Dear WW
Yes, the thought that a Granny Garage might just not be enough of her own place does worry me. I have a side passage between my back door and the garage - ie, my kitchen opens off to one side of the side passage, and the garage opens to the other, and then there is a 'real' back door at the far end of the side passage (and at the opposite end is the garden door), so the garage is in a way 'separate' from the main section of the house.
What I do like about the GG idea though is that I can 'see' her there - I know this sounds weird, this not 'seeing' her anywhere else, but its looming larger and larger in my mind. For five months now I've gone through every damn possibility re her rehousing, and time after time I get 'stuck' because I just can't visualise her there on a daily basis....I know it's irrational (not to say 'deliberate' because I'm well aware that somewhere inside me is a deep, deep despair that is whispering to me 'Give up, give up, give up, you can't win, you know you can't, you know what is going to happen, you know she's going to move in permanently and take over, you know it, you know it'....and that 'not seeing' her anywhere else is part of that hideous whisper)(I feel like a Stepford Daughter-in-Law sometimes, slowly having my brain reprogrammed to be a docile, defeated zombie who has been completely turned into a perma-carer......doomed to spend the next ten years of my precious, precious life making cups of tea and refilling hot water bottles and waiting hand and foot and living the same life as a 90 year old woman.....)(I see women like me, the late middle aged women, in the supermarkets, ushering around sad, helpless, ancient, shuffling old women at zero miles an hour, and they see me too,doing the same thing, and we don't look at each other, we don't meet each other's eyes, because if we did, we'd see the same desperate, despairing, hopeless plea written on our retinas - Help me, help me, help me!!!! But there is no help, there is no help, there is no help....only their death will release us from our chains....) (I know that's a CRUEL, VICIOUS, VILE way of looking at it, but it's true, for all that.....)(at least for me....)
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Right, pause and leaving the self-pity and horror aside for just a moment - back to practicalities.....
A Granny Garage does seem to tick a good few boxes though - because it would enable me to have her here (even if it's just as we're doing now, the cox-and-boxing between me and her own flat), but in her own space more. If she could regard the GG as she does her flat and basically get herself up (which she does here) and get herself her own breakfast (which she does not do when she's here, but does do when she's in her own flat)(though if I'm there, on a turnaround, she sometimes just makes herself a tea, and waits for me to make the toast for her), and even her own lunch, and I would be able to 'look in', and choose when to take her out shopping/driving, and then I could maybe compromise and have dinner with her sometimes, or even her come across to me, or we could assign days, or every other day, or whatever, and I could get carers in as well for her, to let me off the hook completely, especially if I wanted to get away completely for a few days (oh, and they could come in and do 'hygiene' stuff too - she no longer showers), and even if I'm with her for her dinner, she eats very early, so I could pop in with food, and watch Emmerdale, and then say goodnight and come back to 'my house' again and have my own (very quiet - oh, blissfully quiet!) evening on my own (and watch my own programmes, too!)(I don't actually mind the soaps and police dramas, just that I don't watch them myself, and do watch documentaries etc - or rather, I don't when she's here....). The GG would have a patio door into the garden, too, so she could get out in the summer, which she does quite like to do.
So maybe, maybe, maybe it would be £10k well spent! (Though I can see it, sod's law - we'll get it converted, spend the money, and then she'll peg out straightaway and I'll want my garage back and it wil lbe too late!)
Re Sheltered accommodation - I have to say, the places I've viewed, irrespective of whether they were a bit old (but affordable) or brand new (and hardly affordable without putting all my savings into it as well!), have been uniformly depressing. They just are. I wouldn't want to be there myself -so I can see why she doesn't. I know now I couldn't put her in one. But 'ordinary' flats round here are very expensive, and even the further out affordable ones are just so 'distant', not geographically, but mentally - I'm back to the 'not seeing' her there again....
Sometime I've realised is a real problem for me is that for five months now this has been totally preoccupying me, not just the everyday caring, but the desperate mind searching and Internet trawling for somewhere, anywhere, to 'put' her - I have to 'put' her somewhere to get her away from me, to get her out of my life (ie, so she is not utterly dominating my life, taking it over, controlling everything I do just about!). She's like a heavy, heavy parcel I can't put down - remember what it was like wiith babies? You could never 'put them down' anywhere, they were tied to you, all the time, all the time, all the time.....
Yes, I get up to my bedroom to tap away at my laptop like now, leaving her in the living room watching daytime telly (she's stopped reading completely now, used to read sagas a lot, and doesn't even look through magazines any more, she is closing down mentally, I can see....)(her vision is absolutely great, though, so it's not that, it's her mind, not her eyes), and yes, I can meet friends for coffee (though I always, always, always feel that endless 'pressure' to go home again, or think, oh, Granny wants her lunch now, I've got to go - it's the being 'on duty' the whole, whole, whole time she's here....). But as others have said, when you are a carer you lose control of your own day, your own life, nothing can be 'spontaneous' any more, all has to be planned and set up, and then you have to 'sell' it to the caree and feel guilty about it.....
So, yes, what I've found a problem in the last five months is that I repeatedly think up a solution (eg, sheltered accommodation) and get really gung-ho and positive and upbeat about it, and trawl the Internet, and phone estate agents and go and see places, and run the money numbers, etc etc, and then, slowly, slowly, slowly reality kicks in and I realise that no, that won't work either....and I sink back down into my slough of self-pity and despair and desperation.....
So now, of course, I look at the idea of the Granny garage and I know that while today it may seem that 'YES, FINALLY, that's what I'll do!' by tomorrow it too will be sinking away into 'no, won't work, won't work, won't work'.....and I also know that the reason I do that is the 'Stepford DIL' demon again, which is paired with the other demon on my other shoulder, telling me that the only solution is for her to die....and leave me to get my damn life back!
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Right, well, to anyone who's ploughed through this endless rambling message this far, I can tell you that getting all that venom out of me has really, really helped! I do think, for myself, that one of THE most invaluable things about this forum is that I can simply 'let rip' as I'm doing in this 'Cracked' thread, and get all this ugly, nasty stuff out of me.
And I also know, with what is left of my 'real' self (the pre-Granny-carer me, whom I fear will never come back), that between those twin demons on my shoulders - the Stepford Carer demon and the 'She has to die' demon - is, I know, some kind of middle ground where I give her SOME of my life, but not all of it.....
PS - I tell you, this is really testing my religious faith, because either God doesn't exist after all and this nightmare I'm going through of having my life stolen from me is just the 'sh*t that happens' without reason or purpose, or if God does exist, then I'm SUPPOSED to be doing through this nightmare, because, presumably,I've got to atone for past sins (the main one of which, I should think, is basically being pretty damn selfish with my life and not doing much, other than charity donations and sitting on a couple of 'cancer thingies' at my local hospital, to help anyone worse off than me ). And the real punishment, vile though this is to say, is that all my caring now has to go towards someone I don't want to care for, and who I (personally) think has reached the end of their life anyway so it's just a collosal waste of my time! (I mean, if God does exist, then of course the best thing that could happen to my MIL is for her to be 'taken up' and get to heaven to see the husband she hasn't seen for 30 years and the son she hasn't seen for 5....not to drag out her ever-weakening life out here on earth - unless SHE'S being punished as well for HER past sins!!!)(I don't think she's done anything particularly horrible in her life - she wasn't the kindest or cuddliest of mothers, but then she had a crap mother herself, and didn't really know how to be very patient or affectionate with my husband, and anyway he was a 'difficult' child as he was probably an undiagnosed mild Aspie....)(and I KNOW she was devastated when he died....)(and if she DID need any 'punishment' then being a widow for 30 years and watching her adult son die in front of her eyes is surely, dear God, punishment enough for a whole SACK of sins!)
PPS - soz, I sound ready for the funny farm! Anyway, time to make Granny's lunch. Plus get on with something more useful than insanely rambling and venting away here like a loony! That will bring me back down to earth
