My mother was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2010. This is a blog about coming to terms with her absent mind.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Reflections

Things that shouldn't matter but do tend to frustrate me and how I'm dealing with it.

Complete refusal to go to the hairdresser. My mother has gone to the hairdresser every single week for my entire life so seeing her with unkempt hair is unsettling. She also insists on wearing a bizarre assortment of ancient hair clips/slides/bands in unusual ways. It's a minefield trying to ensure she leaves the house looking relatively ok without annoying her. I've started buying new hair bits and bobs and dug out my hairdressing scissors in the hope that she'll let me 'trim off the ends'. She's flatly refused so far but there's a big family party coming up so I live in hope.

Rinsing dishes under a running tap and believing they are clean. Everything goes in the dishwasher now, that way I'm not seen to be re-doing the washing up all the time.

Still not managed to get her to have a look at a day centre. Every time we plan it she finds an excuse not to go. Perhaps I should arrange to visit without saying anything and we'll drop in 'unexpectedly' when we're off to Tesco or simlar.

Ten years of perfectly behaved dog undone in two months. I fear the only way to deal with this one is to be completely firm on how the dog is expected to behave (and everytime I turn my back she's being encouraged up onto the chair and fed biscuits arrggghh)

I can't join a creative writing course until September. There are online ones but part of the reason for doing it is to get out for a few hours. I'll just have to keep plugging away in here for now then...

3 comments:

  1. Do please keep going in here, Bee. I am loving your words and you have a wonderful style. xx

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  2. I love to wash my dishes under a running tap of scalding water and using a sponge thing that holds soap. I much prefer that to putting them in a dishwasher and having dirty water squirted all over. I tested it. I took two glasses and two sets of cutlery and washed them for 2 weeks separately, one set in the dishwasher and the 2nd set by hand. At the end of two weeks the dishwasher glass was all spotty and the cutlery was mottled. The hand washed ones were sparkling clear. Still can't get my husband to admit they are cleaner when cleaned by hand. Actually for thousands of years that's how dishes got washed. So that should be one of those items that is not an item. But I too got tired of seeing Mom's hair a disaster, and I just wheeled her to the beauty shop and left her. Now she's back to going regularly. No arguments any longer, but several weeks of professor hair from Back to the Future was awful.

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    Replies
    1. Aha! The difference is that no soap was involved. And things really weren't rinsed thoroughly so when I then washed everything again Ma got very annoyed. Using the dishwasher completely removed any issues surrounding this.

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