Six years as my mother's carer, and I have my life back
Posted as six_years_of_caring
- Looking for
- one person, unhurried, who understands rusty is not the same as new
- Experience
- Twenty years, then six years away from all of it.
- Around
- the east end, Glasgow
My mother died in November, after six years in which I was in practice her carer. I am forty nine, I have my own life back, and I have very little idea what to do with it.
Switch, east end, twenty years in this before all that, and then six years of nothing at all. I lost most of the people I knew in that period, not through any falling out, simply through never being available for anything.
What I am looking for is somewhere between a dynamic and a way back in. One person, both directions, unhurried, who understands that I am rusty and that I am also not new. The last thing I did in this was in another decade and I know how much has changed in the way people talk about it.
I should be honest that I am probably not at my best yet. I sleep badly and I am not always good company. That will improve, and I am not asking anybody to wait around while it does, but I would rather say it than perform a version of myself that falls over in week five.
Not looking for anybody who wants to talk about grief at length. Not looking for a person who needs a great deal of energy from me right now. Not looking to be somebody's good deed, which I can spot at forty paces after six years on the other end of it. What I would like most is somebody who has their own full life going on and would simply let me be part of an ordinary week, because an ordinary week is the thing I have not had since twenty twenty.