Life Update

It has been far too long since I posted any sort of update to either one of my blogs, and I felt like I should let you all know why. This is a very long story, and if you want to skip all of it (And I don’t blame you if you did) just know that I will be posting again real soon. Well, on with the story.

Not too long ago my father-in-law passed away. Ever since then my mother-in-law has not been processing her grief well. And by that I mean she has not processed anything at all. Think of it like a child throwing an tantrum when they are told to take a nap. They don’t want to do it, so they cry and fight it. My mother-in-law doesn’t want to accept that he is gone, and lives in a state of denial and a sort of tantrum about it. As a result, she is showing severe signs of dementia and early onset of Alzheimer’s. With my father-in-law gone my mother-in-law is in a giant house all by herself. That she never leaves. The neighbors buy her groceries for her, so she has nothing to do by sit in front of the TV all day. My husband is an only child, so he felt like it was his duty to go and help her. In fact, she practically begged us to come and help her. We could live in her huge house, rent free, while we looked for new jobs.

So, that is what we did. We uprooted our lives, moved from Texas to California, to live with her and to help her out. But when we got there, we were in for a rude awakening. The house was a hoarder’s nightmare. There was trash, and junk everywhere. The house wreaked of cat pee & poo. I couldn’t tell you the last time the litter box was cleaned, so her cat went to the bathroom everywhere, and her potties soaked into the carpet and into the tons of boxes that were all over the place.

There is only one working shower in the entire house, and it is in the master bathroom. Asking my mother-in-law to use her shower is like asking her to cut off her right hand. I really could go on and on, but the point is that living with her was not at all what we expected. Still, we made the most of it. We put our stuff in storage, keeping only some clothes and the pet essentials in the small room that used to be my husband’s old room (that small bedroom was the only room in her giant house that we were allowed to use).

But the living condition wasn’t the worst part. It was the way she treated my husband, her only son, that really got to me. At 3 in the morning she would wake us up demanding breakfast. If my husband or I weren’t up right away, she would continue to yell at us calling us horrible names until we got up and breakfast was made. All throughout the day she would say horrible things to him like, “your father never loved you,” or “I never wanted children”, or “you have never amounted to shit in your life and you are only here because you want my money”.

After the longest 5 months of my life, my husband and I knew we had to get out of there. The mother-in-law wasn’t getting better, and we soon came to realize that she doesn’t want to get better. She never listened to the doctor who encouraged her to go to a physical therapist. She wouldn’t take the medication she was prescribed. She wouldn’t listen to my husband or I when we encouraged her to come with us to get out of the house or to eat healthy.

It was not a healthy living environment for us or for our pets. We had to leave, but neither one of us had a job and we were left with very little money (most of it was spent on moving halfway across the country and then on a storage unit for our things). Thank god that my parents don’t live too far away, and they were able to help us out. I was able to find another good job, and we are currently living in Nevada. As for the mother-in-law she is still about the same as she was before we moved in with her. She still calls us leaving horrible messages about how terrible my husband is and how she is not going to leave him any money when she dies. My husband is not a money grubber, it has never been about the inheritance, but the way she treats him still gets me upset. Even as I am typing this I can feel the tears start to well up.

Anyway, thank you for listening to my rant. It feels really therapeutic to have someone to talk to. My husband is going through hell right now, and I try to be brave for him, but it is hard. This post was longer than I intended, so I will close with a very big thank you! Thank you for listening to me, but also thank you for your posts. You couldn’t have realized this, but your updates in my Reader have meant so so much to me. It was the one constant thing in my life when everything else was turning to shit. And it was the one thing that I could look forward to during my day. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you!! ❤ ❤