I have not handled the last three months at all well. As a result, I do not feel in control of my surroundings, I was chatting to myself about how tired I was this morning as I fed the cat, and I entirely cracked up despite being lauded as taking great care of my mother at the meeting I did not attend. So here is a post about handling stress, from someone who cannot, to the point of ignoring the phone this morning.
One of the pithier things that are said to you when you are a carer is that you are supposed to look after yourself first, as you cannot pour from an empty cup. Whilst this may be true, it is not practically possible for many people, never mind somebody in a position where they are scared to accept help because it means the involvement of family who mean them harm.
I became aware that I was suffering from more advanced levels of stress after my mother came out of hospital, and rather than accept that my mother’s new raw diet was making her well, social services and the NHS did everything to refuse to accept the information, which as you can imagine is extremely frustrating in addition to being a time-waster in other respects. Why would I give up my pension, career and right to children to make a bad job of caring for my mother? You would need to ask them this question. Clearly I am very ugly, and have nothing else to do.
It has not affected mother’s care up until the last month, when I have not been as assiduous about her massage and exercise as I could have been, since I did not know if she was going to be here or not. They like to tell you that they are doing the opposite of what they are actually doing, so as they told me many times that they had no intention of removing her, I was convinced that everything they were doing indicated that they were.
This week, they had a third meeting about her ‘protection.’ Her protection has consisted of passing information to her vile children, stressing me out as much as they could, investigating her unusually healthy diet on the grounds that it did not look ‘normal’ enough and insisting that nurses who are here for 5 minutes a day are to be listened to, whilst I am not. I did not end up going to this meeting, as I was aware that I was too stressed to sit in a room full of hostile and in many cases stupid people expressing their opinions about my care of my mother.
Anyway, when I realised that my stress levels were out of control, I first took to spending a lot of time lying on the couch with my eyes shut trying to think my way out of the situation. Unfortunately this means I try to think in advance of an established system based on stupidity – they simply pretend that they are too stupid to accept any information from you in order to insult you. As my family have been doing this for years, you would think I would be used to it, but no, apparently not. So, recounting conversations to myself in an effort to handle things better was of limited use and wasted a lot of worry-time.
I am unable to do any creative work when I am like this, so I then had the lucky break of discovering Wolfe’s event, and set myself an unreasonable target in terms of my appearance. Walking helped with stress quite a lot, as did attacking the jungle gardens of myself and my neighbour. Mrs W insists that I must remove clutter, so a lot of niggly jobs that I was ignoring have now been done.
B vitamins, which I doubled up on, were of limited use in terms of myelin sheath repair, and I still went off like a rocket every time the social workers tried to talk to me, as their enquiries varied from illogical to insulting. Valerian and rose water was of marginally more help, although I did find myself choosing tryptophan rich foods during this period. I have not attempted any big decisions as I have no confidence at all that I would get anything right.
I managed to communicate that fact that I just want to be left alone, with a return of my previous privacy, reasonably calmly this morning after a five hour panic attack overnight. This is not good for your health, and I should probably have done an 8 mile circuit rather than stay in bed. The cats at one point sandwiched me between them, so worried were they that I would fail to open a can this morning. Anyone who knows cats, knows that this level of organised cooperation is quite extreme even for cats that know each other well.
Today I managed to sleep a bit, and am going to go out later in the spirit of my Mrs W project. I wonder how I expect to handle a public event if I cannot handle a bunch of strangers entering my home and expressing ill-informed opinions about my mother’s care? Should I not be more laid back about this, since she is 90 and I cannot expect her to live forever? Given that she has had 22 years, and the life I wanted is out of reach, should I not be pulling back? Or is it just the seething fury at the level of disrespect for the sacrifices I made for this family whilst being treated like utter garbage being extended to random strangers who readily make stupid assumptions about my life? Again yesterday, I had a nurse telling me that I failed to maintain long-term relationships in response to my explaining that I had managed even heavy jobs here thanks to my team of ex-boyfriends dropping in at various times over the last twenty years. On the contrary, they have been around for thirty years. It is a bit like having six absent husbands who don’t hang around for the nagging. Surely that suits everyone?
Anyway, I have learned from the last three months that I am no longer able to handle strangers in my home or stress particularly well and I definitely need to improve my level of fitness and I need to get out of this situation a bit more. I feel considering going to the event is on one hand selfish, and on the other not selfish enough. Nobody gives a shit about my well-being. They keep telling me that I need more help to manage one sleepy old lady, apparently not understanding that the more superficial bullshit I have to talk and the more strangers that come into my home, the more danger I feel we are in, given the persistent investigation. Therefore even when they want to come here and deliver good news, it is just another threat and I do not want to see them.
So, after saying all that – the best stress coping mechanism I can see from all this is getting out of the situation entirely. Making space is at least as important as nutritional tweaks. Apart from that, just don’t get into the situation in the first place. Nobody is really worth being reduced to a doormat over.
