bass. We rarely caught anything large enough to keep, but we got time to be together with no one around and without Mom. I never realized how important that was. We'd come in when I got cold or when there was barely enough light left to swim in safely, whichever came first.
So I went fishing in the evenings, but I fished on the pier. I didn't feel as safe looking for the sandbar by myself, and the water temps really weren't high enough for swimming. I'd never had to pull together the gear alone, and I've added "getting fishing reels ready" to my list of things that Dad made look amazingly easy. My reel was crudded up from years of neglect, but I finally got one setup working and headed down to the pier with a cooler of beer and a pack of cigarettes. As I started fishing, I found myself talking to Dad. It had been a heck of a couple of days with Mom and her memory, and I was telling him how awfully things were going and what a hard time I was having with things. Just then, a tug on the line. I had actually caught a fish. When I reeled it in, it was a lake perch, about the size of my hand, bigger than anything I'd caught in years. As I took a picture of it and got the hook out, I had this amazing feeling of "it will be OK". I wish I could have bottled it and kept it.
We did all of the "usual" family things and went to most of the "usual" places. Except I was driving and I really didn't know exactly where some of them were. We made a lot of wrong turns, but in the end we got where we were trying to go. I hadn't been to this area since grad school, so it was interesting to see what had changed and what was the same.
Having Mom out of her own environment made her memory trouble even more obvious. There was a never ending chorus of "where's this , where's that". A blood sugar testing machine got misplaced and forgotten, leading to a 20 mile return trip for the machine. Mom's need for constant entertainment and activity crashed into my desire to just sit and read and be left alone. I ultimately decided to let that vacation be hers, and I'll get my vacation next month (more later).
On the whole, the trip was a success, but since returning home, my patience is just GONE. I just can't take the never ending dependence alternating with the accusations of making Mom feel stupid. The constant "I can live by myself" followed by a glance at a piece of mail and "I don't understand this, take care of it". Last night blood sugars were going up and down like a yo-yo.
And finally, I just don't feel like I'm grieving for Dad at all. I posted about this on a forum where I'm a regular, and got kind of dressed down because someone felt that I was comparing my loss to someone who lost a young spouse in a tragic accident. They felt that my comments were unworthy to the discussion because Dad's death was "better". So the one place I finally felt "safe" to talk about this, I was told it wasn't appropriate.
I just want to go back to where the biggest problem in my life was poorly written lab reports.
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