In Which I Even Miss the “Aim Low” Mark

#caregiverresentment #depression #suicidalideation #selfharm

Yep. Because it’s been a whole month without posting, when I told myself I would be diligent and focused and purposeful and instead ended up mostly in bed, under the covers, hiding from anything more than the responsibilities I have for the two other creatures in my life.

Namely, making sure the dog has food, water, and some kind of way to burn off his energy, and taking care of my mum.

Which is actually quite a lot of responsibility, when you get right down to it. Even doing the bare minimum of caretaking I can get away with and still live with myself is a shit-ton (imperial or metric, take your pick) of responsibility when your greatest desire is to hide in your room until the whole world forgets you exist, including yourself.

(Trust me, that last bit makes perfect sense when seen through the crazy lens.)

For someone who is now so easily overwhelmed by life that sometimes getting the mail is anxiety producing (No, as a matter of fact I haven’t gotten the mail in over two weeks. Why do you ask?), for someone who never wanted children, for someone who, for the better part of the 21st century has avoided dating and relationships like the very plague, suddenly becoming responsible for a largely helpless human being is kind of like getting kicked in the nuts.

(We’re back to the whole metaphorical nuts/ovaries thing. Why is that? Do I have some kind of obsession with the nuts that I don’t have? I mean, I’m almost 100% sure that ovaries are a magnitude worse, but yet I always come back to the swift kick in the daddy-bags. Huh. Maybe I should bring that up in therapy sometime. But I digress.)

Taking care of another human being is difficult. Taking care of a mostly helpless human being is even more difficult. Taking care of someone you love dearly who is helpless is… whoa. Which is why I now have all the respect in the world for single parents, especially ones doing their parenting without much outside help from family, friends, or the asshats in government who use the law to force people to have children while simultaneously removing any and all government assistance for them to A) survive pregnancy, B) survive childbirth, and C) raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted human being.

Digression. It’s what’s for dinner.

Anyway, props to single parents everywhere. And to ALL caregivers everywhere, whether caring for a relative or a client or a patient; young, middle-aged, or elderly; at any point on the abled scale.

Because even for people with all their ducks present and accounted for, lined up in perfect ranks, and standing at whatever amounts to attention for waterfowl, caregiving is hard. Doing it with less than a full-duck quotient and with whatever ducks you can scrape together all doing their own thing and with one of them not actually a duck at all but a very confused aardvark… on TOP of being as self-centered a human being as has ever locked themselves in their own little world and refused to come out unless it’s to play with puppies and ponies… weeelllllll… it’s really kind of ugly.

And by ugly I mean OMG what is that terrible, suppurating mass ugly.

Speaking of which…

(And by which I mean caregiving, not suppurating masses.)

I just had an hour and a half pause in writing this blog post. Because I needed to change my mum’s briefs (when the house remodel is done we hope to start phasing the briefs out, but as of right now, it’s just too difficult to get her transferred to a bedside commode or the toilet, and originally her left side was too useless for her to be able to use either, so for the past year and change I have been changing very large nappies round the clock), get her up in the wheelchair for dinner, move her mouse, water glass, kleenex, etc to a tv tray, fetch and open another bottle of water, and cook and serve her dinner.

In a bit, I’ll need to help her back to bed and get her set up for sleep.

I’ve only managed coffee and some lunch for myself all day. I even forgot my morning meds because today was a relief caregiver day and I needed to run an errand for the remodel and take the dog out so he didn’t go completely stir crazy and only had two hours to do so. Not that I even wanted to leave my room, let alone the house, which brings us back to that whole ugly thing, which is my brain.

Because when you’re depressed and borderline suicidal and flirting with self harm and really only want to be selfish and take your meds and try to sleep because even being alive is just too fucking overwhelming for you but you have to get up and DO THINGS because someone you love is relying on you not to be a total selfish asshat and make sure they don’t sit around in a wet nappy (or hungry or thirsty or too hot or too cold) and you really WANT to be a total asshat but you just CAN’T, not and still live with yourself, you start to build up a WHOLE LOT of resentment.

And that’s ugly. It’s ugly to have to face the fact that you resent someone you love not because they can do things for themselves and don’t - that’s fucking normal and absolutely well-adjusted resentment right there - but because they can’t do things for themselves and you have to pull YOUR head out of YOUR ass to do things for them. I mean, come on, what kind of a dick do you have to be, right? But it happens. I’ve been told it happens to people who are far better adjusted and saner and just plain better human beings than I am.

So you feel this resentment, and maybe anger or irritation, and then you cATCH yourself feeling it, and you either get defensive (but I’m just so exhausted, or I’m just so overwhelmed, or whatever), and/or you get a nasty case of self-loathing to go with your exhaustion or feelings of being overwhelmed, and that just starts your own personal doom loop.

(This is probably why I developed a new kind of crazy. The old kinds got so maxed out by a downward spiral of exhaustion, self-loathing and anger that there was nowhere else for the feels to go except to manifest a new disorder. And which is why now I get to have periods of time where I can’t allow myself to be around anything sharper than a butter knife and I clutch handfuls of ice for as long as I can stand to over and over again until the desire to reduce all the feels to just one that I can control - pain - subsides.)

I’m sure normal people reading this are at the “Dude, that’s FUCKED UP” stage by now.

To which I say, DUH, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS.

Because how do you reconcile honestly loving someone and wanting to take care of them with the feelings of resentment or anger that happen when you do? That’s the normal fucked-up-ness of being a caregiver, and it’s not something that I think anybody has a real answer for, other than maybe simply acknowledging the fact that humans are pretty messed up to begin with. In Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett describes the human condition as “an ape on the back of a rat that grew out of a lizard”, which is kind of a disturbingly accurate picture of the human brain and one of my favorite quotes.

And I know that all I can do is try to be patient with my mum and myself, and try to be aware that the feelings are there and that I can’t always control what I feel, and to try to control my actions when I can’t control my feelings.

And Yoda? Wherever your cackling little glowing force ghost is?

You can totally stick your Do or do not up your wispy-haired green Jedi ass.