Reply to Sad about how the holiday visit to my family went

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[quote=Anonymous]OP, you mother is suffereing from caregiver syndrome [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caregiver_stress[/url].  As stressful and difficult as it is on you to give assistance and handle your share of family caring from a distance, it is significantly harder on your mother in the day-in day-out care.  As someone who has spent 10 years serving as a caregiver, it's hard and Alzheimer's is much harder than my situation.

You need to find ways to help ease her stress, especially at times like holidays where holiday stress can compound her daily stress and issues.  For example, if you come to visit, either pay for a housecleaning service to come and clean or help clean yourself.  If you hire the service, do so when you are there, maybe giving her a day or afternoon off to go out and you stay at home while the service cleans; then pay them.  Even doing a few loads of laundry or the routine grocery shopping help.  If you visit at the holidays, suggest going out or renting a party room/social room for your holiday meal and have it served pot-luck there.  You can order a honey-baked ham or a pre-cooked turkey to provide the main course.

When you are a full-time caretaker for someone who needs full-time and often personal care, it can be exhausting.  Adding on keeping up with the daily chores and household responsibilities can be overwhelming.  Then you add on hosting a holiday event where people come in and increase your work-load, I can certainly understand your mother's reaction.  Mayhap the invited guests should not be asked to help with chores like taking out the garbage, but her family should.  You were her co-host, so you should at least have been looking out for something like as basic as taking out the trash.  And expecting her sister to help is also not unreasonable.  From the sounds of it, you wanted to come and have a nice visit with your mother hosting you like a guest in her house.  So, despite the fact that she is the daily caregiver (albeit with some limited help), you came to visit and expected her to host you for a nice visit and added more work and stress on her rather than relieving stress and work from her.  Yes, I can see why she is resentful.  My father is far better than your father, but still requires a lot of help.  My mother handles it routinely.  When we get together as a family, I immediately help my father to give my mother a break.  It always amazes me that my siblings will just watch my Mom and I help Dad.  They don't volunteer to help unless we explicitly ask them to help him.  [/quote]

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