this has been a stressful summer for us. mamaw mayme came to live with us this summer, lou's biological dad came back into the picture, thus adding a whole new set of weekly phone calls, updates, visits, etc to our already hectic schedule. rick has been working out of town two days a week, his truck finally kicked it, so we've been down to one vehicle, we had a death in the family and we started looking for a new church, something about which we're still ambivalent and with which we're still struggling. and it's been really hot, so we've spent a lot of our days inside.personally, this has been a hard time for me. my great-grandmother who raised me has completely lost her mind. as in, there's really almost nothing there. and that's really hard to watch. she's forgetting how to use eating utensils or eat certain foods. even though she sees me every single day, she has no idea who i am. she thinks she's in a nursing home facility, and tonight she asked rick how much she owed him for cooking her dinner or if it was included in her stay. she can't bathe herself and she's becoming incontinent. it's difficult for her to even put simple sentences together and i wouldn't be surprised if she soon lost the ability to speak altogether. it's been difficult for us to take care of her.
i get so frustrated when i have to explain something a million times even though i know she can't help it. i'm glad that we were finally able to help out my mom in taking care of her, though, b/c my mom has been going over to my grandmother's house for the past six years to help. while she's been staying with us, my mom and aunt have been able to clean out her house and sell it so she can go to a nursing home. it's sad. i grew up in that house. i just feel very upset about the whole thing, most times. i hate that we have to deal with her issues, but i hate that she's like this; what must the world look like through her eyes? i don't even want to consider it.
at any rate, these past few weeks she's regressed very quickly and it's been very difficult. we can't let her interact with the girls at all any more. she seems to regress into childhood herself when she's around them, and she gets paranoid that she's being excluded. so, she picks on them, says she's going to tell "momma" that they aren't being nice and calls them names -- most recently, i caught her calling shiloh a "freak." we talk all the time with the girls about mamaw is sick and doesn't understand how to talk to people anymore, and that it will upset her if they try to interact, so they mostly leave her alone and don't get upset when mamaw flips out over something. still, it's hard to deal with. i wish the girls would have been able to play with her more, like they did at the beginning when she first came here. ah, well...
as far as lou goes, having mamaw here hasn't seemed to affect her at all, good or bad. what has affected her, though, is the rollercoaster of visitation with her bio mom. we've had increased visitation with a designee, then the designee didn't want to do it anymore and she couldn't find anybody else, so it went back down to just one hour with the social worker, then mom decided she wanted to start family therapy, so that added another visit on during the week, plus she gets two calls a week, which she makes in waves (she'll call every time for a few weeks, then fall off for another few, it's up and down, like everything else in foster care). not to mention, the added contact with lou's bio dad and his family and the extra visits (when they're in town -- he lives in L.A.) and phone calls, etc. he gets unlimited unsupervised visitation and phone calls, so it could be every day for a week, or just once or twice, i never know.
so, lou has reeeeally been sensing the instability and has tried to compensate by micro-managing every aspect of her environment. i have to believe that from her perspective, everything keeps changing, and she can't trust anyone -- even us -- to keep it constant for her. so, she has to double- and triple-check everything, which presents itself in the form of arguing. she's not being spiteful or mean about it, she just has to see it for herself, she has to know for SURE that what i said is actually the reality and that i'm not lying to her, she can't ever just take my word for it or just do what i ask without going through a mental checklist of all of the possible ramifications on any and every thing around her. i know why she does it. i get it. it doesn't make it any less frustrating.
because of said arguing and micro-managing on lou's part, she and shiloh have been fighting quite a bit more. nothing totally crazy, just they have a hard time being together for a very long time any more without one of them getting mad at the other, and they used to be able to play all day every day together without a problem. so, we had to separate their rooms. aaaannd, we only have three bedrooms. that's right, your math is correct -- that means that if lou has one bedroom to herself and mamaw has the other bedroom to herself, and we have the third bedroom to ourselves, where does shiloh go..? yep -- in our bedroom. we moved her toys and bed in there, and there she has been for the past month. when mamaw leaves in a week or so, shiloh will get her own room, but that has definitely been an added stress, not having our own room anymore. we still sleep there, obviously, but not without toys EVERYWHERE.
also, we had to put down penny lane, our beagle. that was really hard. she's been sick for years, and the latest thing was that her back knees went out and she couldn't walk or use the bathroom. it was awful. then, the next day, we found a female beagle wandering our street without tags. we took her in, LOVED her, named her phoebe. then, found out she was pregnant and couldn't deliver the puppies without a c-section, which would have cost us over a thousand dollars. ...yep. so, we surrendered her, which was hard. she was adopted, though, which was good, but not by us, which makes me sad. i cried a lot over having to give up two beagles in two weeks. those few weeks were really tough. i'm still not sure why i cried so much over the dogs and not at all over the stress of the rest of my life. maybe something about them being so helpless and dependent, i don't know.
the best thing, though, has been that my husband is the best husband in the world. through all of this, i think a lot of couples might have been having some issues between them, but i really think that we've grown so much closer. not that we haven't gotten snappy with each other from being in a bad mood or argued at all, but i wouldn't at all say that any of these stressors have adversely affected our marriage. i love him. a lot. and i know how blessed i am that God thought that i would be a good enough wife for rick petersen.
that all being said, i'm going to do something a little lighter now and post some pictures from the summer.
