Right off the bat I want to admit that I am dictating this into my phone as an email so any typos or inappropriate words are the fault of Siri
I’ve been meaning to post for a few days and I’m gonna try to remember what happened each and every day so let me start on the day before my birthday. I was sitting in the family room with the husband and when his computer started shouting out this warning on a loop that something about someone from our IP address trying to download porn and if we don’t call the number on the screen they’re going to disable our Internet It had the mind numbing effect of a nuclear bomb alert ringing out in the background. I tried to call apple but after being on hold and listening to their world’s most annoying hood music for way too long I hung up, jumped in the car and drove to the repair place one town over.
Oh. My. God. The husband had about 50 pages of weird sh!t p!!n open and I had to slide them off the screen one by one and see the graphic photos he was looking at. To say I was embarrassed doesn’t even begin to cover it. The word I would use is humiliated. I cannot believe that I have committed the last eight years of my life to physically taking care of somebody who has so little respect for women. But then as I work through the anger my thoughts begin to evolve and I realized that I was looking at this disgusting dementia habit as something that’s put me down but then I realized is that this is because he is broken and emotionally stunted. It has nothing to do with me. He came that way.
The next day was my birthday.
For my special day I got to take the husband to his new wound care doctor. Now while that might sound like a disappointing thing to do it’s actually great fun for me to do. Now that we have a good Doctor Who is healing him I am excited to see her so she can note the progress his wound is make it. At some point during the appointment the wound care doctor and the foot doctor we’re both in the room and the wound care doctor said to us “I love it when you guys come“ and that just means So much to me!! To think that when the doctor sees the husband’s name on the schedule that she’s looking forward to seeing us?? Yes! It is my goal in life to be the treat of other people’s days. So I told her again how wonderful I think she is
I decided I’d treat myself to takeout for dinner and maybe even the whole weekend (which I did!) because every fucking body kept asking me what special thing I had going on for my birthday. ( WTF?? Do people even know me? ) I’m tired of cooking so this seemed like a perfect fit. Only Evan remembered to call me. (SERIOUSLY???) but Evan asked me if Josh or Marion had called. I said Marion had not and I was pretty sure Josh hadn’t called either and the husband yells with all the certainty of an emotionally underdeveloped 61 year old dementia patient that Josh did indeed call me. He said he distinctly remembered. Ya’ll. So I actually doubted myself there for a tiny second looked at the call log on my phone (and Josh had not called me ) and then I realized that I was letting the dementia patient gaslight me. This is in the top three of the sources of stress in being a caretaker. The constant gaslighting.
Right after I got off the phone with Evan Marion called me and I answered and I said “oh I see you heard from Evan.” We laughed. Josh however did not call me and I believe that is because Evan on the phone actually believed his demented father over me about whether or not Josh had called earlier in the day. To borrow a popular phrase: LET THAT SINK IN. HE BELIEVED HIS FATHER, THE DEMENTIA PATIENT.
It’s great to be a woman. Hahaha. So great.
This afternoon when he rolled out of his room at around 1:30 he pretended like it was so shocking that he had slept so late. This man sleeps for 36 hours for about 1 to 2 times a week these days. This time I called him out on the gaslighting and I said you can try to gaslight me but I know you
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