Why I’m doing this

I created this blog as a personal journal and venting space. Despite being a Gen Xer, I can type faster and longer than I can write by hand — also, no hand cramps — so I decided to make a blog. I don’t care if no one else ever sees this. I’m not doing this for feedback, validation, or anything else. I just need a space to vent.

When I express my frustrations about my mother to my husband, he jumps right to telling me to put her in a long-term care facility. There are numerous options to work through before I even want to entertain that idea.

I don’t want to talk about her dementia with my friends too much because:

1. I know what it’s like to be the friend with an elderly parent without dementia. Hearing it happen to your friends’ parents makes you worry about your own.
2. I know what it’s like to be the friend with an elderly parent who has died from a dreaded disease (in my dad’s case, Parkinson’s), and it can bring up things you’d rather not relive or talk about.
3. I’m beginning to learn what it’s like to be the friend with an elderly parent with dementia. I don’t want to talk about it when I’m out having fun to forget my problems.

The other reason I’ve started this blog is to record my mom’s decline. OK, we’ll call it a “journey” but I’m well aware that her journey will not circle back to the beginning. Here are a couple things that have happened recently that I’d like to record.

I was on vacation with my husband and son recently in a town that my mom vacationed in with us for about 10 years around about 2007-2017. We’d spend two weeks there each summer. When talking about it over the last few weeks, she’s told me she has no recollection of ever being there. I’ve told her where we stayed, what it was like, and what’s nearby. Still no memory. Each time, however, she’s brought up how she always went to another similar town each summer. I, of course, know that because that’s where she took me when I was a kid and I’ve heard tales many times of her going there and back with her parents and two brothers with sand in their shorts stuffed in a car in the days before air conditioning.

This is the first time she’s really displayed the Alzheimer’s hallmark of lack of memory of recent events but total recall of long past events.

Something similar happened in the past week or so related to cars. Twice recently she described in detail her first car. It had a light blue and cream exterior with a matching interior, no divider between the front and back windows (pillarless hardtop but that’s not what she called it), and she paid around $2,000 for it brand new. I know her description is accurate because she’s told me about that car many times over the years.

At least for now, she still mostly has her personality and knows everyone who I’d expect her to know. We’re off to see her primary care physician for a routine checkup. She remembers the main doctor in the practice but not the advanced practice nurse (APN) she’s seen multiple times in the past year or two. And so it goes.