A Month In

[poliphilo]

We've been based down here for just over a month. It feels longer.

My mother has improved considerably. This morning she went upstairs (on the stair lift) and had a wash (leaning on a zimmer frame and sitting on a perching stool) without either of us having to hover protectively. She gets bored. She can't potter like she used to and the steeplechasing season is over, so there's less for her to watch on TV in the afternoons. She gets uncomfortable sitting (so do we; there's not a comfortable chair in the house) and goes to bed an hour earlier than she used to. Every night she thanks me profusely for looking after her.

Yesterday I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. YA novels are sparer- more essential- than adult ones. Their excellence or crapness is more immediately apparent. Is Christopher an accurate portrayal of a person with Aspergers or simply a convincing one? You swing between thinking how awful to be so oppressed and overloaded by the world and how wonderful to be free of all its emotional mess.

I feel tired all the time and correspondingly stupid. I hope it doesn't show in my posts but I'm afraid it does. I'm worrying what to cook for lunch. There's a small portion of cottage pie (I made it myself!) left over from yesterday, but what to put with it?

Comments

[trixibelle-net.livejournal.com]

People with autism aren't free of emotional mess. They just process it slightly differently to us...and within the world of autism itself there is a huge spectrum of difference- as huge as the spectrum of allistic (non-autistic) people's differences. So one autistic person could notice & deal with emotions completely differently to another autistic person. I wouldn't say their lives are any better or worse than ours. It's all relative.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Equal but different- that's sort of what the book suggests.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Does she like jigsaw puzzles? My mom does, she started doing them years ago after her stroke to exercise her brain. And I like them as well so it's one thing we can do together. We generally find them in thrift stores for a dollar.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

She does.

Trouble is I get carried away and finish them for her :(

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Cottage pie? Made from cottages? Or does it contain cottage cheese?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Traditionally it's made with beef- though I used turkey mince because that was what we had in the freezer. There's also shepherd's pie which is the same thing only made from lamb or mutton; that one makes sense.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

When I was taking care of my mother, I felt tired and stupid (and restless and irritable). I think it's the adjustment and the fact that you need to pace yourself differently to care for an older person. And I wasn't a live-in.

It's interesting what you say about your mother's improvement. We noticed that with my former mother-in-law, who we escorted to my son's college graduation in Arizona many years ago. Betty had been in a nursing home and was pretty helpless when we picked her up. By the end of the week's trip she was perkier mentally and stronger physically.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My mother has her routines and we have to fit in with them pretty much.

She's had to adjust to using a wheelchair and zimmer frame. At first she was very clumsy and wobbly but now she's got the hang of them.