Almost Always Tired

These days I find that I’m almost always tired. A large part of that is simply a side-effect of the stress of having to deal with my father. While he’s capable of some (supervised) manual labor tasks, by-and-large his dementia has progressed to where he’s essentially a petulant one-and-a-half-year-old (though still potty trained, thank goodness). It’s tough. He is capable of minimal meaningful communication. The fact is that he can’t recall what words to use, or simply looses his train of thought about two words into the sentence. Then it’s nothing but stammers and failed attempts, often with nonsense words thrown into the mix, until he just gets frustrated and stops trying.

We’ve finally started medicating him a bit. While the docs gave us meds months ago, my mom was hesitant to use them. But it’s finally gotten to the point that it’s the only way we can keep him in bed for more than a couple of hours. Without the pharmaceutical assist, he spends the night getting up, getting dressed, and then popping in on whoever happens to be awake…at which time he’s told that it’s still night, and then he storms off back to bed. All I have to say is that "better living through chemistry" isn’t just a slogan, but a godsend. At least my mom and I can get a few hours where we can let our guard down.

But it isn’t just my dad that tires me–at least not directly. You see, since my dad has always had this insane need to stay busy, once he retired he started doing stuff around the house. Until age caught up with him, from early morning until well on into the afternoon he was constantly cleaning, storing, fixing, shopping, and every other activity you can name. Now that he can’t do that, it’s fallen on me. Trouble is, I’m trying to create product for a new career, an that takes time. Unfortunately, my mom has been trained to have unrealistic expectations of what can be done in a day. Now that it’s summer, I’m usually so fragged by the time I can get to my own stuff that I don’t have the energy, and whatever will I might have had has been beaten out of me. The sad irony is that as my mom gets more stressed, the more she clings to orderliness and maintenance, so it’s all but impossible to get her to scale back. She wants everything "perfect", but that ain’t going to happen. But it’s either try, or listen to the whining about it.

So, my art is getting short shrift, and so is my ability to spend time with the Scotts*. That’s bad since even when I’m doing for them the same sort of stuff I do around here, the love in my heart more than compensates to give me emotional succor. It’s gotten to the point where I barely have conversations with any of them for weeks, if not months at a time. It’s getting crazy. I know it’s selfish of me, but I wish that they could reach out a little more just for the sake of letting my heart smile. But like everyone, they have their own stuff to have to deal with, too.

All in all, I guess I’m just in a sort of "life sucks" stage of life. Not that it sucks in the worst sense, just that I’m more in a physical and emotional deficit than I find myself with surplus. I try to take relief in the fact that either it won’t last for too long, or I’ll die of exhaustion before then. Either way, at least I’ll get some sleep.