Had to get out of Glasgow fast this morning, as the family are cranking up to cause us problems again. Went to see a house I was interested in, and it is extremely solid, although I am not too sure if the lack of mobile signal and evidently pisspoor broadband (I am half a mile away right now, but in the same loose grouping of buildings) might put me off.
So, I am in a Taste of Scotland Restaurant with rooms. I do not normally waste any money on such places as the difference between a 40 GBP B and B and a 140 GBP Hotel tends to be minimal. The linen matches and they give you home made biscuits. If I wanted home made biscuits, I would not need to pay a hundred pounds for them.
This is the view from my window, taken by someone else. This is what Scotland charges for. People from other places think this is magnificent. On the native scale, this view is probably around six out of ten, but foreigners, including English people, seem to think it is out of this world.
It is near to Campbeltown, Kintyre, which I checked out before I returned to this hotel. Basically, the song, ‘Campbeltown Loch, I wish you were whisky’ is a reference to the level of boredom induced by living there. It is very nice, very friendly but not remotely stimulating. Stimulation can be overrated when the skin on your face has just indicated that you cannot do any more caring right now.
In the last two years, it has become apparent that my body is saying no to much more of the twenty-four-hour-stuck-in-the-house-under-stress thing. I now get an unpleasant rash all over my face when I am stressed for a few weeks. The only thing that clears it up, it seems, is getting right away and not thinking about anything much. I am not happy about this, but I am not sure how to go about elbowing myself any more room. I miss the years when I was able to work and swim every day. I miss how much better I looked when I was eating properly. I miss not caring about not seeing people who do not have dementia, because I had time and space to think about something else.
I announced some time ago, that there was no reason why I should be expected to parent my mother’s children. They do not seem to have understood what this actually means. This means I will not be held responsible for my eldest sister’s war of nerves with my mother, which she seems to take for granted, and I will not be tolerating the drunk lying and not turning up. What on earth is so difficult about saying you are too drunk to drive on a Sunday afternoon? If my sister’s drinking is so important to her that I have to be a twenty four hour servant and die childless and lonely with no pension, then I am not sure why she isn’t proud of it. It must be a good thing to do, surely?
Anyway I have now delegated responsibility for the lunatic’s tortured love for her mother to the drunk. I wish them the best of luck with that new relationship. I spent today driving and laughing about Tantric Super Vegetable Guru, which has led me to believe that my Wolfe fetish is all about stress relief. I have handed my emotional self to somebody entirely disinterested as he is the best person to look after something nobody wants. I think this is an interesting and complex idea. I doubt that every exchange we ever had would fill even a paragraph of one of my blogs, and yet I evidently decided that yes, he was the man for the job. It was clearly the right decision, since in terms of self expression, I have positively bloomed ever since.
The same cannot be said for my health, sadly. The first year after he shut me down the first time, I tried and tried not to confuse my intense pain with loss of belief in myself and what I was eating. I was OK for a while, but the weight loss had stopped anyway because of the stress induced by the family. Eventually it came down to the social exclusion issue. Nobody I know is raw, and it was not really possible or practical to go out with normal eaters in a country of salad dodgers. My social life improved markedly when I finally ate something ‘normal.’ My health, however, has ground down to a markedly low level currently.
Usually, when I rest, I look completely different in under a week. It is difficult to determine why caring is so tiring. Emotional exhaustion is a strange thing. Because it is a slow and yet time killing activity, you do not understand that sticks falling on the floor, hearing aids going missing, phone calls she refuses to make, are gradually eroding your sense of self to the point that you are physically drained. It gets to the point where you forget what walking at a normal speed feels like. I looked at a log that I wanted to walk to today, and guessed that I could not make it that far, because I was judging it on what she could do, not me. Hence your health is quite seriously affected when you take on permanent rehab of someone else.
Thankfully, I am very mean with money, and did not spend everything I was supposed to in the earlier stages of her illness, otherwise the financial issues would be starting to press by now.
One less thing to worry about.