Sandwiched. Raising kids while your parents are sick.

It’s been a year and a half and I’m still so thankful to be able to walk to work. Not a bad view at all. :)

Last week I had some awesome things happen. A great training at work, a possible place to write some more, and got a pretty good beer with a friend (Stop making beers with “hoppy” taste. That’s code for “tastes like soap”.). But it was one text that set me off. Mom’s nurse texted that she had lost a bunch of weight in a month and it was all I could think about. (Weight loss is pretty common for patients with dementia- this article was helpful to me)

By “it’s all I could think about” I mean that it made me deep level grumpy in a way that I couldn’t shake. I mean that when my son wanted to show me how he could walk in slow motion “like a sloth bear” after I told him to hurry up and get in the house because it was raining, instead of finding this at all funny, I roughly hurried him along and just wanted the day to be over to get some calm in the house because my brain was absolute chaos. I mean that I tried to settle that grumpy, anxious, sad brain with cleaning and rules and ORDER.

This is the same child doing his best impression of a sloth bear at the park. Don’t worry though because he read a book about bears and is pretty sure they sleep outside.

But a night with two little kids is longer than just a few moments. And it made me think of how many of you are also watching your parents be sick and caring for children. I want us all to go on vacation together to a magical vacation spot where there are grandparents that just find joy and pride in taking care of our kids for us. There would be people that bring us cold non-hoppy beers and we can play flip cup, nap after exercise and laugh with our partners. So last night when the night dragged and the kids wouldn’t sleep and they wanted to have stories and “huggies” and the perfect amount of blankets and legos in their beds and for me to get the Hulk car out of the basement- I felt like I couldn’t take one more minute. I had to put myself on time out, apologize to a 3, 7 and 41 year old, duck out of all bedtime things and fold laundry alone in the basement.

This is the perfect amount of bed Legos. In case you or Lego was wondering.

Even after the kids were in bed last night, I could barely be around myself. I couldn’t do yoga or drink some wine or even watch TV. I couldn’t/didn’t/wouldn’t cry. I just wanted to sleep the deep sleep of denial. This morning I woke up and coerced a friend into running with me at 5:30. When we finished our run she said “I feel like I just dropped one of the bricks I was carrying”. While that expression sounds like she pooped her pants, I totally get it (She didn’t poop her pants. While possible for any runner, today was not the day.).

I’m pretty sure this same friend is consistently impressed with my outfit choices. This one was a puffy sleeved sweater over a running shirt after forgetting my jacket. I took this in front of the Fendi store, because I found that super funny.

Having sick parent affects me in so many ways but the one that causes the most guilt and shame is how it affects my patience with my family. I hate it and spend too much time judging myself for having a very real reaction to something that really really sucks.

So today, after I visited Mom, I sat in the car, played some John Gorka and dropped another brick. This expression does NOT work, right? I just sat in the car and cried and cried- for what has been lost, for what we are losing and for the shitty mess that is dementia. And my friend was right, after dropping the brick I felt a bit lighter, like I had more space to breathe and I could pick some other things up again.

The next day, I told my seven year old that I was really having a hard time and I was sad about grandma. He hugged me and said with the confidence of an emotionally intelligent 7 year old: “I know Mama. She doesn’t even talk to you.” And what I learned is that it is okay to keep talking to my kids about this, because they know it anyway. As much as I want to protect them from all hard things, I know that part of my role is to show them what it looks like to handle hard things. And how to cook. They need to learn how to cook.

We don’t need any help with fashion. We have that covered!