TURNING INTO MY MOTHER

Had a horrible, unsatisfactory day. It’s like the troubles with Mum are there all the time, even when I’m doing something else, trying to explode to the surface. Thanks to the weather, I haven’t even been able to escape into the garden.

I just wish it would stop.

I keep thinking I’ll feel better when this happens, or that, but I’m kidding myself. I need to stop judging myself from the way other people see me. I know I’m honest and caring,  and that I’ve always done the best I could, and tried to help Mum in any way I can. I know what I gave up for her and what she put me through. That should be enough, but it isn’t.

It’s strange, but in the weeks she was calling me, umpteen times a day, I felt that I was being useful, giving her somebody to talk to when she was upset. Now that’s not going to happen anymore and I feel lost. I don’t have a cause or a reason to live. I don’t love anybody and nobody loves me. I have no family apart from Mum. I haven’t made any close friends since I moved. I don’t even have any volunteering since the board games group moved to Wednesday.

I have this terrible fear that I’ll turn into my mother.

When my father went into a nursing home, she told everyone she met about, desperate to attract attention and sympathy. I fear that this problem will have the same effect on me, that I will become the woman whose only topic of conversation is the fact that her mother was bunged into a home by Social Services.

My other fear is more obvious. Dad had Alzheimer’s, now Mum’s got dementia. What are the chances of me avoiding the same fate?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m already crazy.