My "whine moment today." What's yours?

Whine of the day -- I hate being woke up and asked for a pill. Then I explain that it isn't time and am told that I forgot to put them out. When I say that I'm asleep and will do it later, she says that I am awake and she knows I was up. This is said to someone in bed with the covers pulled up. I wish that every day didn't seem like such a train wreck, especially when I haven't even woke up yet.

Thanks, Veronica!

I don't help either of the older kids at all anymore - I had to finally tell myself what you just said - that I was only enabling them and allowing them to walk over me by trying to do what I thought was best - in the long run, it wasn't doing them any favors.

Mom has a bath seat and a hand-held showerhead - this issue with lifting her legs over the tub is a fairly recent development. She still won't let me help her shower, but at the very least she *is* showering, except on weeks when she gets a little resistant to it, so I'm thankful for that.

I am very thankful for what I have - and I do feel better tonight. I just needed to vent.

Dear Susan. you are feeling a lot of pain today and it is certainly justified..
You certainly are still young and have a lot of life ahead. I guess you were very young when you had your first child maybe still in high school and not married. If the two elder have gone down the wrong path their father also has contributed to that.
How involved was he is raising the children? Did he pay his child support on time every month? Did he work under the table so you never got enough? You did the best you knew how and now the youngest is living with Dad probably at least partly to avoid paying you support.
If your son is happy in the situation leave him be. let him grow up and you may find he wants to be closer to you when he is more mature. Hopefully he is doing well in school and will have a decent career ahead. I would not pay out money you can not afford to go and see him. He can make an effort to come and see you and his grandmother. By all means pay his fare, but that's it. A decent father would help his son visit his family.
As far as the other two are concerned stop enabling either of them. they have some hard lessons still to learn. The court will catch up with him and he will have to pay up including arears. If he doen't it will be back to prison. I know they are your kids but tough love is in order here.
As far a Mom's walk in shower is concerned Medicare probably won't pay but HUD might or you may find a charity to help.
In the meantime install a detachable shower head in the bath tub if there is already a shower. you can buy one for about $25 and do it yourself. you just unscrew the existing one and screw the next one on. Buy a wide shower chair. one of those that sits with on pair of legs on the floor and one in the bath. Have Mom sit on the seat outside the tub and while she hangs onto the arms swing one leg over the side and then have her scoot over a bit then you lift her other leg in. She can wash herself sitting on the chair using the hand held. You will have to help her more but even if you get a walk in shower she probably wont be safe on her own anymore. That would be a much cheaper option if she agrees to try that. You may be able to find a used shower chair for $5- 10. Another option would be to install one of the walk in tubs. I don't know how the costs would compare, but I think they can be installed in one day.
Try and stop focussing on what you don't have and make the best of what you have been blessed with. Call your local health dept and see if Mom can qualify for some nursing care to give her a bath a couple of times a week or can she afford to pay for help herself. She must at least have SS so you don't have to pay for everything and work such long hours.

My whine moment of today is I hate when my father goes into pest mode. Its usually on the weekend. He doesnt feel like he is getting enough attention. All day today he has been a pain in the neck over silly things. He knows hes being annoying and he wants to be yelled at so he can start a huge argument. Today he wanted fruit to make smoothies...then he decides to send me to the store to buy fish for dinner even though the freezer is packed with meat. Next, I needed to call the people on a piece of paper he found from probably 1982, then he insisted he needed to find batteries and finally I had to go on his daily walk with him in order to give his caregiver (who is paid to this) a break. If I say Im going out, he will get upset and find 15 more things that need to be done such as mail that HAS to be read at that very minute. Some days like today, I dont mind. But other times Im already stressed out and his daily need for undivided attention is not helping.

Bookluvr, I enjoy cooking ! When it was just me and my children, I made all sorts of meals. Sundays was usually a big meal that we all sat down to eat together.

My sister doesnt cook so my father expects me to wait on her hand and foot when she comes to visit. I dont do as much cooking as I did before I moved in with Dad and thats for a couple of reasons. One, he is now like a child in that if you are cooking something he wants it too. The other reason I do not cook as much is because his weekday caregiver takes over the kitchen each day. If I am in there, she finds to go into the kitchen also. Whatever I use,it always winds up being something "she was going to use" GRRRRRRR. She is nice enough to leave enough for me and my children when she cooks a large meal for my father. Then she goes behind my back and complains that she does more than she should. I dont ask her to leave anything for us.

Hurt and very frustrated today. :-( Sorry, this is going to be a bit long, but I need to vent. Feel free to skip over this post if you don't want to read it.

Feeling very hurt by my kids today, and just not sure what to do with all this pain.

Older son got involved with a bad crowd right out of high school and ended up in jail for B&E (all the other offenders were bailed out by their parents - I made him sit in there and serve his time - told him this was one lesson he better learn the first time) - then he ended up on drugs and had to go through rehab - but got kicked out for not following the rules (he tried to help someone else sneak in an internet router and hook it up, which was against the rules - and he knew it). He now has a 1-yr-old son he never sees, doesn't support (court is pursuing him on that to take out of his paycheck) and never even bothers to send anything for the child. I send diapers once a month because I feel it's unfair for the mother to be saddled with everything. The mother is very emotionally unstable, bounces between saying we can see the baby anytime we want, then saying the next week that we can only visit him at her home and not take him anywhere (we've never done anything to justify that kind of restriction), and says we can't post pictures of him on Facebook or anywhere else (I understand that concern, but she goes ballistic and threatens to report us to the police for "abuse" if we post pictures instead of calmly asking us not to post them - so we don't post anything at all now, we don't even share the pictures she's posted). I don't even attempt to see the baby now, because I don't trust her. She lives 2 hrs away from me, and I worry that if I try to see him, she will change her mind at the last minute and I will have waste a trip, which I can scarcely afford to do.
Older son now has a full-time job, but still won't bother to do anything for his child - buy diapers, clothing or anything. He used to stay in touch with me every week, but now rarely contacts me. He will drive an hour north to see his sister, but will not drive an hour and a half east to see me unless I give him gas money - and then he lies to me and gives me an inflated figure for what it costs for gas and spends it on something else. I had been helping him with groceries for a while - I told him as long as he was sending *something* to the baby's mother once a week - even just $50 - I would help him out with groceries so he didn't go hungry. I didn't give him cash - I took him to the store and bought him food. Turns out he was lying to me - he never paid her anything unless I was right there to see him hand her the money - which amounted to about $200 over the course of the first year of the baby's life. So I stopped helping him at all, and now he ignores me.

Daughter is 26 and has 2 children by 2 different men, neither of which is involved in the child's life, and neither pays child support. She dropped out of high school as soon as she was old enough, because she simply didn't want to do the work required to finish - a bitter disappointment to me. I *made* her get a GED, so she would at least have that. She has never held a job for more than a few months at a time before quitting or getting fired. She didn't even know who the father of the 2nd baby was until it was born and we saw who he looked like. By that time, she was involved with someone else (a prescription painkiller addict who had done jail time for stealing his mother's painkillers when she was suffering from cancer, was fresh out of rehab, can't drive due to multiple DUI's - no license, and who milked an insurance claim against my insurance when he was involved in a rollover accident I had last year when I hit some black ice - he wasn't wearing a seatbelt even though I asked him to. He got $30k out of it and still claims he's permanently disabled and wants more. Oh - and he told us long before the accident that he'd had a previous back injury that paralyzed him for 6 weeks -seeing a pattern here?? Ins. co. knew about the previous injury and all of his activities posted on Facebook showing he wasn't as badly injured as he claimed - but they paid him anyway. He and my daughter ran through that $30k in 3 months and have nothing to show for it. Nice guy, huh?) She is now married to him.

Youngest lives with his dad in another state, over 650 miles away, and I can only afford to make trips to see him once a year (every week-long trip is $2000+ because of the distance, lodging, food, etc). It was his choice to go live with his dad 4 years ago - and he wanted to come back a year later, but his dad got his hooks into him and made him feel guilty about wanting to come back here...so now he'll never come back. Now that he's established in school down there, has friends there, and feels he shouldn't leave because he feels he should stay with his dad..I never get to see him unless I make a trip. I miss school events, important things happening in his life, etc - I don't even get pictures of him anymore - not school pictures, special event pictures...nothing. It's like I don't exist anymore, and it really hurts. His father will never let him come back to live with me, because he blames me for how our older son turned out - like his choice to break into buildings and steal things and then get hooked on drugs is my fault. He keeps telling me that if our older son had stayed with him instead of moving back with me, he would have never turned out this way - something he keeps throwing in our youngest son's face as well - that he doesn't want to turn out like his brother. Anytime the youngest makes a mistake or does some of the normal dumb stuff teenagers do (slacking on homework, getting a little mouthy, etc), he slams him with that - "you're going to turn out just like your brother".

I call him (or he calls me) every week. Today I learned that he had been baptized and became a member of his church. That hurt SO much - he never told me he was doing it, nor did his father. I am missing out on so much because his father is "too busy" with his new family to do anything towards keeping me informed (his new family includes a baby that was born with kidney failure and will require a transplant). We have had bitter arguments over the fact that he doesn't keep me informed on anything.

Some days - like today - I sit down and wonder where the heck I went wrong and what I did to deserve this. I guess you could call it a pity party or empty nest syndrome, and I'll be over it by tomorrow, but dang it, it hurts. I did the best I could with my kids after my husband left for another woman (the one he's married to now). I was a single parent with 3 kids trying to be both mom and dad to them, and I know I didn't always make the best choices. However, I didn't do drugs, drink, go out partying (other than going to a singles dance now and then), or bring guys home that they didn't know. For the most part, I didn't even date after my divorce - the one time I tried, I got freaked out and broke up with the guy because I was scared he'd turn out to be like my ex. I never dated again, and still don't. I tried to take the kids to church whenever I wasn't working on a Sunday, kept them involved in school activities, took them fishing and on road trips whenever we could, and did simple things like dancing in the rain and wading in creeks with them, teaching them about nature and life and love. Yet I am now almost completely uninvolved in their lives, other than the occasional phone call, Facebook message or text. I know it is not my fault that they turned out to be something other than what I hoped for them, but darn it....it sure feels like it some days.

I guess I'm just confused and hurt. I have *so* much on my plate right now with my work and caring for Mom (which is steadily more difficult as time goes by and she loses more of her mobility). I have to figure out how to afford a trip north to where we released my dad's ashes, plus the trip to see my son, plus paying for the supplies and labor for the work being done on the house, and now, to top it off, we have to look at getting a walk-in-shower sooner than planned for Mom, because she's no longer able to lift her leg over the tub, so I'm having to help with that, and there's a definite fall risk there. No idea if Medicare will pay for such a thing - but probably not. So there's something else that has to come out of my pocket, unless we can get Mom approved for a grant through HUD to do that. (sigh) I'm working about 70 hours a week right now trying to make extra money for these trips and extra expenses with the house. I'm only 43, but I'm definitely feeling much older lately!

Just having a bad day, I guess! Thanks for letting me vent.

In all my years I never enjoyed cooking.... it was and still is a science project that usually goes horribly bad.... I am not sure if CSI could figure out what that thing was before I cooked it. I am still trying to master instant oatmeal that comes in a packet !!!

I think the reason why I dislike cooking had to do with my Mom.... when I was a kid trying to cook something, I was always using the wrong bowl, or the wrong spoon, or the wrong this or that.... so I decided enough was enough. I decided to shadow my Dad and he taught me how to fix things letting me decide what to use with his guidance.

Nighty night ,sleep well.
The produce manager might give you a quick lesson or (dare I say it) fav sis might got with you.
You can go to a high end grocery store and pick up everything and look it over. Then go round a cheap store and you will see the difference. Make sure you wash everything well before you use it as they are covered in pesticides. You can google "choosing fresh vegetables" and I am sure you will find something. Keep up the good work. you may even find evening classes to begining cooks.

Book good for you skooling yourself on cooking..

Me personally, I do it because I have to but I don't enjoy it!!

Veronica, I spent about an hour today reading up on simple salads. I even copied and pasted several tomato and avocado recipes. I even looked up how to choose string beans, how to choose tomatoes. I learned to avoid any with wrinkles, etc... I've never had anyone take me to the grocery store and show me to choose the onion,etc.. Thanks.I'm going to sleep now.

Book I always boil sausages first, drain and cool, then brown in the fry pan. It gets rid of a lot of the grease and salt and they brown in a few minutes. I gather that is how they do them in restaurants so they're ready to serve quickly.

Congratulations Book
You have mastered so many things and cooking is going to be added to your list.
There are many excellent cooks on this site. If there weren't their loved ones would not live such long lives (whether thay want them to or not) so you may get lots of yummy easy recipes,
First of all get round to the library and find a good cook book on low cholesterol foods. I know a fried sausage egg and bacon is really yummy and OK as a treat ocessionally but it is really bad for the cholesterol. How about an egg, tomatos, mushrooms and baked beans? Hugs for making a start

Assandy, you're most likely right. What I fear is - what if I find cooking boring? But I do love it when my cooking comes out right. So, maybe that would be incentive enough for me to keep trying to cook. Years ago, I wanted to cook. But my father was criticizing every single action I made while cooking. After a week of this, I just stopped cooking. It was much much safer to buy take outs and blame whatever was wrong of the food to the restaurant or cook. I was adventurous in cooking than my fave sis. She keeps to the traditional plain cooking of our people. I was more into jazzing up the pork chops with gravy and steamed broccoli. Whereas our people would just fry the pork chops with lots of black peppers and salt. I was always adventurous. I made a cake by steaming it using that springfield baking pan. I substituted the butter (or was it oil?) with orange soda. I didn't tell anyone until after they ate my cake. They never noticed it! =)

Book:
Siblings never forget anything and like to remind you of it all the time! You probably said many times how you hate to cook! So now they think you aren't allowed to change your mind.. If only they listened to you when you said that you hated changing your father or dealing with his cathetar!! Next time remind them of that.. "Or sure you listened to me when I said I didn't want to cook, but it falls on deaf ears when I don't want to change Dad".

UGH!!

Trying to help my Mom understand it's June 1st and she doesn't need to wear a turtleneck, under her sweater also heavy knit pants to church today.. Oh forgot she wants to wear winter coat!!

I've made no bones about my lack of expertise or experience in the kitchen. All these years, since I got a job, I had take-outs and microwavables. I only recently decided to learn to cook because I've reached the point that I'm tired of microwavables and salty, greasy take outs (cholesterol shot high). So, for the past month, I've been cooking breakfast on Sundays - my only real day off.

It's getting to be so irritating for my fave sis and her daughters to ask me weekly if I'm still cooking. And then to be surprised that I'm still cooking! Okay, so, I'm 48 years old. You can still teach an old dog to do new tricks. Give me break! They should give me 2 months before I give up cooking and go back to microwavables! Not a measly few weeks. =(

In all seriousness, I find myself enjoying cooking. I still am impatient. If the sausage is not cooking fast enough, I raise the heat, and it comes out burnt, and the pan, too. Yeah, yeah, patience is a virtue.....

Well mark this day in history..no whine moments today. Its so weird how when our weekend caregiver is here it is so quiet and peaceful. She is a lovely woman who does what she has to do and sits down quietly. Imagine that ! My children love her and she calls them her grandchildren.
Im sure I will have plenty of whine moments tomorrow...Dad cannot go an entire weekend without creating some drama.

Victoria I hope they were giving out medals with the prescriptions you sure deserve one.

My whine for the day..... I was wondering why the lawn guy who mows my lawn didn't show up this past week, then I found out that my Dad [who uses the same lawn person as I do] told the lawn guy to mow his yard and my yard every two weeks, so not to mow this week..... say what?.... now my grass is so high I need a herd of cows to come in.

I need to catch the lawn guy and tell him to ignore anything my Dad says regarding *my lawn*..... [sigh]

VictoriaP, oh my gosh, my parents are the same way regarding the U.S. postal service. My Mom thinks the postman who delivers to the house reads her "Goodhousekeeping" magazine any time it is a day or two late. Sure Mom :)

I was also ready to pull my hair out when my parents got their pharmacy prescriptions sent to their post office box and I had to run to the post office daily to see if the meds came in.... after a few times to doing that, I put my foot down and asked my parents to have the meds delivered to the house.... it took some doing as Mom was convinced the mailman would steal her pills.

wow...I will check that out sharynmarie..isn't that amazing..same thing but because labeled "migraine" they charge more for it....thanks!

In regards to migraines, I just want to say that those of us who are helped by caffeine, read the labels because Excedrin has extra strength version and a migraine version...both have the same dosages of caffeine, aspirin and acetaminophen but the migraine version charges more.

today, i have no words for what she said and did.

NO amount of sleep can make it better.
I've cried for 8 hours. WHY did she say those things? why?

Did my weekly visit to 88 year old narc Mommie Dearest, taking fruit and juice. As usual, whines, complaints, wants, wants, wants - the staff should deliver her lunch so she can stay in bed ... what????. Endless abusive phone calls made me quite ill during this past winter until I had a black out- changed my number, made it unlisted and told her I got rid of it. Now she plans to call everyone she's ever known (and not given a fig for unless there was something in it for her). God help them!

Now she wants to call my cell which I never have on, it's just for road emergencies. She's asked for my address numerous times but I only give her the nearest village. 20 years ago when I didn't answer the phone she called the cops on me ... she wasn't looney tunes then and that's not happening!

Every visit unhinges me but she can no longer get at me. The admin at the NH told me today if I hadn't taken action to go low contact I'd be dead by now, a sobering thought. Fed my critturs, going to eat supper in front of the tv and get to bed early. Tomorrow is another day and it's mine, as is every day for the next week or two until I have to go visit again.

I just spent 2 1/2 hours driving/waiting for medicine to be filled at the military pharmacy for my mother. Then come to find out they have mail order and it could be delivered. I told my mom about it and she says "oh yea, they have that but I don't trust the mail" I swear, I'm going to pull my hair out!!!

I am amazed at the sheer number of narcissists we're caring for.

two cents ¢¢

57twin, the heat or AC going full blast with the doors open or windows up gets to me, too. All that money going to heat or cool the world. My mother does it so much that I peek around throughout the day to see what needs to be closed.

My mother has entered a new phase of medication management. If I put the pills out early now she'll just take them. So I've had to change tactics and put them out right before she needs them. I'm learning that the only thing to expect is change.

Well I got up during the night to go to the bathroom and there is dads alarm clock on the bathroom counter. WTH????? Hubby snores so I sleep with Bose noise canceling headphones I didn't hear a thing. Dad up early once again ( 6:45 am). go into bedroom to change sheets room was HOT. We have electric heat and was turned up to the max and windows were open. Grrrr I had it and yelled. Also found dads sunglasses on my dresser and he was moving stuff around on his dressers.
Good news is this weekend he is in offsite respite care though I could gave dropped him off this morning. Well we will pick him up Sunday night.
Hopefully my attitude will be better.

And go es to bed earlier, shhhh!

Hooray, Jeanette! The day care will wear her out more than you possibly could. And the added benefit? Is it does not wear you oh as well. May find that day care is much more effective than the Seroquel. But we still use Seroquel after day care, for sundowning agitation and she sleeps so much better.